[This essay was originally published in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John V. Denson, pp. 667–696.
 

I tried to post this as a reply to the criticism of my criticism of Frank Shostak’s money supply definition that the person calling himself Newson posted under Frank’s most recent article. It strangely disappeared so that’s why it’s posted under a new post (slightly reformulated since it is a new post rather than a comment under a post): First of all, I am not the only Austrian economist who thinks that Shostak’s definition of the supply of money is too narrow.

An American liberal like Kinsley should (after 6+ years of the “War on Terror”) be aware of the great downside to a government monopoly of the military. Everything that is wrong with government control of, say, automobile production, carries over into the arena of defense. For example, costs are vastly inflated, and inefficiency abounds, because there is no direct link between the customer and the service provider.

Famed investor/world traveler Jim Rogers, interviewed on Resource Investor, drops this bomb on Bernanke:

[The Conscience of a Liberal. By Paul Krugman. W.W. Norton, 2007. 296 pages.]Like him or not, Paul Krugman is an economic theorist of distinction, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, and often rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize. It is disappointing, then, that Conscience of a Liberal contains virtually no economic theory. Instead, the book consists of crude propaganda for a “soak-the-rich” policy.

[Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. By Jonah Goldberg. Doubleday, 2007. 487 pages.]