AOL News is reporting that Daryl Hannah and others were arrested trying to stop a landowner from developing his Los Angeles property. Squatters have been using Ralph Horowitz’s 14 acres to grow crops while he “was paying $25,000 to $30,000 a month in mortgage and other land costs.” None of the protestors, including Hannah, Willie Nelson, or Danny Glover, were willing to demonstrate their preference that this land remain undeveloped. Oh, they demonstrated, but they never opened their wallets to show their true preference rank.

For the third month in the row, “core” consumer prices, which the Fed and accordingly also financial markets have decided to focus on ( for irrational reasons ) showed a 0.3% increase, which translates into an annual rate of more than 3.5%, well above the official comfort zone.

[This article originally appeared in International Journal of Value-Based Management 12: 195-207, 1999.]

Besides national defense, no government-provided service enjoys as much exemption from scrutiny as the provision and subsidization of primary public education. Even presumed champions of the free market, such as Milton Friedman, support the government subsidization of education through high school:

The Iraqi version of Jack the Ripper, Al-Zarqawi, got his. So, that was good. But our buoyant mood was ruined by the Rhode Island legislature. Though not near the malingnancy of Al-Zarqawi, they planted a small, silly IED in the pathway of freedom. Just a pinprick — insignificant — still, as ominous as smoke curling out of the barn door. The political philosophers who ponder the fate of the miniature state of Rhode Island made a new law: you must neuter your cat. The state, having established a beachhead on my private life is driving inland.

In a series of posts to an Internet discussion group several years ago, David Friedman severely criticized Murray Rothbard’s account of Adam Smith in his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Edward Elgar, 1995). These comments have enjoyed wide circulation, and various posters to the Mises Institute Blog have referred to them.

Gotta love ThePirateBay.org, a Swedish website. They offer an index to various data files--movies, videos, songs, what have you--that you can download via “Bit Torrent” technology. The files are not stored on their servers; they merely provide users with links as to where they can download various material from.