I’ve been waiting for an Austrian who actually understands the accounting legalities to explain all this but no one has, so consider this an invitation. Tech companies have been buffeted by a round of stock options scandals. The media coverage has been a bit confusing but the irregularities have something to do with backdating stock options to a point when the stock price was low to maximize the value of the options. (What is confusing is that this in itself doesn’t seem to be illegal.

The market is often described as a learning process, one that could never be replicated by a central planner. A case in point is a piece of capitalist history I didn’t know: the original cake mix required only the addition of water. But, says this, this didn’t sell well at all. Potential buyers felt a sense of guilt that it was so easy. So the Betty Crocker company started requiring that an egg be mixed in. The cake mix took off.

I’ve learned from reliable sources connected with various free market think tanks around the world that various important companies, in particular pharmaceutical, have become “supporters” of such think tanks--provided, of course, that the think tank supports intellectual property rights. Could this be one reason many free market think tanks are supportive of IP despite a mounting case against it?

Saving is the use of revenue or income by a business or individual for purposes other than expenditure on consumers’ goods (or consumers’ services). It is revenue or income that is not consumed.

Says Scientific American: Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.

As election day nears, America’s get-out-the-vote frenzy is entering high gear, trying to browbeat voters into exercising their franchise with various arguments. Unfortunately, those arguments reflect seriously flawed logic.

In Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility feminist scholar Angela Franks presents the evidence that should revolutionize our view of the founder of Planned Parenthood. Far from being motivated by the liberation of women she was in fact a lifelong devotee of that dark 20th century phenomenon: eugenics. A review in Touchstone by Anne Barbeua Gardiner explains:

The Economist writes: “By the late 1990s the Wallenbergs controlled some 40% of the value of the companies listed on the Swedish stock exchange.” My thanks to Tyler Cowen for this Sweden fact of the day.