Economist Robert Frank has discovered a Ph.D powered economic perpetual motion machine that lifts itself by its own bootstraps, as explained by Mark Steyn:

The epicenter of the current economic crisis has been the U.S. housing market. The collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the dramatic fall in home values have sent out shock waves of economic disruption around the world.

Many have interpreted these events as another example of the inherent instability of the free market. There have been loud calls for greater and more detailed government regulation of the mortgage business and financial markets in general.

The computer and the Internet have put the world on our desk. Now the computer phone is putting the world in our pocket. If you haven’t seen it, the Money Museum is a beautiful online museum of world coinage.

The press on the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, is downplaying the message and importance of the document mainly because he does not say what the Obamaite/left wants him to say.

[This article is excerpted from Human Action, chapter 16 section 7, “Good Will.”]

It must be emphasized again that the market is peopled by men who are not omniscient and have only a more or less defective knowledge of prevailing conditions.

      First, let me say that I am not an economist. Nor do I actually own a legitimate armchair, for that matter.

Even as the Austrian critique of Greenspan’s housing bubble gains more adherents, some economists have tried to exonerate the former Maestro. Previously on these pages, I have responded to Henderson and Hummel’s defense of the former Fed chairman, and I also took on Greenspan’s own list of excuses.

I’ve been reading Mao’s Little Red Book, which I gather achieved some level of popularity among the New Left in the 1960s, which is nothing short of astonishing, given its open and aggressive call for mass death against resistors and it’s dripping-with-blood rhetoric about armed struggle from beginning to end. “Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence…. All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.”

My buddy Vijay Boyapati mused in an email whether Mises had anticipated the eventual development of argumentation ethics. “Here he has a little discussion here which really reminds me a lot of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics:”