Do Greedy Spinach Merchants Want To Kill You?

The story of the poison spinach might have ended, as the groceries isolated the source of the problem and the baggers turned their attention to the farmers and the farmers looked more carefully into the irrigation and fertilizer sources and otherwise sought to fix the problem. And why wouldn’t they? They are all in business to make money. You can only make money by selling things that people want, and this much is absolutely certain: people don’t want spinach that makes them sick. But then, and inevitably, the government got involved.

Thanks, Fellow Taxpayers

Everything that’s wrong with government can be summarized by a single sign that stands eloquently at the entrance to my neighborhood park. A plot of green with tennis courts and soccer fields for athletes and playground paraphernalia for junior swingers. I mean the kind that really like to swing. Cursed with a civic attitude that makes me wary of gifts from politicians, I note A boastful sign. “This playground made possible by the city of Huntsville and the Madison County Commission,” it says. Not a blatant lie - just a fuzzy deception.

Richard Epstein on “The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property”

New from Law professor Richard Epstein: The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property (video). Epstein argues that there are many similarities between physical property and “non-physical” property (i.e, intellectual property). Epstein identifies four principles that create a basic framework for understanding physical property law.

Stiglitz in The Times: A Study in Confusion

In the New York Times, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winner in economics, has an article titled “How to Fix the Global Economy.” Judging from his article, Stiglitz appears to believe that the main problem of the global economy is “global financial imbalances.” By this, he means “America’s enormous trade deficits,” which he states are close to $3 billion a day, and “China’s growing trade surplus of almost $500 million a day.”

The Prophet of the Great Depression

The Causes of the Economic Crisis is a collection of articles on the business cycle, money, and exchange rates by Ludwig von Mises that appeared between 1919 and 1946. Frank Shostak writes that we have here the evidence that the master economist foresaw and warned against the breakdown of the German mark, as well as the market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed. Mises presents his business cycle theory in its most elaborate form, applies it to the prevailing conditions, and discusses the policies that governments undertake that make recessions worse (even before Keynes’s General Theory appeared!). He recommends a path for monetary reform that would eliminate business cycles as we have known them and provide the basis for a sustainable prosperity.
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