Today is Earth day, and a week ago we “celebrated” tax day. It is fitting, in a sense, that Earth Day and Tax Day are only one week apart. Those who blame global warming on human activity see taxation as an effective and desirable means of preventing environmental global catastrophe. In a recent publication, former Bush advisor Greg Mankiw has extended an “open invitation to join the Pigou club” by embracing the idea of regulating greenhouse gases with corrective taxes.

It is not true that speed, alcohol, drugs, etc., are ultimately responsible for vehicular death. Rather, they are only the proximate causes. The underlying explanation is that the managers of the roads, those in charge of them, have failed to deal with these problems. With a system of private highways and streets, the various owners would compete with one another to provide service for their customers (including, preeminently, safety). Those who failed would be forced either to change the error of their ways or go belly up.

Are you all for Obama’s economic plans? Do you think that bailing out failing companies and throwing trillions into the national money pit is just the ticket for stimulating the economy back to recovery? Then you might get the chance to put your money where your ideological convictions are. The Obama administration is cajoling investment companies to create bailout bonds.

I advocate the complete, total, and full privatization of all roads, streets, highways, byways, avenues, and other vehicular thoroughfares. And I am serious about this, deadly serious.This is so far off the radar of public-policy analysis and apart from the concerns of politicians, pundits, and commentators that few people will take it seriously. Do not be one of them. Your very life may be at stake.

Walter Block’s remarkable new treatise on private roads is a 494-page book that will cause you to rethink the whole of the way modern transportation networks operate. It is bold, innovative, radical, compelling, and shows how free-market economic theory is the clarifying lens through which to see the failures of the state and to see the alternative that is consistent with human liberty.

For those thinking that the real-estate bust is all over with — think again. The residential market has hit the ditch and continues to sink lower, but now the commercial property market is rolling over and will take many lenders down the drain with it. America’s small and regional bankers are pointing their fingers at the big banks, claiming the big money center banks “have tarred and feathered us,”

John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like “animal spirits” and “liquidity trap” to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and held the opinion that government could run the economy.