On May 3, 2010, I gave a talk to a class of students studying public health policy at the University of Washington. I began the talk by asking the students how many of them believed that the current healthcare system in America was flawed; everyone in the class raised their hand. I then asked how many of them believed that the recently passed healthcare legislation, supported by President Obama, was a step in the right direction in reforming America’s healthcare system. Once again, everyone raised their hand.

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

With the recent sentence on the Comcast affair,1 it seems that the debate about net-neutrality regulation has paused.2 Feeling the ca

I assume that you know how the banking system developed and how the banks could improve the services rendered by gold, by transferring assets from one individual to another individual in the books of the banks. When you study the development of the history of money you will discover that there were countries in which there were systems in which all the payments were made by transactions in the books of a bank, or of several banks. The individuals acquired an account by paying gold into this bank. There is a limited quantity of gold, so the payments which are made are limited.

Art Carden speaking @ In Defense of Capitalism conference from Nicki Brøchner on Vimeo.

So the whole green jobs thing in Spain turns out to be catastrophic, just as Gabriel Calzada of Juan de Mariana predicted. The only thing that strikes me as strange here is the very strange reality that a government seems to be admitting error, if only in secret. In the U.S., the government is always and everywhere infallible.

Respected value investor Jeremy Grantham “guarantees” that gold will crash. He is quoted, “I hate gold. It does not pay a dividend, it has no value, and you can’t work out what it should or shouldn’t be worth…It is the last refuge of the desperate.”