The shortcomings of Fannie Mae have been overlooked on the basis that Fannie plays a critical role in driving the housing sector, and thus the American economy.

Why do professional athletes make so much more money than, say, professional teachers? Do people really value sports more than they value education? Dan McLaughlin writes that teachers provide a service that is generally accepted as contributing real value to the development of society. Some people view sports, however, as superfluous. They think of it as something that society could function well without. It doesn’t seem to make sense...

A new report says that housing prices having fallen nationally by 2.1% since last year. That’s not a crash or even much of a correction, and hardly seems to verify predictions of an exploding bubble. Or am I missing something?

The WSJ blogs about a revival of Austrian economics in the context of a report by the Bank for International Settlements. The report suggests that central banking and credit manipulation are the cause of depressions and malinvestment.

Lysander Spooner was the foremost legal theorist of the 19th-century American individualist anarchist movement. His 1882 open letter to Senator Bayard is fairly well-known among Spooner fans; but an 1886 sequel, A Second Letter to Thomas F.

He who has lived well knows how to die well. Death holds no horrors for him. It is simply the ultimate adventure of life. The death of Hans Sennholz on June 23, 2007, concluded a life of untold adventures. Born (February 3, 1922) in Germany during the hyperinflation soon after World War I, he experienced the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism. In World War II, he lost his mother in an allied bombing raid on his hometown, and his father in a mining accident. His only brother, who served in the German army, did not return from Russia.

In case you missed it, yesterday’s New York Times offered a profile of “freegans” -- people who live as much as possible, and relatively well, off other people’s garbage, which they get for free by combing through dumpsters and the like. That’s fine, if it’s how you want to live, but the article gets really good when the freegans offer their political views:

Garrison Keillor notes the anniversary of the GI Bill on the Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1944 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the GI Bill of Rights. It was one of the most important and influential pieces of legislation ever signed by an American president, but the newspapers barely covered the story at the time. They were too busy reporting on the Allied invasion of Europe.