Last year J.H. Huebert discussed a new ad model of placing advertisements in space.
While this idea has received praises in the past, it has also been poo-pooed by a wide range of individuals, including those against the commercialization of space.
And they are not alone, as the State both directly and indirectly stymies entrepreneurial activity in the cosmos.
In product development there are two kinds of errors. A “go” error occurs when the green light is given to a product that eventually fails. The Edsel, a $250 million write-off by the Ford Motor Company in 1959, is one example. The “drop” error occurs when an idea that could have been highly profitable is eliminated from further consideration. How do we know that the idea could have been profitable? In a free market dropped ideas have the habit of being picked up by someone else.
The sham of socially responsible investing (SRI) is exposed in a recent New York Times column by Joe Nocera. This incisive article concludes that SRI “oversimplifies the world, and in so doing distorts reality.”
There is a very revealing aspect of this story that Gene Weingarten wrote about in the Live Discussion:
There is an interesting backstory to this event, and it reveals something enlightening about the nature of government bureaucracy, versus private industry.
There is total frenzy in the arts community over the story that Joshua Bell played in a D.C. subway and was all but ignored (Washington Post). But no one seems to have noted the obvious: these are mostly government employees. Can we really expect them to recognize beauty?
The Panic of 1819 was America’s first great economic crisis. And this is Rothbard’s masterful account, the first full scholarly book on the topic and still the most definitive. It was his dissertation, published in 1962 but nearly impossible to get until this new edition, the first with the high production values associated with Mises Institute publications.
In their various speeches Fed policy makers have been emphasizing the importance of price stability for economic growth. For instance, in his speech on April 2 2007 to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis William Poole said,
