[This article is excerpted from Professor Hoppe’s introduction to the 1998 edition of The Ethics of Liberty. An audiobook version is available for download.]

I know nothing about the tire market but it seems clear that the unions have set out to destroy another company. I’m in the market now for tires, and I would like to buy Goodyear if only to support “capital” over “labor” (how absurd to think that their interests are naturally opposed!). But the car parts guy tells me that I can get a better Michelin tire for $50 less. Maybe he is not telling the truth but if it is true, it gives a hint as to what needs to happen at that company.

One argument against intellectual property is that property rights should be recognized only in scarce (rivalrous) resources. Some refer to this quality as “tangibility,” somewhat inaccurately in my mind, but it’s at least a similar concept. Anyway, the basic idea is that, say, “software” is not property because it is not tangible or scarce; therefore, copyright in software is illegitimate.

On Sunday, December 10, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile died, at the age of 91. General Pinochet deserves to be remembered for having rescued his country from becoming the second Soviet satellite in the Western hemisphere, after Castro’s Cuba, and, like the Soviet Union, and Cuba under Castro, a totalitarian dictatorship.

Gary “plastics, baby, plastics!” North discusses George Bailey’s Road to Monetary Perdition where “the buffalo gals have come out at night to vote by the light of the moon.”

In Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!, North describes the reasons for its importance, the message of forgiveness, and the implications of fractional reserve banking.

[This talk was given at the LRC Health and Wealth Conference in Foster City, California, December 2, 2006.]

Whatever you do, don’t try to make something useful out of the penny.

The Candian National Post reports, in an article Gold’s rise points to inflation on David Ranson, president of an econometric consulting firm. Ranson

defines inflation as a decline in the purchasing power of a national currency. He prefes that definition to flawed ones like the rising cost of living or increasing labour costs.