Soviet-Style Rule in Iraq
So you thought that the US went into Iraq to uproot a dangerous dictator and establish democracy? Well, writes Lew Rockwell, the US military has taken on a job a bit more difficult than that.
Taxing Astronauts and the President
Maybe some tax expert can set me straight on the following assumptions, but from what I can tell, federal income tax law technically should make it virtually impossible to have a space program and to have anyone but a billionaire as president. Bear with me.
Taleb on Mainstream Economics
I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s bestselling Fooled by Randomness. I think Austrians would really like this book. (Elsewhere Taleb has favorable things to say of Hayek.) Here’s his take on (mainstream) economics:
What Do Austrians Mean by “Rational”?
Michael Rozeff explains Mises’s concept that all action is rational. According to Mises, irrationality is not willed behavior without a purpose. All willed behavior has a purpose. Irrational behavior is behavior induced by response to stimuli, behavior that lies beyond the control of a person’s will or volition.
Knowledge vs. Calculation
On occasion I’ll see someone try to smooth over the Mises-Hayek “dehomogenization” debate which argued whether and to what extent Mises’s and Hayek’s approaches to the impossibility of socialism differed. One side--what I’ll call the Rothbardian or praxeological-Misesian view--sees Mises’s insight as having to do with the use of money prices to serve as a cardinal unit for purposes of economic calculation. This approach is championed by Rothbard, Hoppe, Herbener, Salerno, Huelsmann, and others, and arguably Mises.
Chinese Bank Credit Drives Boom and Bust Cycle
Economist Brad Setser (Director of Research, Roubini Global Economics) has authored a paper The Chinese Conundrum: External financial strength, Domestic financial weakness(link with free registration required alt link) describing the current state of the Chinese banking system.
Intellectual Property: The New Backlash
Good post by Dr. Peter Klein, Intellectual Property: The New Backlash, on the Organizations and Markets blog.
Should Wal-Mart Be Broken Up?
Wal-Mart-hating interventionists are running out of reasons to hate Wal-Mart, writes Tom DiLorenzo. So they are rewriting American business history — including the history of antitrust regulation — to vent their hatred of an institution that has done more to help the poor than all the government welfare programs devised in Washington.
Armentano: Austrian Theory Applied
Is antitrust law a necessary defense against the predatory business practices of wealthy, entrenched corporations that dominate a market? Or does antitrust law actually work to restrain and restrict the competitive process, injuring the public it is supposed to protect?
In this pioneering study, Professor Armentano thoroughly researches the classic cases in antitrust law and demonstrates an enormous gap between the stated aims of antitrust law and what it actually accomplishes in the real world.
Fear of Robots
Even though I entirely disagree with The Upcoming Robot Revolution, I really like it. It is a sort of unintended Bastiat satire for our time. Here we see the Luddite fear of technological innovation pushed to a reductio ad absurdum. I think it just makes it all the funnier that the author is entirely earnest and sincere in painting his dystopia where robots have taken away our jobs and much of the American population is being warehoused in “government welfare dormitories”.
