Rosamaria Bitetti spent the summer in the US attending various seminars. She wrote this article providing helpful and interesting tips for fellow Italian students. Translation by David Perazzoni:

Mandatory evacuations, such as that ordered in New Orleans on Sunday, are a wonderful invitation to looters, and they came in droves. Where was the law?

“Looting on Tuesday took place in full view of police and National Guard troops.... Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by.”

Far from protecting property owners, they protected looters.

John Lukacs, in his own estimation, is much more than an ordinary historian. In what he considers his most important book, Historical Consciousness (Transaction, 1994), he elaborates “not a philosophy of history but its opposite: a multifaceted statement and exposition of a historical philosophy. . . it wishes to demonstrate the profound, yet considerably unsystematic, historicity of our knowledge” (p. 662).

You know that you are living in strange times when a single news item on the Iraqi Constitution contains supporting comments from Bush (”completing the next step in their transition from dictatorship to democracy...

Of course one can never trust court rulings—the State can turn just about anything to its advantage in the long run—but on the face of it this seems to be a good turn of events for Canadian health care.

(Thanks to Pete Johnson for the article.)

Bloomberg reports on the annual central banker symposium taking place at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At last year’s event, Greenspan defended his long-held view that central bankers cannot identify asset bubbles until after they have burst.

Here is an advertisement, appearing in a major Austrian (the country, not the school) newspaper, for Hans Hoppe’s forthcoming lecture (Sept 21-22) at the Siemens Forum Wien.