The Privatization of Public Services
Privatization is the only hope for renewal of once proud cities, writes John Chapman. In his 1944 book entitled Bureaucracy, Mises distinguished between “bureaucratic management” and “profit management.” He explained that neither incentives nor exploitation of useful information are optimal under bureaucratic management, and by definition there could be no rational calculation via profit and loss. Hence, coordination of resources will never be optimally efficient.Nationalism and Socialism
Nationalism appears to be a modern phenomenon having its origin in the nationalities constituted in Europe between the 16th and the 19th century concomitantly with the disappearance of feudalism and of the Romano-Germanic Empire that came into being with Charlemagne and was totally liquidated with the unification of Italy.
Mencken on the Police
We are preparing to print Notes on Democracy, the hard-to-find book by H.L. Mencken--strongly recommended to us by William Peterson--and I just can’t resist quoting the following, which is just a slight sample of what is emerging from the remarkable 1920 treatise. Here is Mencken on security and the police:
The Conscience of Paul Krugman
Like him or not, Paul Krugman is an economic theorist of distinction, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, and often rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize. It is disappointing, then, that Conscience of a Liberal contains virtually no economic theory. Instead, the book consists of crude propaganda for a “soak-the-rich” policy.
From Legotown to Communist Utopia
A commentator on this blog draws our attention to this piece on the site Rethinking Schools. It is called “Why We Banned Legos.” It is indeed an amazing piece of work, a perfect distillation of the romantic attachment that bourgeois educators in a prosperous society have for a communist ideal they have never experienced or seen or, apparently, read about.
Max out your credit cards
Do it for the nation.
Apparently NYC-based Damon Hemmerdinger gave away around $20,000 over President’s Day to nearby denizens. The only catch, you needed to wear a sticker that reads: I Support the Economy!
Isaiah’s Job
Albert Jay Nock wrote, “The only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?”
The Economics of a Free Society
There will come a day that the world financiers will rush from dollars just as they have recently rushed into dollars, causing even worse chaos in the international financial markets. Without a stable monetary unit, the speculation will continue and worsen. Overreaction is now becoming more commonplace, but this is a predictable consequence of a world gone mad with fiat currencies, debt creation, and overspending. Massive debt liquidation will come.
Who is John T. Flynn?
John T. Flynn — journalist, author, and master polemicist of the Old Right — is highly unusual. He started out as a liberal columnist for that flagship of American liberalism, the New Republic, and wound up on the Right, denouncing “creeping socialism.” What is unusual about Flynn is that instead of being seduced by the New Deal and the Popular Front into supporting the war, Flynn was led by his thoroughgoing antiwar stance to challenge the developing state worship of modern liberalism.
Flynn’s final and definitive shift from left to right was completed with the writing of his greatest work, As We Go Marching. In this book, Flynn stepped back and tried to see the trends he had been fighting — militarism, centralism, leader worship — as the interlocking components of a system.
