Many people have wondered about the Austrian Scholars Conference, the trend line and general health, which might be considered a good barometer of the health and well being of the Austrian School generally.

Well, after years of enjoying a fairly stable attendance, this year, it is going to set all records. We are looking at having more than 150 people here, which, if you have been to the Mises Institute, means that we are going to be stretched to capacity. This is ideal and very exciting for us.

Maybe the explanation is the program itself, which looks really great.

Our fiscal problems can be explained by an Internal Revenue Service that isn’t aggressive enough. (Story here.)

This film is in theaters now, but unfortunately not for long. Please get out to see this film! This is our story, a libertarian story.

See more films about liberty and the state at the film page.

Amazing Grace (2007)

Jeff Tucker’s post on the supposed failures of the daycare market got me thinking about some of the messages implicit in the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies report that criticises government oversight of daycare programs and calls for more regulation. Let’s think about this for a minute. What is daycare, anyway? It’s essentially the outsourcing, for some period of time, of the job of taking care of your children. When not done by daycare providers, this job is done by parents.

1. Purposeful Action and Animal Reaction

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.

Turns out that Abe Lincoln held patent 6469. From the Patent Office:

From Caroline Baum’s excellent opinion piece:

Happy Birthday today to Murray N. Rothbard who would have been 81 if my calculations are correct. And happy early birthday to Gustave de Molinari who would be really old tomorrow.

It’s one thing for a firm to guard its own secrets, and enforce those rules with internal sanctions. But government regulations on insider trading is criminalizing knowledge as such, insofar as it is not in a press release, an notion which wars against the very idea of entrepreneurship.

It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter’s trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration is, what is the law in the matter? Or, more likely, how can I make use of the law to improve my lot in life?