[This talk was given at the Austrian Scholars Conference on March 13, 2009. Download the mp3 audio file.]

Two housing industry flaks suggest a novel way to reduce the U.S. housing surplus, in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Health and Nutrition Secrets is a book by Russell L Blaylock, MD. Dr. Blaylock is a board-certified neurosurgeon who “has recently retired as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Medical University of Mississippi. He has practiced neurosurgery for the past twenty-four years and runs a successful private nutritional practice.”

I have no idea if Paul Krugman writes editorials for the New York Times, as well as his own columns. I do know that his excoriation of Europe’s governments in today’s missive is similar to an editorial that appeared last Friday attacking the European governments for not spending to Larry Summers’ liking.

My attention was recently called to Tibor Machan’s paper “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso” (working paper version), which will be in his book The Promise of Liberty (Lexington, 2009). As noted in the Abstract, the paper argues as follows:

Since 1988 I’ve been fascinated with Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics“ defense of libertarian rights. This was around the time I was exposed to the legal concept “estoppel” in a contracts law class, which I ended up using in my own arguments for libertarian rights.