The universe is full of mysteries; like when does the phone company collect the coins in pay telephones? (Have you ever seen a guy in a phone company uniform lugging a satchel full of quarters out of the airport phone booths?) Why is it that your driver’s-side windshield wiper is ALWAYS the faulty one? And why do we Southerners say “lyberry” instead of “library”?

This latter question leads me to one of the great political conundrums of our time. Why are municipalities in the book-lending business?

I apologize for posting something that isn’t completely germane for this blog, but this New Yorker article on the White House’s plans for Iran is truly frightening (especially to people in the Middle East). One of my game theory students tipped me off to it because some of the analysis is “strategic,” but I told him that I didn’t think the following had accurately captured the utility functions of the “Islamo-fascists”:

Christopher Westley’s article is solidly libertarian. But I should like to indicate here, some of the very real complexities of Iraq.

In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. By Charles Murray. The AEI Press, 2006. Xv + 214 pgs.

Charles Murray, by his own account, should not have written In Our Hands. He identifies a genuine problem; but he himself shows that his plan to solve it is either useless or inferior to a better plan.

According to the SAF, the City of New Orleans will return the guns that were stolen by the police following Katrina. You would think that since they were *gasp* taken at gunpoint, that they would be nice and make the process as easy as possible. But no:

[Here is a short talk I delivered a few days ago]

To give a short talk on the work of the Mises Institute is like giving a short talk on the history of Europe or a two-minute introduction to the social sciences or a brief overview of the philosophy of mind. It is impossible to cover every point, so I would like to just sketch the rationale and overarching purpose.

Our raison d’etre consists of three main parts.

If so, expect your fees to rise, with TiVo’s recent $74 million patent lawsuit victory, sure to be leveraged against cable TV companies who offer TiVo-like DVRs. (The award might actually be tripled, because the jury found the infringement was “willful.”)

Few issues are more frequently commented on than the shifting of American manufacturing to locations outsides the United States, in order to take advantage of lower foreign wage rates, particularly in Asia. This shifting is what is meant by “offshoring.” With equal or greater frequency lamentations are heard concerning the United States’ chronic excess of imports over exports, i.e., its so-called “unfavorable” balance of trade.

Here’s an example that will help to put both matters in proper perspective.