In “Remembering Henry Hazlitt“ (7/27), Bettini Bien Greaves lays out Hazlitt’s importance. However, something important was left out of that account. Out of some 10 million words he wrote, nothing of what he said about liberty was included. Therefore, to provide a taste of some of the words that made Hazlitt so important, consider just a few:
“Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.”
No one, but no one, tells the story of the Ford Motor Company like Garet Garret. He loved machines and technology, and the markets that create and market them. He loved the car and its transforming effect on society. And he lived through it and knows what he is talking about.
Here he sees Henry Ford for the genius that he was, as an entrepreneur who saw the possibilities and seized on them. He tells of how Ford faced and overcame incredible obstacles on his way to becoming one of the great capitalists of all time.
Imagine fires back against BigBand’s lawsuit — So BigBand sues Imagine for patent infringement for video-processing and bandwidth-management techniques—before Imagine’s initial product and technology have even been commercially deployed. As Imagine notes, BigBand’s lawsuit is filed too early to allow BigBand to “properly know or understand the details of Imagine’s yet-to-be released technology to form the basis for a lawsuit.” So why did they do it? Imagine’s guess?—
As the mortgage-backed securities market meltdown accelerates, Bloomberg reports U.S. Urges China to Buy Mortgage-Backed Securities. According to the article, China buys some but not a lot of these instruments.
“There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.” – Ludwig von Mises
By now there’s been a great deal of libertarian criticism and discussion of Randy Barnett‘s controversial Wall Street Journal editorial, Libertarians and the War (subtitled: “Ron Paul doesn’t speak for all of us.”), including:
Family farms are very similar to mom-and-pop grocery stores or general stores or butcher shops. Those shops used to dot the landscape in towns all across America. Before the age of efficient transportation and refrigeration, computers, and advanced technology, prices were relatively high, and local family-owned stores could make an adequate profit. Those high prices that gave the small shops the ability to thrive, however, were the same high prices that burdened every other family in the economy and kept standards of living relatively low.
Why have a monetary system based on gold? Because, as conditions are today and for the time that can be foreseen today, the gold standard alone makes the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups. The gold standard alone is what the nineteenth-century freedom-loving leaders (who championed representative government, civil liberties, and prosperity for all) called “sound money.”
