Prices respond
The PPI was released yesterday (up 1.8% in June) and today the CPI appears, showing an upward move since December 2008, and now rising at a 3-month seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.3%. The food index has stopped falling.
Bob Murphy On If The Devil Made Him Do It...
Atomizing the Market
Just when the market cleans the air, in steps the regulators. The e-cigarette solves the smoke issue by atomizing a nicotine solution in a pen-size device. Pretty slick. But, wait. The feds consider the e-cigarette a nicotine delivery system. Sure, and Mountain Dew is a caffeine delivery system, just as Ho-Hos are a sugar and fat delivery system. Big deal.
Reaching out to the Mainstream
I just came across a letter from a mainstream economics journal from 2003 rejecting my paper “Skyscrapers and Business Cycles.” It reads in part that “this journal focuses upon specification and testing of formal macro and monetary models and does not publish papers like yours in which the theorizing and testing is more casual-descriptive than formal-econometric.”
Correcting Thomas Sowell on Boom-Bust
Despite all his worthwhile contributions, and despite being a self-proclaimed supply-side economist, Dr. Sowell fails to convincingly explain the cluster of errors which led to the housing boom
Faith and Freedom
The archives of what we are calling the Old Freeman are now complete, more than 100 issues of this extremely rare periodical.
Today we are putting up a publication hardly anyone even knows about. It was called Faith and Freedom, from the early 1950s. Talk about the memory hole!
From the Runways of Austria ...
It’s Economics Week here in Austria. The two haute couture lines creating the most buzz are “Laissez-Faire,” by Ludwig von Mises, and “Après Moi le Déluge” by British export, John Keynes.
Stop Signs and Liberty
Deliver an insult and you are arrested. Try to run and you are gunned down. Fail to pay and you end up in the slammer. And maybe the cop will find something else about your life to be suspicious of.
John Law and the Invention of Modern Finance
John Law may have died in disgrace after his Mississippi System failed in 1720, but government and its cheerleaders in the economics profession continue to embrace his ideas.
Are Patents “Monopolies”?
On occasion you get some defender of patents who is upset when we use the m-word to describe these artificial state-granted monopoly rights. For example here one Dale Halling, a patent attorney (surprise!) posts about “The Myth that Patents are a Monopoly” and writes, “ People who suggest a patent is a monopoly are not being intellectually honest and perpetuating a myth to advance a political agenda.”
