NEW DELHI (AFP) — A fake government office has been discovered in northern India that collected taxes, provided civic services and even handed out birth and death certificates, a report said Monday. An office was set up outside Jhansi town in Uttar Pradesh state and 20 people were employed to carry out jobs such as street sweeping. Officials believe the operation originally started as a scam to collect fees from residents in return for one municipal janitor.

In an editorial in today’s Columbus Dispatch, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and editors take credit card companies to task for raising the interest rate of certain cardholders. Sure, it’s always easy — and politically effective — to attack big business, but Levin and the Dispatch editors missed the other half of the equation: the cardholder.

ComicMix asks the question. “My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles. “The Berlin Batman,” #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman’s attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands.

[This Study Guide to Human Action, Chapter VIII is also available in PDF.]

Joy, joy, the Fed has cut rates again. Picture the Joker from the movie Batman throwing money from his float on the parade and you can see where this is going. Or imagine the alchemist of medieval lore, attempting to conjure up wealth from chemical mixtures.

The sea of inflationary credit is the core problem behind the falling dollar, the subprime crisis, the housing meltdown, not to mention the rise in the national debt and a thousand other problems.

The sea of inflationary credit is the core problem behind the falling dollar, the subprime crisis, the housing meltdown, not to mention the rise in the national debt and a thousand other problems. No one in Washington seems to understand the reason for the crisis, much less how to fix it. A good indication is President Bush’s freeze on subprime mortgage rates. It is a classic case that provides serious lessons for all of us.

The rate cut today is a good reminder that the Fed can’t always get its way. It is usually assumed that the trouble with the Fed in 1930 was that it failed to attempt to expand money and credit. In fact, Bernanke himself has made this argument and sworn it will never happen again. Rothbard, in America’s Great Depression, makes the opposite case: the Fed tried to flood the market with money but could not: