Economics and Earth Day
Forbes.com published this article yesterday. It’s based on my paper “Economic Calculation in the Environmentalist Commonwealth.”
“Secret intellectual property treaty could profoundly change life on the Internet”
So argues David Bollier in the post Et tu, Obama? Open Government Suffers Another Blow. An excerpt:
A government cannot be held accountable if there is a cloak of secrecy around its core deliberations and citizens are excluded from the process. … So what gives with the Obama administration’s refusal to share the most basic documents about a pending intellectual property treaty that are widely available among corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan and the United States?
The Road to Freedom: An Interview with Walter Block
[This article is excerpted from The Privatization of Roads and Highways.]
Green Jobs?
Advancing the goals of environmentalism is capable of creating a virtually limitless number of jobs. Big-rig trucks and their “polluting” emissions might be done away with by replacing them with human porters who would carry freight on their backs. Ocean-going ships and their emissions might be done away with by replacing their “dirty engines” with the clean labor of banks of oarsmen.
Rights for Robots
I understand that in the United States there are still those who think that the machinery of government can be used as a substitute for personal responsibility on the part of the governed. This idea, as we know only too well in Britain, is the open road to disaster. It changes persons with responsibilities into robots with rights.
The Health Czar Can’t Calculate
Everyone seems to agree that the US needs a health czar. But without the bearings of economic calculation — that is, without pricing signals derived in a free market — all patients, hospitals, physicians, and producers of healthcare services (and the health czar himself) are left, to paraphrase Mises, groping in the dark.
Secession Is in Our Future
Of course, once it becomes clear that a majority of the states — and specifically those that are the most productive — are seceding, the remaining states of Old America will have to consider their options. Would they want to bail out the corporations, the unionized public-school teachers, municipal workers, and the UAW, and the bankrupt states of California and New Jersey, among others, when the burden falls much more heavily onto them?
The Fake History of the Depression
Contrary to what you have heard and read over the last year, Hoover behaved as a textbook Keynesian after the stock-market crash. He immediately cut income tax rates by one percentage point (applicable to the 1929 tax year) and began ratcheting up federal spending, increasing it 42 percent from fiscal year (FY) 1930 to FY 1932.
Zero Percent Inflation is Still a Tax and Wealth-Destroying
Heavyweights Kohn,Volcker Spar Over Inflation Goal notes that:
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn’s question-and-answer session at a Vanderbilt University conference Saturday was going as countless others surely have in his years as a top policy maker. ... Until Paul Volcker raised his hand.”
Goodbye Scribd!!!
Another great institution is being taken down by the copyright terrorists. This one is beyond-belief hilarious/ridiculous/evil because of course we not only own the full rights. We have put the book into Creative Commons and are desperately trying to give the book away to the world.
Observe the insanity!
