What Happened to Katrina Aid?
Manuel Lora looks at Katrina aid six months since the hurricane.
Two Losses
This week, two important associates of the late Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, have died.
Dr. Paul Poirot was the editor (and really writer) of The Freeman for 30 years. The Rev. Edmund A. Opitz was author of Religion and Capitalism: Allies Not Enemies. Both men, with their deep learning, commitment to the free market, and elegant manners, exemplified the old republic.
May they rest in peace.
Socialized Medicine and Rationing
A news story from Great Britain highlights an essential flaw of socialized medicine and of our own, also highly collectivized system of medical care. Namely, that it results in having to choose between bankruptcy, to pay for unlimited medical care, or the government’s rationing of medical care, including its denial to people whose very life may depend on it.
More from PCR on outsourcing
Bill Anderson alerted me to the latest from Paul Craig Roberts. Now PCR keeps accusing us corporate shills of denying economic reality. How long will this persist? E.g. can we continue to eat the seed corn and sow our destruction for another five, ten, fifteen years? PCR has said elsewhere that the US will be a “Third World” economy by 2024. If that hasn’t happened by then, will he admit he’s been totally wrong all along? Or will he “spin reality”?
Free Market = Mass Society = Bad?
I’ve started a discussion with a political science professor at my college, and I thought it might be helpful to get more views. (Now not only is this guy a colleague, but he’s also used Rothbard in one of his classes, so no spitballs please.) Below I’ve excerpted some things from his latest email, and then I give a quick response. This is the type of discussion that will probably be better if it’s short bursts back and forth, rather than long discourses. Nathan said:
dotCommunists
The February issue of IP Law & Business has a couple of interesting pieces (free registration required): “Pulling Back the Covers” (Google is dragging the book world online. Will the publishing industry make the leap with its copyrights intact?), and “Meet the dotCommunist” (about Eben Moglen: “This Columbia law professor believes all intellectual property should be abolished.
Property Rights Consistency
On the day that representatives from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems appear before a Congressional hearing for complying with the Chinese government’s rules in order to gain a foothold there, I read that Wal-Mart is being ordered by Massachusetts bureaucrats to sell a controversial abortifacient known as the “morning after
Bruce Bartlett Banned
He told the truth about Bush’s hysterical spending.
US Calls for End to Wheat Monopoly
US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently said that Australia should end its wheat export-marketing monopoly.
In a statement that proves at least one lawyer does understand economics, he stated: “By the nature of things, monopolies tend to be trade distorting.”
The Economics of Taxation
First, I want to explain the general economic effect of taxation. This represents a praxeological analysis of taxation and as such should not be expected to go much beyond what has already been said by other economists.
