To the right is an image of Doug French sitting outdoors in a French cafe. Sitting across from him, it took me a few minutes to fully realize that this was not a French cafe and it was not outdoors. It is indoors at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas, a town that provides many such illusions and where you constantly have to remind yourself that you are not in fact where you think you are but rather you are in a place that was once a barren desert.

Despite economic conditions being awful, the financial press labels the environment “improving.” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress recently, “The economy … appears to be on track to continue to expand through this year and next.” While economic activity maybe good on the island of politics and bureaucracy that is Washington D.C., everywhere else the policies emanating from D.C. has the economy in a funk.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen Greg Ransom’s posts below discussing what Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev’s appearance on Glenn Beck did for Hayek exposure (watch the whole thing here).

Glenn Beck’s show on Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom featuring Mises Institute Senior Fellows Yuri Maltsev and Tom Woods:

— crashed Hayek’s Wikipedia entry.

— sent the GOOGLE search phrase “The Road to Serfdom” to “volcanic” status and #1 on Google Trends.

There has been tremendous criticism in the media of late regarding BP’s response to the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the subsequent spilling of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.