The sham of socially responsible investing (SRI) is exposed in a recent New York Times column by Joe Nocera. This incisive article concludes that SRI “oversimplifies the world, and in so doing distorts reality.”
There is a very revealing aspect of this story that Gene Weingarten wrote about in the Live Discussion:
There is an interesting backstory to this event, and it reveals something enlightening about the nature of government bureaucracy, versus private industry.
There is total frenzy in the arts community over the story that Joshua Bell played in a D.C. subway and was all but ignored (Washington Post). But no one seems to have noted the obvious: these are mostly government employees. Can we really expect them to recognize beauty?
The Panic of 1819 was America’s first great economic crisis. And this is Rothbard’s masterful account, the first full scholarly book on the topic and still the most definitive. It was his dissertation, published in 1962 but nearly impossible to get until this new edition, the first with the high production values associated with Mises Institute publications.
In their various speeches Fed policy makers have been emphasizing the importance of price stability for economic growth. For instance, in his speech on April 2 2007 to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis William Poole said,
Since the 2008 election battles are already well under way, pressures toward protectionism to steal from others to line constituents’ pockets are intensifying. Through their patrons in Washington, industries and unions are pushing even harder for what amounts to delegated government taxing power over their consumers, using the offer of election year resources as a lure.
