The Austrian-style Business cycle in one lesson
James Grant, writing in the New York Times, gives the briefest possible explanation:
The dollar: the true passenger bill of rights
OK, air travel can be a mess. There is nothing so frustrating as delays, especially delays on the tarmac. To some, this is a reason to have government create and enforce a so-called passenger bill of rights. In fact, New York is just days away from being the first state to have such positive rights enforced by the power of law. That said, we already have a passenger bill of rights: the dollar. You see, if you are willing to pay the price, you can have aircraft on standby ready to hustle you to your destination, 24/7.
Victims on Trial: The Everyday Business of Courts
In a courtroom packed with purported criminals, not even one of the people who appeared before the judge was a danger to society. Nearly all were in for victimless crimes.
The two who had perpetrated actual crimes — petty theft from Wal-Mart and the local mall — could have easily been dealt with without involving the state. So far as I could tell, the place could have been emptied out completely and our little community would have been no worse off, and massive human suffering could have been avoided.
But that’s not the way it works. These people, overwhelmingly black and poor but dressed very nicely in the hope of impressing the master, found themselves entangled in the web and thereby elicited the glare and killer instinct of the spider. How painful it was to watch and not be able to do anything about it.
The Corporate Form, Limited Liability, and the State
A common complaint of anticorporate libertarians and self-described anarchists is that corporations are creatures of the state. The limited-liability feature of the corporate form, they claim, and the ability of corporations to raise large amounts of capital are state-granted privileges.
Two important replies to such claims must make their way into cultural awareness: (1) we need corporations if we want any decent standard of living; and (2) these corporate powers would exist without the state.
The Task Confronting Libertarians
Another Reason to Reform Patent Law: Touch Off A Recession!
And here I thought recessions and the business cycle had something to do with state manipulation of the money supply. Now we have a new culprit: Patent Reform. So here’s the deal. There’s increasingly hyperbolic opposition to patent reform efforts. In the last year or so, the U.S.
How the Justice System Works: A Report
If you think about it, it is inherently implausible that the state could be an effective administrator of justice, for which there is a supply and demand like any other good. Shortages, inefficiencies, arbitrariness, and underlying chaos all around are going to be inherent in the attempt.
Because we are dealing here with the meting out of coercion, we can add that inhumane treatment and outright cruelty are also likely to be an inherent part of the system.
Privatize the Strategic Petroleum Reserve!
So I argue in an op ed for Investor’s Business Daily.
Lawrence Lessig: Governments Always Get It Wrong
Well, after a couple of decades of battling copyright extensions, the famed cyberlawyer Lessig has detected the Real Problem: government. In this Economist article, he proposes to improve the “transparency” of government activities through the Internet.
The New Left Was Great (Before It Collapsed)
Here is Murray Rothbard’s hilarious and exciting story of the rise and fall of the libertarian involvement in New Left politics.
