A truly Orwellian op-ed piece in The New York Times of May 6, says of Bolivia’s nationalization of the natural gas industry in its territory:

May 8 marks the 1899 birth of Friedrich Hayek. Though best known as an economist, he was acclaimed for contributions in many fields. Nobel Prize winners and others have lauded him as the 20th century’s outstanding economist, social scientist, and political philosopher. Peter Boettke named him “probably the most prodigious classical liberal scholar of the 20th century.”

I first heard the term ‘market-based management’ (MBM) in 1994 or 1995, attatched to the now-defunct Program on Social and Organizational Learning at George Mason University. The theory was described in a few papers (one example here) and, as I recall, a monograph.

Few persons have done as much as George Resch to advance libertarian scholarship. He was a protégé of the outstanding libertarian thinker F. A. “Baldy” Harper and worked with Harper at the William Volker Fund. While working there, he helped Harper establish the Institute for Humane Studies and became part of Murray Rothbard’s inner circle. He became an authority on education and wrote a seminal paper that dissected the concept of equality of opportunity. Anyone fortunate enough to have met George will be struck immediately by his incisive mind.

The Washington Post reports that the House of Representatives this week overwhelmingly passed a measure imposing severe penalties for “price gouging,” an alleged phenomenon it was unable to define and has left to the Federal Trade Commission to define. Once the Federal Trade Commission figures out what price gouging is, it is authorized to impose fines of up to $150 million for wholesalers and $2 million for retailers.

I suspected as much! What the lady at Home Depot called the “sprinkler repair cult” is an emerging guild seeking privileges and regulations from the government. That means a supply restriction, high prices, or another do-it-yourself project. But there is a way around it.

I first began to smell a rat when the automatic irrigation system on my front yard needed work, but had unusual struggles in trying to find a repair guy.

Congress toyed with the idea of a tax holiday on gasoline as a way to drive the price down to address constituent complaints. But, as you might guess, they rejected it.

Why, oh why, did Congress decline to give us a bit more liberty, aside from the obvious fact that they like the revenue and power? Well, we can’t go too much aside after all: they like the revenue and power. From their point of view, why give it up?

For those of you who thought the Bank for International Settlements was replaced by the World Bank and/or the IMF, think again. It’s alive and well in Basel, Switzerland (where it’s always been - nice place if you can afford to live there), and publishing working papers in which Austrian theory is cited - by name - as an argument against inflation targeting by central banks. The Austrian argument against central banks themselves is not noted, however.