Today the Wall Street Journal published (p. A18 or online ) an article by David R. Henderson on Phelps’s Nobel Prize award. Henderson notes that Phelps himself credited Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. But though Mises’s 1911 Theory of Money and Credit is deserving of attention, “Mr. Phelps gets the credit because—this is not his fault—academic economists now insist on formal models.”
As if we didn’t need more evidence of big government growing bigger and bigger, here comes a story about not only the number of federal employees on the rise, but the increase in government-funded contractors, and organizations that receive government grants:
[This essay first appeared in the American Mercury in March 1939.]
As well as I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment, coupled with distaste, displeasure, or horror, according to the individual observer’s capacity for emotional excitement. Perhaps I ought to shade this statement a little in order to keep on the safe side, and say that this is the most generally expressed attitude.
Another book by Thomas DiLorenzo? Yes indeed, but this one goes far more into depth than his first blockbuster on the subject. Recall that DiLorenzo single-handedly dragged serious Lincoln scholarship into the mainstream to show that he was not the great liberator but a classic despot in every way.
Mea Culpa! I have seriously misread Dr. Shostak’s piece as endorsing what he was actually presenting merely as his take on Phelps’ flawed description of ‘stagflation’, namely:
Last Friday, I presented a paper (co-authored with Walter Block) at the 49th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space at the International Astronautical Conference in Valencia, Spain.
Advertising Age, the industry bellwether, interviewed me regarding that paper, and an article related to the paper and the interview has now appeared in the latest issue.
Our topic: space billboards.
Ask yourself if the following paragraph would seem believable to you if you were to read it a in a newspaper:
I wondered what was up when the neighbor kids came by doing a government school fund raiser but couldn’t explain what the money was for. In this funny NYTimes op-ed Karen Karbo makes it all clear:
...in these belt-tightening times, selling stuff doesn’t just raise money for new uniforms for the marching band — it also keeps the computer lab up and running and the heat on in the winter. To blow off the fund-raiser is tantamount to being anti-education.
John Denson, in a book that covers the history of America’s large wars from 1860 through the Cold War, describes the twentieth century was the bloodiest in all history—not coincidentally a century of statism. His book is A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt.
