Isn’t the Capital Surplus a Good Thing?
One of the strongest arguments in defense of large US trade deficits1 is to point out that they are the accounting flip side of a net capital inflow to the United States. This is quite effective rhetorically.
Mayhew’s Case for Revolution
Most Americans say that understanding our founding is very important. However, we actually pay almost no attention to it, leaving us woefully unaware of many critical aspects of our heritage.
The Tamedly Study
I find this book intriguing. First, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read it, or even heard of it until recently. Second, I don’t know who the author is, though she studied with Roepke and otherwise offers a massive bibliography, and is clearly an outstanding scholar. If anyone knows, please post.
New Hampshire: A Model For The Nation
Why does it always have to be California? New York? Massachusetts?
Why not New Hampshire?
New Hampshire: The Land of “Live Free or Die: Death is not the worst of evils.”
The home of Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, Mary Baker Eddy, Franklin Pierce, Robert Frost, Maxfield Parrish, Alan B. Shepard Jr, J.D. Salinger, Ken Burns, and Dean Kamen.
Does Business Need Washington to Manage Wages?
Robert Reich was discussing President Bush’s offer to go along with the Democrats’ plan for hiking the minimum wage $2.10 per hour, so long as it is accompanied by tax relief for small businesses. Reich would have none of this, writes Robert Murphy, claiming that the proposed hike in the minimum wage wouldn’t burden small businesses at all. To defend this paradoxical claim, Reich offered three main reasons, each of which Murphy debunks.
Reaping Cannon Fodder
By supporting the minimum wage, asks N. Joseph Potts, has the curmudgeonly Republican Party finally developed a concern for the economically downtrodden worker? Does a newly more-conciliatory administration now see the need to cooperate with the new Democrat majority in Congress? Or maybe the administration discovered in this reviled policy a means of advancing other goals — goals even more odious than the effects of the minimum wage. Maybe it will find new cannon fodder among the unemployed.
Bureaucrats: Another Breed of Cat
According to the USDA, the Hemingway Home is an exhibitor of six-toed cats, and must hold a USDA animal welfare license, writes DW MacKenzie. The USDA has repeatedly denied the Hemingway Home applications for such a license, because the cats are not in cages. The USDA has also suggested the installation of an electric fence around the Hemingway Home premises. How is it that a law intended to promote animal welfare could lead to cats being caged or shocked with electricity?
Professor Norman Barry on “Stakeholding” and the Firm
My article “Shareholder, not Stakeholder,” which argued against the collectivist notion of “the stakeholder,” brought forth much disagreement, especially from the bohemian business types. Regarding this same topic, there is this magnificent Norman Barry piece on the stakeholder fallacy in the Freeman. He notes:
The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century
[Written in 1925, this essay was published in Economica in 1926 and became more widely known when F.A. Hayek included it in Capitalism and the Historians (1954).]
Friedman for Government Intervention: The Case of the Great Depression
We’ve often heard that monetarists and Austrians agree that the government is to blame for the Great Depression. A deeper look, says Mateusz Machaj, shows that this is nothing but empty rhetoric.
Here he debunks the popular view that Milton Friedman proved that the Great Depression was not a market failure and that Friedman made a very strong argument against interventionism.
