An interesting email just arrived from Poland:
I was reading Poland’s major weekly publication “Wprost” (roughly translated “Direct”) and took note of their selection for the 2008 Person of the Year, the Polish Premier Donald Tusk. In an interview, he was asked an interesting question (I am translating from Polish):
Interviewer: “In the fight with the financial crisis, are you a Keynesian or a Friedmanite?”
In Los Angeles, a window repairman secretly went around breaking windows by shooting them with a slingshot. Times are hard and he needed the business. The police caught him and, because he was a private individual instead of a state, now he is in trouble for his attempt to stimulate the economy.
Thanks Broken Window Watch and Vanguardist.
[Last in a series]
Someone handed me a book the other day--a cult classic among music geeks--and urged me to read it, and, when I had finished, sign my name in the front cover. That way I could be added to the already long list of readers in the front cover, each of whom add added his or her scrawl to the book after having read it.
How charming!
[Chapter 9]
How essential are drugs patents as a piece of the machinery of the modern pharmaceutical industry? Incredibly so. Repealing them with no other changes would likely lead to a dismantling of a massive and lucrative industry that saves lives every day.
[This article is excerpted from Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
So says Richard Armey, who is among the many Republicans who are suddenly making sense after years of kowtowing to Republican-style Keynesian policy. It seems like a universal principle: those who are out of power favor free markets more than those in power. So the agenda seems clear: keep everyone out of power.
In, Bryan Caplan’s EconLog post Fraud and Punishment, Caplan comes down on the pro property side while Hayekian Will Wilkinson proclaims that “libertarianism is not Rothbardism” and chides Caplan and others for “conflating” the two. Leaving aside this dispute about who should be thrown out of the libertarian “church,” I noted a few points made that were worth responding to at length. My comment there is reproduced below.
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