Robert Higgs has a well-deserved reputation as an eminent economic historian, but in this collection of essays and interviews, he shows himself an adept moral philosopher as well.
He subjects the “humanitarian” case for the Iraq War, unfortunately professed by some self-styled libertarians, to withering scrutiny.
“All hail ticket scalpers.” No, that doesn’t come from a libertarian. It comes from a sportswriter. Jim Caple says:
Six million Americans go to sleep hungry, they tell us. Another three million are cold. Eight million more have sniffles and millions of us go to bed under-deodorized and consequently smelly. And don’t forget 30 million of our countrymen who suffer from allergies. There’s something about getting in bed and living in America that just begs for calamities.
As my Aunt Thelma said when she lost on the lottery, WHERE do they get these numbers.
When Professor Reisman reveals, in his latest blog entry, that Mises told him that the value of a (specific?) produced means of production is set by its costs, was this any more than a shorthand way of warning against a adopting an overly simple, one-stage act of discounting backwards when the calculation actually rests within a much more highly complex process?
The Gulf Coast received hundreds of millions in foreign aid last year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. But, what happened to all that money?
How does the left get away with describing right-wing thought as Talibanish, especially when compared to the left-wing agenda of speech codes, economic regulation, and authoritarian intervention in every aspect of American private life?
This article originally appeared in The Free Market, September 1999.
The idea that we need to be “self sufficient” when it comes to producing food just keeps getting more respect than it deserves. As Sallie James of Cato pithily observed, “I know of only two other countries that pursue a policy of total self-sufficiency in food: North Korea and Zimbabwe.”
Is it true that changes in stock prices are predominantly set by changes in money supply? At some level, it makes sense that an increase in the rate of growth of money supply strengthens the rate of increase in stock prices. Conversely, a fall in the rate of growth of money supply should slow down the growth momentum of stock prices.
The chart below seems to indicate that the yearly rate of growth of the combined South East Asian stock prices has a good visual correlation with the yearly rate of growth of the combined money M1.
