Sometimes the regular news reads just like The Onion, such as this one on the growing controversy about a new liquor drink called Spykes.
You can listen to the panel I appeared on at yesterday’s Cato Institute conference on globalization here (mp3) or view it here. Dr. Rich Brake of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute opens the panel, followed by the talks — first by me, then by Olaf Gersemann. After that, we have a fruitful question-and-answer session.
I guess I don’t understand politics unless I assume that politicians think we’re a lot dumber than them. A small example; why would anti free-traders rant about the trade deficit. It has virtues, too. A surplus, say by the Chinese, enables them to lap up those strong, safe US Treasury bonds. (Would you rather have a ten year Treasury or a Bulgarian note?) and other bargains in American assets. Great, let them finance America. But the anti free traders never dwell on that.
Many churches during the season of Lent hold a “hunger banquet” to illustrate the problem of poverty in the developing world. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but does guilt manipulation really solve the problem or does it cause people to grasp for straws or actually favor dangerous policies?
Nature magazines are delightful to read. The photos that grace conservation publications are often magnificent. Yet it is hard to ignore the economic illiteracy or the socialist propaganda that is espoused in many of their thoughtless articles, and it is even harder to ignore the strength with which statists call for government expropriation of resources in order to achieve their goals. I will examine why this is ethically incorrect and economically inefficient.
The Hayek Foundation of Argentine has a new site.
Nicolai Foss notes at Organizations and Markets that James March and Herbert Simon, in their 1958 book Organizations, were among the first social scientists outside the Austrian school to recognize that Mises and Hayek did not lose the socialist calculation debate.
The front page of today’s (March 28) Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) a change of heart on the part of Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan S. Blinder that free trade is good. It seems he has in mind the millions of American jobs now threatened by the unprecedented ease with which information can be shipped out and back in.
