Three National Treasures: Hazlitt, Hutt, and Rothbard

There is a Japanese custom naming great achievers as living national treasures. In an article from 1986, Lew Rockwell wrote that there were three then living: Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, and Murray N. Rothbard. To most Americans, economists don’t leap instantly to mind as treasures, let alone national treasures. Whether making arrogant and fallacious mathematical predictions, filling the minds of college students with the wrong-headed Keynesian and socialist ideas, or giving a theoretical cover to state inflation, taxation, regulation, and spending — the typical economist is not a friend of liberty.

Spiderman: A Class Act

The skinny on Spiderman 2 is that this is a movie that even movie snobs can love, and there’s certain truth in this view. Its characters are more introspective and thoughtful than other superhero fare, and its social-critical undercurrent isn’t overtly political enough to become annoying, writes Jeffrey Tucker.

Spidey’s Forgotten World

Jeffrey Tucker writes of an unexpected pleasure that comes from watching any Spider-Man movie, and the new release of the third is no exception. It allows the viewer to be a voyeur of the workings of a largely abandoned ideology, the perspective of the old, old Left. The film, and the ideological structure of Spiderman’s world, not only shows us how wrong the left was way back then; it reveals just how much the class-conflict view of economics has had to adjust in order to stay viable at all.

Who Would the Founders Endorse?

The 2008 presidential campaign has been going on for months, even though we are far from the end of 2007. But all that really gets discussed are the horserace details — who is ahead, who is raising more money, how badly will a particular scandal or issue hurt a candidate, etc. Unfortunately, that approach, which dominates the media, is a horribly inadequate way to go about selecting the person who will fill America’s highest constitutional office.

The Scandalous Student Loan Scandal

The student loan scandal concerns the fact that many colleges and universities chose preferred lenders for financing student loans and then received remuneration for their recommendations from the lenders. The scandal has been going on since mid-March. Thus, it is startling to learn that it was not until April 30 that any evidence was provided concerning how anyone might have been harmed by the practice.

Opponents of the “Consensus” on Anthropogenic Global Warming

Contrary to what one often hears, opponents of the ‘scientific consensus’ promoted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are not self-published kooks & cranks. In view of the heat that this statement seems to generate, it is necessary to spell out & clarify what is involved (for careful readers): There are many established scientists who seriously question its procedures & arguments. See, for example, the following:

Environmentalist Zen

If you’d prefer to be cool rather than suffer in the heat, what you need to do, according to the environmental movement, is smash your air conditioner, refrigerator, and freezer. That will help to cool the planet—someday. If you want to be secure from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and other natural (according to it, manmade) disasters, what you need to do is destroy the energy base required to produce and operate modern construction equipment and means of transportation.

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