This is a fascinating review of Rothbard’s economic treatise, by Henry Hazlitt, published in National Review, September 25, 1962. He loves the book, of course, but introduces criticisms toward the end, particularly pertaining to the Rothbardian perspective on repudiating government debt, the legalization of blackmail, and the strict distinction between patents and copyrights.

Brad Setser at RGE Monitor provide this commentary on the management of foreign dollar holdings. Setser cites several sources on the accumulation by governments around the world — mostly of oil exporting nations — of large dollar-denominated funds.

Below are the headlines of four obituaries that have run in The New York Times. The first is that of the recent obituary of the Anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet. The next three are those of the obituaries of the Communist mass murderers Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. Please be sure to note how many are described as having ruled by terror.

[This article was published in in The Irrepressible Rothbard, available in the Mises Store.]

Upon the collapse of centralizing totalitarian Communism in Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union, long suppressed ethnic and nationality questions and conflicts have come rapidly to the fore. The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still vibrant “deep structures” of ethnicity and nationality.

I’m sick of our economic whiners and their tear-stained statistics. “Ten Million American children go to bed hungry every night.” Baloney, thick sliced and ready for your intellectual palate! Who believes such falsification? Were it true, fifty million Americans, given the generosity of Americans, would announce a bedtime snack program. “Kid, if you’re hungry come by my house — or better yet, I’ll bring by a couple pieces of fried chicken with a side of fries. Total cost: about 40 cents in my kitchen.

This article by Mark Skousen makes the preposterous claim that Mises and Hayek “refused to do empirical work” whereas Milton Friedman did do empirical work, which accounts for his influence and their marginalization.

Virgin America’s Bid to Start Flights Denied by U.S. From Mike Shedlock comes this analysis:

In a previous post, I noted that Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had advocated replacing the patent system with a system for “awarding prizes”—presumably taxpayer funded—for innovations and inventions.