Murray Rothbard, in a memo dated 1959, reviews Robbins’s book on the Great Depression:
Lionel Robbins’s The Great Depression (Macmillan, 1934) is one of the great economic works of our time. Its greatness lies not so much in originality of economic thought, as in the application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression.The Federal Reserve on Friday announced two initiatives to address heightened liquidity pressures in term funding markets. First, the amounts outstanding in the Term Auction Facility (TAF) will be increased to $100 billion. The auctions on March 10 and March 24 each will be increased to $50 billion--an increase of $20 billion from the amounts that were announced for these auctions on February 29.
In If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?, Techdirt writer Mike Masnick discusses various proposd replacements for the misleading term “intellectual property.” Contenders include “intellectual monopoly,” “intellectual privilege,” “imaginary property,” and “None of the Above.” There are problems with each of these.
Neither party will cut government in a way that is desperately needed. Instead, they offer a left- or right-tinged Americanized socialism or fascism. One promises domestic expansion and foreign reduction; the other promises foreign expansion and domestic reduction. The inevitable compromise: expand both domestically and internationally.
In addition, whatever the new president does will make our growing economic problems worse.
Thomas Paine was more than a pamphleteer for the cause of the American revolution. He was a serious political philosopher, as this excerpt from The Rights of Man demonstrates. In many ways, he anticipated the insights of Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek.
“A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It had its origin in the principles of society, and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.Do We Want Free Enterprise by V. Orval Watts is an exciting challenge issued to business in 1944. He points out that business is not necessarily a friend of free enterprise. True free markets would mean an end to cartelizating regulations, tariffs, business subsidies, and every form of privilege that business has learned to love throughout the New Deal period. In some ways, he writes, free enterprise represents a challenge to business that it would rather avoid completely.
Nationalism appears to be a modern phenomenon having its origin in the nationalities constituted in Europe between the 16th and the 19th century concomitantly with the disappearance of feudalism and of the Romano-Germanic Empire that came into being with Charlemagne and was totally liquidated with the unification of Italy.
In fact, however, the spirit of nationalism is very ancient. It has been and still is present as a factor in both political and economic history. The only thing that has changed is its form.Imagine my surprise yesterday when I flicked on a kitchen radio with the hope of catching some Mozart to accompany my doing the dishes, only to hear a fey British voice saying the following:
