As Murray Rothbard described one of their favorite lines of attack,

The free-market economy, they charge, is “the rule of the jungle,” where “survival of the fittest” is the law. Libertarians who advocate a free market are therefore called “Social Darwinists” who wish to exterminate the weak for the benefit of the strong.

With his latest, rather forlorn call for banks to help solve the mortgage crisis by ‘forgiving’ just enough of their loans to keep people’s inability to service their full contractual obligations from triggering foreclosure proceedings, he truly has gone all the way back to Solon and his 6th century answer to Athen’s very own sub-prime crisis, the ‘seisachtheia’ - or ‘shaking off of debts’

A piece of mine posted here: “To compare politicians with entrepreneurs is like comparing two runners in a race, one who stands at the starting line and makes a speech, and another who runs the full distance around the track without saying a word.”

If you click on the link and comment there, it might encourage the editors to run more pro-market stuff. 

[Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action. By George Weigel. Doubleday, 2007. 195 pages.]

[The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. By Robert P. Murphy. Regnery, 2007. Xii + 206 pages.]Robert Murphy’s admirable book is much more than a conventional defense of capitalism. Murphy includes standard material, e.g., why price controls, minimum wage legislation, and rent control do not work. Though it was once controversial to point to the inadequacies of these measures, now even mainstream textbooks hasten to condemn them. Murphy goes far beyond this.

“Seniors hurt in Ponzi scam” headlined the story of elderly Southern Californians bilked in a pyramid scheme. While sad, the story reminded me of Social Security, since it is also a Ponzi scheme involving those older, with high payoffs to early recipients coming from pockets of later participants. With Social Security, however, it benefits those older at others’ expense.

Somehow I had forgotten that the U.S. has a thing going on in Somalia. “A local official told Reuters that the missile was fired by a U.S. aircraft.

The so-called ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in Alaska became a national joke in 2005 after ABC’s ‘20/20’ put the spotlight on this particularly fat slice of pork.

The proposed bridge, since cancelled, was to replace a ferry that runs every 15 minutes or so between Ketchikan, a small town on the island of Revillagigedo, and Gravina Island.

The ferry ride, $5 per person ($6 for cars), takes about 5 minutes — a half-mile ride across the small waterway that separates Ketchikan and Gravina.

The social-work crowd is puzzled about what to do: there seems to be a stigma attached to eating government-subsidized lunches. It only took 30 years for the NYT to notice.