The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen. The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the contributors—Keynesian, socialist, communist, and fascist—agreed with that point, including such luminaries as Sidney Hook, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.

Passages like this one from The Humane Economy by Wilhelm Roepke make me think that the Mises.org store should be carrying this book, despite its failings otherwise. It’s from the 1971 LibertyFund edition, pp. 168-70:

This piece from 1992 was lost in the shuffle. Here I discuss the strange vogue of the planned society in the 1930s, when academics freely linked FDR, Mussolini, Keynes, and Stalin—with praise for all!

For those who can’t get enough of David Gordon — and, really, who can? — he’s guest blogging over at Organizations and Markets.

From the Forbes blog: Good news for those of us who enjoy the occasional (or maybe even frequent) after work cocktail: tipping back a few can help fill your wallet. Drinkers earn 10 to 14% more money at their jobs than nondrinkers - and men who drink socially, visiting a bar at least once a month, bring home an additional 7% in pay, according to a new study.

Hackers Jailed for Zotob Worm Attack provides an illustration of how the crime of trespass can be committed remotely by computer means, such as, in this case, by “creating and distributing the Zotob worm that squirmed through Windows 2000 networks in August 2005.” Likewise, as argued here, spam can also be considered to be a form of trespass against property rights.

The conventional wisdom (i.e. what my dad and his buddies would tell me) is that, so long as you have decent credit and plan to stay in the area for a few years, it is crazy not to buy a house (rather than rent) because you can deduct the interest on your mortgage. Especially in the first few years, when you are paying tens of thousands in interest payments, that tax advantage equals hundreds or even thousands of dollars in extra take home pay per month.

Liberty Magazine‘s October issue has two very powerful, provocative pieces on immigration, by Stephen Cox and Bruce Ramsey. Cox’s especially presents an unusually forthright, honest, and open libertarian case against unlimited immigration.