In a July 21, 2008 column in the Jewish World Review with a shouting headline of STOP OIL SPECULATION NOW!, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann argued that the government should take action to restrict trading in futures markets. They are mistaken, however, in their assessment of oil speculation. Speculation is an important part of the supply and demand process.
David (on the Against Monopoly blog)–sure, it is understandable why you are “much more favorably inclined towards trademarks than other forms of intellectual property.” As you say, “It seems to me a good thing that it is possible to tell who you are doing business with, and no downside monopoly”.
[This year marks the 60th anniversary of John Kenneth Galbraith’s celebrated book, The Affluent Society, which sparked much public discussion at the time of its publication about disparities between ever-increasing private wealth and what Galbraith claimed was an impoverished public sector lacking in social and physical infrastructure.
Several people have sent a link to this post on the Time Magazine effort to push national service. In an addition to violating liberties on a massive scale, this program would be a colossal waste. It will rob young people of their most important years early in life, taking them out of productive work and making them less able to offer anything to the marketplace after: an extension of an already catastrophic system of publicly funded education, which already drains brain power and time.
The problem of evil is a big theme for a movie, and certainly for a movie based on a comic book, but Batman: The Dark Knight deals with it expertly, and with a message that offers profound support to the idea of human liberty.
It does so in two ways: it supports the view that human beings are capable of cooperating toward the social good, and it shows the unpredictable level of evil that state intervention unleashes. Yes, I know it sounds implausible, but please hear me out.
This is the true and remarkable story of private coinage and banking in Britain in the early years of the Industrial Revolution (1775-1850). Making money was a business in demand. The needs of business for small denominations were changing. Merchants needed small denomination coins in copper and silver.
In Frank Van Dun‘s paper on argumentation ethics, “Argumentation Ethics and the Philosophy of Freedom,” there is a fascinating discussion about what law and courts and lawyers have become: not justice-seekers, but technical interpreters of artificial rules. Van Dun argues that equality before the law
If you are glued to the evening news or the radio, you might believe that the whole nation is waiting in suspense to see how our leaders are going to deal with the economic challenges of our day: recession, inflation, unemployment, bank runs, etc. There are proposed laws, bills flying everywhere, candidates promising this and that, press conferences, debates, op-eds, talking heads, regulations, investigations, proposals, and policies.
Then there is the real world.
