Yesterday afternoon, my friend, who has recently moved to the Left Coast, pointed to this blog to alert me to the fact that MacArthur Maze, “the complex of freeways where Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and all the traffic from the East and South Bay area come to a head,” has collapsed again.

(”Again?” Yes, again: the exact same spot that collapsed in the 1989 earthquake.)

Time magazine reports on the Degania kibbutz’ decision to abandon socialism and allow the private ownership of property, a move many kibbutzim in Israel have been making in response to low productivity and the abandonment of their youth.

From the article:

[I]n a market economy, entrepreneurs play a very specific and important role. In the pursuit of profits, they make guesses about the future and then direct scarce productive resources, either their own or someone else’s, into a particular line of production. If they guess correctly, they earn profits; if they guess incorrectly, they suffer losses.

Here’s a fantastic video dramatizing the fact that pirates and emperors are really the same thing.

Here’s a direct link to the video on YouTube.

Find out more here Hat tip to Sunni for alerting me to it.

MSNBC runs a funny picture of the White House response to the news that economic growth is at a four-year low.

Yet another biography of this worthy thinker, and some interesting comments on his resurgence.

I was amazed that when Muhammad Yunus, head of the state-supported, quasi-socialist, regimentation-promoting Grameen Bank, received his Nobel Prize that free-market commentators bought into the propaganda. They threw their hats in the air, and their brains too. It reminded me of how conservatives all lauded Jack Kemp’s program for “home ownership” without thinking critically of the means of ownership. For that matter, too many have been fooled by the Bush administration’s early rhetoric about creating an “ownership society” via government activism.

When the economics profession turns its attention to financial panics and crashes, the first episode mentioned is tulipmania. In fact, tulipmania has become a metaphor in the economics field. Should one look up tulipmania in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, a discussion of the seventeenth century Dutch speculative mania will not be found. Guillermo Calvo (1987, p.

I guess we should be grateful that the federal government has magnanimously agreed to suspend shutting Vonage down on appeal of a patent verdict against it. For now, at least, it may escape the $612M damages that were extorted out of BlackBerry. And why did Vonage lose and might be shut down? Because its service is covered by someone else’s patent, which gives them a monopoly on this concept:

My review is posted here.