The most common misunderstanding about economics is that it is only about money and commerce. The next step is easy: I care about more than money, and so should everyone, so let’s leave economics to stock jobbers and money managers and otherwise dispense with its teachings. This is a fateful error, because, as Mises says, economics concerns everyone and everything. It is the very pith of civilization

This talk was delivered to the Auburn University Libertarians on February 16, 2006.

As all students today know, Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are not usually the result of insults, sanctions, invasions, bombings, killings, puppet governments, censorship, economic controls, and occupations. If this generation learns anything from this period, that would be a good start.

How sad to hear the news that Harry Browne (born June 17, 1933), author and long-time spokesman for libertarian causes, died March 1, 2006. He was a man of great principle who courageously and consistently stood up for liberty even when his position clashed with mainstream political culture and public opinion. He was a great writer who worked hard to turn a phrase in a way that would serve to educate people about free markets and the free society.

Well, the Republicans have some ideas for reducing the price of gasoline.

Don’t laugh before you hear the details, among which: Congress will send a $100 check to American families to compensate for fuel costs, they will force more money into ethanol, and they will step up prosecutions of any gas distributor who sells for a price above that which the government approves.

Okay, now you can laugh.

As Microsoft prepares for the new release of the new version of its browser, Google is grousing about one of Microsoft’s marketing strategies. Internet Explorer E7 will likely have a little search bar in the upper right hand corner of the browser, just as Safari and Firefox do now. With it you will be able to access a number of search engines.

This is the foreword to a forthcoming collection of Critical Essays of Walter Block’s, assembled by Glavan Bogdan of Libertas Publishers in Bucharest, Romania.

Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the Washington Monthly, uses various criticisms that leading conservatives have made of Bush to proclaim a new “conservative crackup.” In the course of his narrative, he rehearses the same old ho-hum history of postwar American conservatism, tells the same old story of how intriguing it is that conservatives are upset with the person they put into power, and then comes to the same old conclusion, that conservatism is deluded, and that we should all be leftists li

Sometimes there’s nothing so relaxing as sitting on your patio alone enjoying a beer, with only the backyard birds for company. And sometimes nothing beats a brew with a pal at your corner tavern. But in both cases, there’s an uninvited and invisible third party who can not be ignored. He’s the governor of your state and his fellow legislators — Alabama in my case. Their attitude toward beer drinkers like us and the stack of law books on their bookshelf has a lot more to do with enjoying your beer than the birds — or your buddies down at the corner.

John Dvorak of PC Magazine makes a very compelling case that Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s biggest ever entrepreneurial blunder. “If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then it’s the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised.

In the popular academic mind, the doctrine of class-conflict seems to be inextricably linked to the particular Marxist version of the idea.1 Lip-service is often paid — especially by those eager to diminish the claims to originality of Marx and Engels — to the fact that these writers had precursors in this approach to social reality.