Some of you may remember Jeff Tucker’s rightly indignant post about the woman (who calls herself “the chicken salad chick”) who made delicious chicken salad out of her home, only to be ratted out by a competitor and forced to close up shop. Well, she now has her own store front, and I suspect she’s going to make that competitor regret starting all this in the first place.

In the 45-minute speech, Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to double or triple the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare that he has commissioned from two Nobel laureates in economics, Amarthya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.

The Writers Guild apparently says it’s OK for Jay Leno to do his monologue, but if writes his monologue then he has crossed the picket line. As I explain in this PRI blog post, such a position quickly leads to absurdity. The union advocates would have you believe that they are merely withholding their own labor to show how important their contribution is, but everyone knows that their tactics go beyond that.

While Rothbard gave an enthusiastically positive review to Henry Hazlitt’s The Failure of the “New Economics,” he was considerably less impressed with Benjamin Anderson’s The Value of Money:

Second Life Blog: “As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.

Economics is a science that studies production of wealth, i.e. material goods to satisfy human needs, in a division of labor society. Behind this simple definition stands the desire to understand factors that are responsible for high and rising productivity of labor. The material comfort, indeed the very survival, of billions of people depends on the knowledge of what to do to maintain the existing relatively high level of productivity of labor and how to raise it even further so as more and more people around the world will be able to enjoy high and rising living standards.

Murray Rothbard addresses all the critical questions. Do libertarians believe that individuals are isolated, acting without influence? Are we libertines? Naive rationalists? Utopians? Do we promote selfishness? Before judging and evaluating libertarianism, it is vitally important to find out precisely what that doctrine is, and, more particularly, what it is not. It is especially important to clear up a number of misconceptions about libertarianism that are held by most people, and particularly by conservatives.

Atlanta Journal Constitution: “They came in droves — high school students, retirees, young moms, the unemployed — all for a shot at a job at a new Wal-Mart on Memorial Drive in central DeKalb County. In just two days, and with virtually no advertising or even any signs, a staggering 7,500 people filled out applications for one of the 350 to 400 available jobs.”