Should Polygamy Be Illegal?

When the Winter Olympics came to Salt Lake City last year, some of the dirt that visiting journalists dug up to soil Utah’s good name was the issue of polygamy. Polygamy, the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time, especially wives, is against the law. But, should it be?

Are the Excess Reserves Finally Leaking Out?

For a while I have been warning that one way the (price) inflation genie will get out of the bottle, is that banks will take some of their incredible excess reserves and buy Treasury debt (as opposed to granting new loans to customers). The trillion+ that Bernanke has injected into the banking sector would then start trickling out into the “real economy” via federal government spending.

So you can imagine my alarm when I read this story from CNBC:

Money-Supply Metrics, the Austrian Take

All economists, whether they are of an Austrian, a Keynesian, or a monetarist bent, as well as nearly every investor, would agree that money plays a vitally important role in the economy. And a correct measure of its supply is an indispensable input into every economic and financial forecast. How could it not be? Money is one half of every economic transaction.

Yet, despite its importance, the money-supply metrics used by the majority of today’s economists and investors are seriously flawed, for they are founded on a faulty definition of money.

How Civilization Deals with Torture States

[Rule of Law, Misrule of Men • By Elaine Scarry • MIT Press: A Boston Review Book, 2010 • Xxii + 191 pages]

Elaine Scarry, a distinguished English professor at Harvard, attracted great acclaim early in her academic career for her study The Body in Pain (1985). It is hardly surprising, then, that the use of torture in the Iraq War has attracted her attention.

In Rule of Law, Misrule of Men, her searing indictment of the Bush administration, Scarry argues that the absolute prohibition of torture lies at the basis of the rule of law.

The Sovereign Individual

Fifty years ago, Mises came to South America and delivered six historic lectures. Today, there is a great international revival of Misesian ideas — including in Brazil — which show the benefits that consumers and workers derive when they are free to venture, to chart their course, and to fulfill their desires.
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