[The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. By Robert P. Murphy. Regnery, 2007. Xii + 206 pages.]Robert Murphy’s admirable book is much more than a conventional defense of capitalism. Murphy includes standard material, e.g., why price controls, minimum wage legislation, and rent control do not work. Though it was once controversial to point to the inadequacies of these measures, now even mainstream textbooks hasten to condemn them. Murphy goes far beyond this.

“Seniors hurt in Ponzi scam” headlined the story of elderly Southern Californians bilked in a pyramid scheme. While sad, the story reminded me of Social Security, since it is also a Ponzi scheme involving those older, with high payoffs to early recipients coming from pockets of later participants. With Social Security, however, it benefits those older at others’ expense.

Somehow I had forgotten that the U.S. has a thing going on in Somalia. “A local official told Reuters that the missile was fired by a U.S. aircraft.

The so-called ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in Alaska became a national joke in 2005 after ABC’s ‘20/20’ put the spotlight on this particularly fat slice of pork.

The proposed bridge, since cancelled, was to replace a ferry that runs every 15 minutes or so between Ketchikan, a small town on the island of Revillagigedo, and Gravina Island.

The ferry ride, $5 per person ($6 for cars), takes about 5 minutes — a half-mile ride across the small waterway that separates Ketchikan and Gravina.

The social-work crowd is puzzled about what to do: there seems to be a stigma attached to eating government-subsidized lunches. It only took 30 years for the NYT to notice. 

This MSNBC article notes how the price of wheat is being driven up not just by the devaluation of the dollar, but by “increased demand” for ethanol.

The article fails to mention that the demand for ethanol has not just magically increased on its own, but has increased only because massive government subsidies have made it more relatively attractive. Nor does it mention that ethanol is also now much more attractive to farmers because it receives fat subsidies that wheat-growing does not receive.

A wild debate has broken out at the WSJ blog concerning whether borrowings from the Fed’s new Term Auction Facility is or isn’t inflationary. The background is that since December, non-borrowed bank reserves have plummeted while borrowings from the Fed’s TAF have soared. The debate concerns what all this means. Mark Thornton will offer his analysis on Monday.