Interesting article in the Washington Post: Old Money, New Money Flee France and Its Wealth Tax, by Molly Moore:

“The A-team” supports the idea of natural law, rejects the nominalist tradition, rejects relativism both on ethical and epistemological grounds, supports entrepreneurship and free market, praises division of labor and monetary economy, builds its morality on the nonaggression axiom, rejects the necessity for economic regulation, undermines the government itself by demonstration of its failures, and shows how society is shaped by human action.

The “A” in the praised TV series probably stands for anarcho-capitalist.

Ah, I see here that today is the anniversary of the beginning of construction on Disneyland in 1954, the carrying out of a vision of a fully private community of fun and fantasy. Its remarkable “small world” turned out to be a microcosm of a trend to the privatization and de-socialization of the entire world and the globalization of Disney’s cultural imprint via free enterprise.

Russia, U.S. Fail to Reach WTO Agreement reports that “Russia and the United States had failed to agree on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization .... The failure to reach a deal dashed the hopes of Russian President Vladimir Putin to burnish the first Group of Eight summit hosted by Russia with an economic triumph his government has been seeking for years. ... Russia is the largest economy to remain outside the 149-nation WTO, which sets the rules for global trade. ...

PIMCO bond manager Paul McCulley’s recent commentary, A Kind Word for the Austrian School, contrasts the Austrian and Keynesian views on macro-economics. After reading it several times, I am still slightly puzzled about whether McCulley understands, or accurately represents, the Austrian view. McCulley writes:

The BBC News Magazine asks if the nation state is under threat from the rise of the super-city? The author seems to hope against this decentralization as he clings to his nationalist sentiment. But, at least he is willing to ask the question.

Sociology Professor Richard Sennett at the London School of Economics is one academic that has recognized the changing relationship between cities and the countries they are in.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist, said the rich are different from us. His contemporary (and rival) Ernest Hemingway countered with, “Yeah, they’re richer”.

It’s really something how much growing opposition there seems to be to intellectual property, particularly patent and copyright. I suspect one thing that is happening is as technology ever-more-rapidly changes and becomes part of our world, and with the digitization of information and media, and the Internet, the costs and injustices that have been caused all along by patent and copyright are becoming more visible and perhaps more extensive.