If you subscribe to wsj.com, they are starting a new forum today, kicked off by Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling (of the Cato Institute). After a tit-for-tat in which these big boys seem mostly to agree, participation is invited from readers as to what they think of the New Deal.
This Slate article discusses a new econometric study that apparently shows juvenile criminals don’t lower their criminal behavior when they become 18 and can receive stiffer penalties.
On the one hand, as a libertarian (not to mention a pacifist) I love stuff like this: The State fails in its use of stolen tax dollars and barbaric punishments!
Historically, you know, we have a couple of grievances with the Japanese. First, healed over like an old wound, are the events of December 7, 1941. In the usual American tradition, we won that war but we lost the peace — said the experts. (I’ll tell you why later.) Next, was the Great Scare of the eighties when armies of U.S. economists, with teary eyes and downcast faces, predicted the mortal wounding of the U.S. economy. The Japanese system — a partnership of government and business, would flourish. They’d steal our jobs.
An Asia Times piece by Zhou Jiangong earlier this week describes a complicated plan by the Chinese Ministry of Finance to in essence reallocate a portion of its portfolio of US Treasuries and agency debt into other asset classes. This news continues a trend on the part of central banks holding large reserves to allocate an increasing portion of those reserves to private capital markets.
One of the amazing phenomena of the present election campaign is the way in which speakers and writers refer to the state of business and to the economic condition of the nation. They praise the administration for the prosperity and for the high standard of living of the average citizen “You never had it so good,” they say, and, “Don’t let them take it away.”
Friedrich A. Hayek was only thirty-two years old when he published this two-part article in Economica, at the time, the world’s leading English-language economics journal. The article is a review essay of John Maynard Keynes’s two-volume book, A Treatise on Money, published the previous year. Keynes, a generation senior to Hayek, was at the time the leading economist of the British Cambridge School and had already achieved world renown as a public intellectual.
As I have written elsewhere, I normally cringe when I read the Economics section of most conservative publications. Nothing changed when I picked up last month’s issue of Chronicles. Writing under the heading of “The Economy,” R. Cort Kirkwood has done it again. Jeff Tucker has already drawn our attention to Kirkwood’s anti-Wal-Mart rant in the November issue of Chronicles.
This morning’s New York Times reports on the growing trend of outsourcing government activities via contracting duties to private firms. The result is an increasingly common accounting trick, in which the state can expand its activities while both reducing its size and increasing the scope of activities that occur without public scrutiny.
