Is Our Future Really $0?

Chris Anderson, a well-known business guru in the world of online commerce, imagines a world in which all internet services are free. But he has made an error. The reason some goods are given away for free in some markets has no relation to any hypothetical notion of “marginal costs tending to zero.” In fact, those supposed free goods are “given” to us in exchange for our time and attention. As time is an increasingly scarce resource, its value is steadily rising, in terms of storage, processing, and bandwidth.

Government Attack on Prostitution ends in woman’s death

Sad news this morning (here and here) that a lady involved in the “high end” prostitution business killed herself because of government prosecution — she knew her life was over since she would be in prison for the best years of her remaining life (from her perspective). Her mother found the “D.C. Madam” hanged in the shed — with a note announcing her intention.

Starving the World’s Poorest

Contemplating the grotesque potential side effects of bioethanol subsidies in the world’s most developed economies is almost unbearable. While everyone is affected by higher food prices, for some people, the more costly food puts their very subsistence into question. No doubt, the politicians who came up with the idea of subsidizing the diversion of grain to the production of bioethanol did not intend to starve the world’s poorest people; but the fact that the consequences were unintended does not absolve them of responsibility.

On Mises’s Ethical Relativism

Mises’s utilitarian, relativist approach to ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be supplemented by an absolutist ethic — an ethic of liberty, as well as of other values needed for the health and development of the individual — grounded on natural law, i.e., discovery of the laws of man’s nature. Failure to recognize this is the greatest flaw in Mises’s philosophical worldview.

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