This past spring I pointed to a large visual aid that illustrates the budgets each agency receives. The new 2007 edition has just been released and it lives up to its predecessor.

Since 1990, we’ve heard about what a low rate of inflation we’ve experienced. In some ways, it might appear low compared with what we experienced in the late 1970s. The dollar of 1976 was worth only 63 cents by 1981, once the Nixon-Carter inflation had done its work.

The cultural and economic consequences were devastating. A generation was punished for having saved and accumulated capital. Debtors were rewarded, with the government being biggest debtor, of course.

Advocates of replacing the income tax with the FairTax — a consumption tax in the form of a national retail sales tax (NRST) on new goods and services — regularly point to the complexity of the tax code, the millions of hours and dollars wasted on compliance costs, the evils of the withholding tax, and the abuses of the IRS to bolster their case for the FairTax.

This is a fun letter to The Business:

Although I have been an occasional reader of The Business (mostly due to having two young children that leave me little time to sit and read a Sunday newspaper in an enjoyable manner), I thought I would write to let you know you now have one additional committed weekly reader.

Stephen Cox, editor of Liberty magazine, recently wrote a well-received article opposing the allegedly suicidal policy of open borders (”The Fallacy of Open Immigration,” available online here). Cox aimed his article at libertarians who understandably think that the only acceptable position is to insist that the federal government takes no action in hindering the passage of foreigners into the United States.

A fascinating, and very depressing, story from the NYTimes. Convinced that markets, supply and demand, and voluntary production would be insufficient to protect us from a bioterror attack, the government took on the job, and project BioShield was born.

Perhaps it is human nature for people to decry whatever their situation might be. All of us wish to be better off than we are at the present time, not matter how good the state of our current circumstances.

While that might be so, the supposed “inequality crisis” decried by some economists (and, of course, members of the political classes) does not stem necessarily from human discontent with the nature of scarcity, but rather from the propensity of some to play with aggregate numbers — and call it “economics.”

The Mises Circle event this past weekend — The Fed and War Finance — was a wonderful time; the full house at the University Club seemed to agree. Apart from having my toiletries confiscated at the airport (yes, they mean it when they say no liquids or gels), I was glad to visit New York City again, where I lived for five years, and see some of the old cadre as well as a great many new faces.

As has been reported on this blog, Israel Kirzner wrote a short article where he distinguishes between information-knowledge and action-knowledge. The distinction between the two is that action-knowledge refers to “knowledge that actually spurs and shapes action” while information-knowledge is simply facts and figures that exist in memory.