15 years ago Thomas DiLorenzo penned a concise piece detailing severals reasons and examples as to why socialism was not only unable to prevent pollution, but how it is the prime culprit in many cases.

For those who like their environmental gloom’n’doom spread with a thick dollop of Utopian totalitarianism and garnished with a slice of Galtonian pseudo-science, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas holds its sixth annual conference in Ireland this coming week.

Reader “Albert Nock” was kind enough to send me notice of some new research on violence on the American frontier. This relates back to an article I wrote for Mises.org in 2004 and to extensive work done by Terry Anderson and Peter Hill (including an article in the JLS). There is also a chapter on the topic in Thomas Woods’ latest book.

Ever since the first banner ad found its way online, there has been a virtual arms race between ad placement technology and ad blocking.

The latest chapter in this ongoing saga revolves around Adblock Plus, an extension that can be integrated into the Firefox browser that essentially blocks all ads. And in short, due to the fact that tools like this exist, several webmasters are now refusing to allow netizens to access their respective websites via a Firefox browser.

Well, no, it is not exactly a confiteor moment as he appears to spread the blame around quite considerably in his new memoir: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

The Majesty of the Law

The account of Ludwig Mises’ legal and institutional research in chapter 3 of Hulsmann’s biography is helpful in understanding the empirical base upon which Mises would later build his understanding of the effect of regulations upon social relations and economic conditions. I think the importance of this kind of thing for a young scholar is often under-estimated.

This interview was a great pleasure:

[Cross-posted at Organizations and Markets]

Austrian economists eschew empirical analysis in favor of deductive, a priori reasoning. They don’t believe in prediction. Neoclassical economists, by contrast, endorse the “scientific method” of rigorous empirical testing. You know that, right?

In their eagerness to keep the pot boiling somehow, somewhere, many financial pundits are spinning the line that Emerging Markets now offer a form of ‘safe haven’ from the problems affecting Western credit markets — an angle that finds an immediate resonance with the many who have been seduced by the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved in any description of China’s recent rise.