For all of you who wondered why I had not written my usual Monday missive against Paul Krugman’s latest column, it was because the Krugperson seemed to be making sense. In his Monday, March 23, column, Krugman was critical of the government’s newest bank bailout plan, the “cash for trash” program in which the government co-signs for private investors who buy toxic assets with the understanding that if they go down in value, the government will pay for them.
The another step in Obama’s agenda for advancing state power and economic collectivism in America is his carbon “cap and trade policy,” under which the government will formally nationalize the atmosphere above the United States and make businesses buy permits to emit carbon dioxide into the air.
About the only time the general public focuses on the judiciary is when new Supreme Court justices are chosen. So President Obama’s soon-to-be-announced replacement for Justice David Souter has drawn a great deal of attention. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of our founders’ intent for America and the implications for interpreting the Constitution that Justices pledge to defend.
The works of Leonard E. Read, who founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946, are now online at the Mises Institute. It is probably not the complete collected works, but it is all that he collected in book form. These are books that shaped several generations of activists, donors, writers, and intellectuals. They are the books that kick-started the libertarian movement after World War II.
Thus does Thom Hartmann at the Huffington Post say that “The intellectual forefathers and mothers of the insane conservative economic policies that have brought us to where we are include Ludwig Von Mises, Freidrich Von Hayeck (sic.)...”
Never mind that Mises and Hayek were the 20th century’s premier opponents of loose money and central banking and subsidized credit.
The 1978 interviews with Friedrich Hayek conducted by Earlene Craver, Axel Leijonhufvud, Leo Rosten, Jack High, James Buchanan, Robert Bork, Thomas Hazlett, Armen Alchian, and Robert Chitester in 1978 are now available on the internet.
This transcript is a translation of the first part of Egill Helgason’s interview of Gunnar Tómasson, a former IMF economist, on Icelandic state television’s “Silfur Egils” on February 1, 2009. (The video is available on YouTube.)
In Enemies of What State?, mutualist Kevin Carson, in yet another strawman attack on “vulgar libertarians” (libertarians I know are not Thatcherites or Reaganites, for example) and “free market” advocates who are really statists or “economic fascists,” writes:
