With recession looming or already here, the time has arrived for finding scapegoats. Expect a long list of these. Here is the target of the day: tightfisted consumers. A decline in personal consumption, writes the New York Times, “would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.”

When asked why the RIAA is going after an easy target--college students--the response made me cringe: “College students have reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized,” Duckworth said. “And their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development.” Sadly, this statement tells you everything you need to know about the RIAA.

Credit expansion is responsible not only for the boom-bust business cycle, as Mises showed, but also that it is a major source of artificial economic inequality and sharply increases profits relative to wages. These are processes that come to an end and are actually thrown into reverse as soon as credit expansion stops and the recession/depression that is its ultimate consequence begins. In wasting capital through malinvestment, it undermines the rise in production and accompanying rise in real wages.

Income tax revolt is slowing making its way to the ballot in Massachusetts, and it’s picking up a few enemies along the way.

I can vaguely recall a time when the person who helped kids across the street was called a “crossing guard.” It seems like not to long ago, the person parked and watched cars was called a “parking attendant.” The people directing traffic at construction sites were just construction workers. The police were called the police.

Now, however, all these jobs seem to have been upgraded. They are variants of “security personnel.” And they all wear shirts with big letters: SECURITY.

Some of you may remember Jeff Tucker’s rightly indignant post about the woman (who calls herself “the chicken salad chick”) who made delicious chicken salad out of her home, only to be ratted out by a competitor and forced to close up shop. Well, she now has her own store front, and I suspect she’s going to make that competitor regret starting all this in the first place.

In the 45-minute speech, Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to double or triple the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare that he has commissioned from two Nobel laureates in economics, Amarthya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.