The marketplace is a wonderful place, writes Chris Westley, except when it’s MarketPlace, that public radio program that airs mornings and evenings in the United States. It’s a reliable source of economic fallacy, state celebration, and anti-commercial bias. Since there is no shortage of privately provided business media in print, radio, and television, why must government fund MarketPlace? FULL ARTICLE 
The Mises Institute is very pleased to introduce a lost work of genius: Basic Principles of Economic Value, by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk.
In this book, Mises’s teacher and a huge figure in the history of thought explains and argues for the subjective theory of value, the theory of marginal utility, and their relationship to price.I realize this is silly, but it was too funny to pass up. Check out this Bob Murphy homepage. The guy is me, except for his middle initial and, oh yeah, he’s against tax cuts, pro inflation, and pro-minimum wage.
David Hughes sends the following:
Slate carries a fascinating article by Fred Kaplan on Thomas Schelling’s role in the Cold War. I highly recommend Fred Kaplan’s book, The Wizards of Armageddon. It contains an insightful account of the central role the RAND Corporation played in the development of game theory. The RAND Corporation, formerly Air Force Project RAND (for Research and Development), was started with a huge grant from the U.S.
Contrary to myth, Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one, writes George Reisman.
A mini-debate has ensued, starting with Michael Mandel weighing in on the chief methodological problem with game theory — its presupposition of the adoption of perfectly mutually-adjusted strategies by actors. Tyler Cowen ignores this critique by taking the somewhat dialectical position of saying that if it improves our ability to think through economic problems, then it’s useful.
As Walter Block, Roy Whitehead and I argue in a forthcoming law review article, “The Duty To Defend Advertising Injuries Caused By Junk Faxes: An Analysis Of Privacy, Spam, Detection And Blackmail” (and as I have argued elsewhere), spam and related activities can in principle be a crime—a type of trespass—since it is a means by which the spammer uninvitedly uses another’s property.
Given that the Rev Pat believes that “We have the ability to take him out” and that “we don’t need another $200-billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” are the Lord’s Special Ops Brigades about to swap their jungle fatigues for some Arctic warfare kit?
Spot the difference: between this evil foreign dictator:
Arthur Seldon, founder and director of the Institute for Economic Affairs and adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, has died. Chris Tame writes: “he was a genuine libertarian, idealist, and true comrade to others.” His collected works are available from LibertyFund.
Courtesy of the Instituto Burno Leoni, here is a picture of Seldon (left), Mises (middle), and Leoni (right:
