Living on the Reservation

During a cross-country trip William Anderson took in early June, he drove past a number of Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, and the sight was not exactly uplifting. He could see hundreds of tumble-down shacks and old trailers located on hillsides, and none of them were inviting places to live. It was obvious then that he was seeing something akin to a Third World scene with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people living in great poverty. So it is whenever government is in full control.

There will be no private coinage

N.J. Hoffer sent in this incredibly fascinating story of a Fed crackdown on a group called NORFED that markets the Liberty Dollar. Now, I’ve never been much for these attempts to create an alternative money. They seem to falter on the problem highlighted by Mises, namely, that the money used in a society emerges from exchange of commodities, and remain money even if the government has robbed it of its commodity backing. So absent sustained hyperinflation, there will be no getting rid of the dollar.

Myths of the Mixed Economy

The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen. The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the contributors—Keynesian, socialist, communist, and fascist—agreed with that point, including such luminaries as Sidney Hook, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.

How Not To Dismantle the Caste System

The Indian state has embarked on a campaign to eliminate the caste system by coercing people into associations that they might not otherwise choose. Jayant Bhandari writes that this way will lead to more hatred, social division, and unpredictable disasters. There is only one kind of equality that should be celebrated in a free society, that is, equality before the law, or what Roderick Long calls more broadly “equality of authority.” That kind of equality is exercised through free association.
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