The just-completed midterm elections giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress are being interpreted as a referendum on Iraq. Yet once the results were in, the same party that opposed the use of American force in Iraq immediately proposed to use more force on Americans. After all, the only way to impose higher tax rates, higher minimum wages, added regulations and more trade restrictions is to threaten force against those who disagree.
In his obit, Samuel Brittan astutely notes the differences on method between Friedman and the Austrians.
Indeed, Friedman lived long enough to see a reaction against basing economics on discoverable numerical relationships and the revival of so-called Austrian methods which concentrated on predicting general features of interacting systems on the lines of biology and linguistics.
Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. His passing is a milestone. Friedman stood out as a leading figure in the fight for limited government and personal freedom in the mid twentieth century.
The Bard College Library has catalogued the books in the collection of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She owned a large number of books by Mises, even more by Hayek, and two by Rothbard: For a New Liberty and The Panic of 1819. The Arendt Collection can be searched here.
The wonderful series of articles (”Beward of Income-Tax Casuistry”) on the income tax in the August, September, and October issues of Freedom Daily by Sheldon Richman is not online yet, but it is worth getting a copy of the three issues from the Future of Freedom Foundation. Among other things, Richman shows that the federal government can tax incomes without the 16th amendment.
He died 174 years ago today
At Thanksgiving, Americans recall their blessings around bountiful meals, with imagery going back to Pilgrim days, especially Plymouth Colony’s 1623 Thanksgiving. But little attention is paid to what allows that bounty to be created — capitalism — though Jamestown and Plymouth both illustrate that lesson.
Reflections restricted to our bounty ignore that most colonists in both Jamestown and Plymouth starved under their initial communal property rights. Then, when private property rights were established, starvation gave way to increasing prosperity in both.
“World oil production will not begin to fall for at least another 24 years, contrary to doomsday theories that supply is already in terminal decline, a prominent energy consulting group said Tuesday.
“Cambridge Energy Research Associates said in a report that the world has some 3.74 trillion barrels of oil left -- enough to last 122 years at current consumption rates and triple the amount estimated by ‘peak oil’ theorists...
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (Monday, Nov. 13, front page) on a doctor’s frustrations with a company that refuses to sell in the U.S. what he believes is a very effective treatment for infants with short bowel syndrome. The treatment is a new formula called Omegaven, based on fish oil, which does not appear to have the negative effects on the liver that other formulas have.
