It’s hard to know whether to be outraged or yawn at the revelations that Henry Paulson with Bush’s Treasury talked constantly on the phone with the head of Goldman Sachs, probably in violation of every ethics rule on the books, during those bailout days. These rules are made to somehow clean up government and establish a ridiculously naive ideal that government can and must be constantly impartial in the pursuit of scientific public policy.

From a reader in Cambridge, ON, Canada:
RE:The Real Right To Medical Care….

My day job is software development. Within the field there is a considerable literature on modeling, which means more or less, identifying and organizing the concepts in your problem domain into a form that is suitable for writing programs.

While reading the book Model-Driven Design Using Business Patterns by Pavel Hruby, I was struck by some similarities between the modeling strategies and some Austrian concepts.

For example, p. 19, Economic Resources:

G.A. Cohen, who retired last year from Oxford, died on August 5. Although he was a Marxist, he took libertarian ideas with great seriousness; and his efforts to come to grips with the self-ownership principle merit careful study. I rate him one of the best philosophers of the past fifty years. He was extraordinarily sharp in argument but, at least judged by the few times I was in touch with him, warm and generous. He was also extremely funny. I will miss Jerry Cohen.

Over the past few years there has been an ongoing and productive dialogue over the viability of alternative strategies available to young scholars seeking to pursue a vocation in Austrian economics in academia. While there have been disagreements, most parties to the conversation have treated their opponents’ positions with respect and scholarly restraint.