Gregg Easterbrook has an excellent piece in Slate tearing apart NASA’s much-heralded plans to put a base on the moon. I especially like that he ridicules the government’s claim that establishing a moon presence will help us create “heritage sites” — i.e., nature preserves of nothing but lunar dust that no one would disturb anyway! Walter Block and I tackle exactly that issue (”space environmentalism”) in a forthcoming law review article.
In recent weeks, the New York City Board of Health has displayed a pattern of profound aggression against the citizens of New York City.
No irredeemable currency has ever claimed a more scientific and practical guarantee for its goodness and for its proper action on public finances. On the one hand, it had what the world recognized as a most practical security,—a mortgage on productive real estate of vastly greater value than the issue.
In two previous articles we examined the “social function” of stock speculation and futures contracts. Rounding out the trilogy, today we shall discuss the beneficial effects of a free market1 in call and put options.
A feature of conservative thought that I’ve never entirely understood is its persistent anti-technology theme. If the roots of left-wing anti-technology views are probably with Rousseau, where can we find the roots of similar right-wing views? In this essay, Russell Hittinger locates a surprising source: the writings of Christopher Dawson.
Much ink has been expended in discussions of the US yield curve and also on the reluctance of the country’s lower money aggregates to grow as rapidly as previously, despite the veritable explosion in credit instruments issued and traded and the unmistakable signs of renewed finanical market euphoria evident everywhere.
[This article appeared in The Review of Austrian Economics in 1992.]
I didn’t know until the release of the “Iraq Study Group Report“ that Iraq’s “inflation is above 50 percent. Unemployment estimates range widely from 20 to 60 percent.” So a quick look at the primitive date at the Iraq Central Bank shows a 40% increase in M2 from November 2005 through May 2006 (the last time the data were updated). Cause and effect, with very little time lag!
