[Address delivered before the Economics Faculty of New York University at the Faculty Club on November 20, 1940, a few months after Dr. and Mrs. Ludwig von Mises arrived in New Jersey on August 2, 1940, as refugees from war-torn Europe. Reprinted in Planning for Freedom.]

Bill Fleckenstein (MSN Money) says that the next Fed chairman should “Be well-versed in the so-called Austrian School of Economics.... a school of economic thought championed by, among others, Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrians deny that a central bank, such as the Fed, can work economic miracles by juggling interest rates. In effect, the Austrians hold, interest rates are the traffic signals of a market economy. Turn them all green, and what you get are lots of pileups.”

Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner has been reviewed several times on Mises.org (1, 2, 3), but there are some points to add.

And none too sympathetically. Curiously, after largely agreeing with the authors that the perfectly competitive model does not constitute a reliable welfare benchmark, that antitrust practice has often missed the mark, that entrepreneurs have a moral claim to the wealth they create, and so on, but criticizing the polemical style of the book, the reviewer concludes with his own polemic:

The International Herald Tribune imagines a world without copyright. The article discusses the use of copyright today as “the tool that conglomerates in the music, publishing, imaging, and movie industries use to control their markets.”

In the latest money supply report, the M3 measure of money supply surpassed the psychological barrier of $10 trillion. It is up 7.1% over the latest year (52 weeks) and at an annual rate of 11.2% over the latest 13 weeks.

The various government agencies that finally got around delivering aid to people hit by Katrina often brag about the 2.2 million Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) they handed out. Surely these did some good for someone, somewhere, but I can also report that MREs are everywhere these days in the Deep South, and wastefully so.