“No one really knows what anything is worth anymore. Some sellers appear to be kidding themselves…”

So says David Whitford in this nicely detailed piece about real estate in Phoenix. Overall prices in Phoenix, by the way, are off 53 percent from the peak, and have seen the biggest decline in the nation.

I take a lot of my inspiration for public writing, blogging, etc. from George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux. Over the last several years, Professor Boudreaux has waged a prolific letter-writing campaign for economic literacy. Here’s an excellent example in which he dissects the claim that capitalism is too materialistic. I plan to incorporate some of his insights into my discussion of “common objections to capitalism” at Mises U.

p>The guy who came up with the Major League Baseball logo was asked what he thinks about the obvious fact that other sports have copied it without credit or payment.

According to Jim Cramer, Ben Bernanke has saved us all:

Jim Cramer says history will recognize Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as the primary reason America avoided a much more serious meltdown as the housing market and rotten banking investments forced the economy to halt last year.

“I’ll just come right out and say it: Ben Bernanke will go down as the greatest Federal Reserve chairman in history,” Cramer wrote in New York magazine.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of Human Action. Robert Murphy has written a study guide for this chapter, available in HTML and PDF.]

Sweden’s Pirate Party has won entry to the European Parliament in Brussels in elections held Sunday.

The Pirate Party gained 7 percent of the Swedish votes and secured at least one of the 18 seats that Sweden holds in the parliament.

The reason there is an interventionist-welfare state is that there are individuals and groups in the society who want “other people’s money.” The political process is the mechanism that these individuals and groups use to get that money via regulation, protections, and redistribution.