The job fell to me, as it does at times, to do a radio interview. And the topic was — what else? — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the state of the banking system in the United States.
While preparing for this interview, I felt an unusual sense of foreboding.
While on an evening bike ride with my oldest son, we reminisced about one of the first government meetings we attended together — an annexation hearing before our county commissioners. Looking back, we agreed that the meeting turned out to be an invaluable opportunity to witness government in action.
Mötley Crüe rocked the 1980s. They played hard and partied harder. Their lifestyle was a toxic mixture of drugs, alcohol, fast cars, and fast women. Their reputation for drug abuse remains legendary — rivaling Ozzy Osbourne, the Grateful Dead, and even the Rolling Stones.
We are right in the middle of a season of summer seminar season. Some students are attending only one seminar, and others are completing a rigorous circuit of seminars sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, the Independent Institute, the Cato Institute, the Mises Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the American Institute for Economic Research, and/or other organizations interested in building on the intellectual foundations of a free society.
Thorstein Polleit has an article coming up on MIses.org, and it quotes Mises in a way that is just too interesting not to blog ahead of time, however tacky it might be for me to loot a forthcoming article of some of its best material:
The recent takeover of Anheuser-Busch by the Belgian company InBev has raised the usual set of fears about the alleged takeover of the American economy by foreigners. Perhaps it is because Anheuser-Busch produces iconic American brands, but the public reaction to the takeover exhibits the voter biases identified by Bryan Caplan in his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter: anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias.
