Film Page: The Pathetic Charade of Elections
The Bureaucrat in Your Shower
You can hack your shower, writes Jeffrey Tucker, but do not do this lest you endanger your status as a law-abiding citizen who takes wimpy showers.
Forgotten Proto-Austrians
Here’s my review of Alejandro Chafuen’s stunning book Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics, a truly original and groundbreaking contribution to the history of economic thought. It partly inspired one of my own books.
Murray Rothbard R.I.P.
I was just going through my files and came across the postcard I received from the Rothbard Rockwell Report in January 1995 announcing the death of Murray Rothbard on January 7, 1995. Then I realized that today is January 7th. Please, a moment of silence.
Government Debt Has No Upside
In order to consume in the present, writes Robert Murphy, resources must be used in the present. That goes for government too.
Role Playing Games and Money
I came across this old thread in the Austrian Economics forum, and I thought some of the older folks who read this blog (but not the forum) might be interested in this description of what happens in a “Massively Multiple Online Role-Playing Game” (MMORPG) when the setup allows for injection of monetary units whenever someone’s agent kills a monster and (I think) the computer randomly picks an amount of money that the monst
Mises at the AEA Meeting?
The thoughts of Ludwig von Mises will not be completely absent from the American Economic Association’s annual meeting this year. Besides a session on “Buchanan and Hayek on the Constitutional Order” where he may make an appearance, Edmund Phelps of Columbia University has a paper where he begins by discussing Mises’s insight on the economic calculation problem. Phelps calls Mises “one of the early moderns” and recognizes Mises as “the founder of property-rights theory.”
Elaborations on Randian IP
As I noted dudderday on Lew’s blog, an Objectivist blog claimed that “Greg Perkins has written a very powerful critique of the libertarian opposition to Intellectual Property rights for the February issue of Axiomatic. I don’t think it will shut the libertarians up, but it will put their arguments to rest.” Now Perkins writes me to inform me the article is out.
Constitutional Law, Corporate Power, and Liberal Imperialism
Issue 19.4 of the Journal of Libertarian Studies offers path-breaking and controversial articles on topics ranging from jurisprudence to economic history, and from sixteenth-century Spain to contemporary Iraq, with plenty of debates between libertarians.
