Once again, Ron Paul gets the lowest GOP score from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

By: Timothy P. Carney

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its 2009 congressional scorecard, and once again, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex. — certainly one of the two most free-market politicians in Washington — gets the lowest score of any Republican.

David Ignatius penned a piece for today’s Investors Business Daily warning U.S. politicians not to dither. America has a growing federal deficit and, “The sensible real-world answer, many economists argue, is a value-added tax that would encourage saving at the same time it pays down the deficit to manageable levels. But politicians are terrified of being right too soon on this one,” writes Ignatius, who goes on to say that the U.S. is guaranteed to have a debt crisis.

Government is constrained only by the inflation it can create by over-spending, but its ability to spend is numerically unlimited. — Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Assistant Professor, Franklin and Marshall College

The dollars are nothing more than data entry on the Fed’s computer. They have no other existence. And it has no impact on the government’s ability to spend as to whether China’s dollars are in their checking account or savings account. — Marshall Auerback, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Warren Mosler, President, Valance Co.

NYT, March 16, 1913, on the eve of World War I: “The news of the assassination of King George has caused profound emotion throughout Greece. Telegrams confirming the report of the murder were received this evening from Prince Nicholas and from the Greek Administrator of Salonika, but full details of the crime are lacking.

If a judge were to say that a horse is whatever the government calls a horse, and that the government has the right to call a chicken a horse, everybody would consider him corrupt or insane. Yet many theories of law argue that money is whatever the government calls money.

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An audio version of this Mises Daily, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available as a free download.]

Not really, but Wal-Mart should consider it.

In the current class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart that has just been certified by a federal appeals court: “The plaintiffs allege that women were paid less than, and were given fewer opportunities for promotion than, their male counterparts.”