Me and my friend, Herb, were having a few yeasty libations the other night at the malt shop. As we drained our last mug, here comes the waitress bearing down on our table with that small, but ominous piece of paper that must be indented with a viable credit card. Herb looked at me with zero-round eyes, the same shape as his bank account.

“Uh, Herb, I’d love the privilege, but didn’t I treat last time?”

”Yeah, but what’s love or last time got to do with it?” This was outright illogical - even for Herb.

Today on LRC, I explain why high taxes makes black market nannies and other black market activities necessary and why the assertion of a statist Christian leader in Sweden that black market activities constitute theft is absurd.

Following up on Justin’s post, can anyone volunteer to put this Hayek comic into this format?

A new activity patch has been designed by the Motion Picture Association of America for 52,000 Scouts in the Los Angeles area to emphasize the ills of piracy to a generation that has grown up finding free music and video clips on the Internet.

Gary Gentile of the AP reports:

Economic geologist Eric Cheney says: “The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil.’ The correct response is, ‘Never.’ It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon.”

We just received word that Lord Harris of High Cross (b. 1924), an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, has died. He was the founder of the Institute for Economic Affairs and a great champion of freedom.

The BBC website reports here that the U.S. Joint Economic Committee is looking at the trade taking place in interactive computer gaming societies like Second Life or Eve Online. Apparently the economies in these societies can be fairly sophisticated, the sum “GDP” rivaling small countries like Namibia, and they are becoming large enough to attract the eye of the state.

Country Squire in the White House, by John T. Flynn, full text in PDF

The US Mint is protecting you from the criminals who want to buy things with gold and silver, instead of the feds’ own handsome cupro-nickel and paper compositions.