As always, when the central planning bureaucrats get in a jam with no way out of the mess they have planned themselves into, they turn to libertarian ideas for the answers. Libertarian ideas with a big-government twist, that is. This article in the Telegraph is astounding: “US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive.”
Sheldon Richman has a great “TGIF” [”The Goal Is Freedom,” but released on a Friday--get it?] column out today, Intellectual ‘Property’ Versus Real Property: What Are Copyrights and what do they mean for Liberty?. For a very short column, it’s packed with great insights.
Admirably, Richman focuses on justice rather than more utilitarian concerns such as incentive effects:
“No one really knows what anything is worth anymore. Some sellers appear to be kidding themselves…”
So says David Whitford in this nicely detailed piece about real estate in Phoenix. Overall prices in Phoenix, by the way, are off 53 percent from the peak, and have seen the biggest decline in the nation.
I take a lot of my inspiration for public writing, blogging, etc. from George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux. Over the last several years, Professor Boudreaux has waged a prolific letter-writing campaign for economic literacy. Here’s an excellent example in which he dissects the claim that capitalism is too materialistic. I plan to incorporate some of his insights into my discussion of “common objections to capitalism” at Mises U.
p>The guy who came up with the Major League Baseball logo was asked what he thinks about the obvious fact that other sports have copied it without credit or payment.
According to Jim Cramer, Ben Bernanke has saved us all:
Jim Cramer says history will recognize Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as the primary reason America avoided a much more serious meltdown as the housing market and rotten banking investments forced the economy to halt last year.
“I’ll just come right out and say it: Ben Bernanke will go down as the greatest Federal Reserve chairman in history,” Cramer wrote in New York magazine.
[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of Human Action. Robert Murphy has written a study guide for this chapter, available in HTML and PDF.]
