History as Fiction Designed to Unite Us

Until late in the 19th century, most historians regarded themselves neither as social scientists (a concept that did not even exist before the 19th century) nor as humanistic scholars, but rather as literary men, men of letters. The stories they were telling were true, of course, but nonetheless they were telling stories, just as though they were novelists, and their job, as they saw it, was to tell their stories as vividly and poetically as any novelist.

The Nuttiness of Negative Interest Rates

In his April 18 New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor (and Bush adviser) Greg Mankiw calls on the Federal Reserve to promise future inflation, in order to fix the economy. Mankiw’s article beautifully illustrates what is wrong with today’s economics profession: it consists of very sharp guys (and gals) who can develop interesting models that spit out policy recommendations that would destroy the economy.

“Secret intellectual property treaty could profoundly change life on the Internet”

So argues David Bollier in the post Et tu, Obama? Open Government Suffers Another Blow. An excerpt:

A government cannot be held accountable if there is a cloak of secrecy around its core deliberations and citizens are excluded from the process. … So what gives with the Obama administration’s refusal to share the most basic documents about a pending intellectual property treaty that are widely available among corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan and the United States?

Green Jobs?

Advancing the goals of environmentalism is capable of creating a virtually limitless number of jobs. Big-rig trucks and their “polluting” emissions might be done away with by replacing them with human porters who would carry freight on their backs. Ocean-going ships and their emissions might be done away with by replacing their “dirty engines” with the clean labor of banks of oarsmen.

Rights for Robots

I understand that in the United States there are still those who think that the machinery of government can be used as a substitute for personal responsibility on the part of the governed. This idea, as we know only too well in Britain, is the open road to disaster. It changes persons with responsibilities into robots with rights.

The Health Czar Can’t Calculate

Everyone seems to agree that the US needs a health czar. But without the bearings of economic calculation — that is, without pricing signals derived in a free market — all patients, hospitals, physicians, and producers of healthcare services (and the health czar himself) are left, to paraphrase Mises, groping in the dark.

Secession Is in Our Future

Of course, once it becomes clear that a majority of the states — and specifically those that are the most productive — are seceding, the remaining states of Old America will have to consider their options. Would they want to bail out the corporations, the unionized public-school teachers, municipal workers, and the UAW, and the bankrupt states of California and New Jersey, among others, when the burden falls much more heavily onto them?
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