Mr. Greenspan has often reached outside economics to hone his insights, at times drawing on history, physics, Mozart and even Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle for inspiration. In 1999, he tackled a key economic mystery with an analogy to the discovery of the planet Pluto.

Today it was reported in the Swedish business news paper Dagens Industri that Foreign Direct Investments in Sweden fell to zero during the first half of this year. It would be interesting to see how a certain Paul Krugman explains that.

I received a nice set of questions on this article from a reader in Vietnam:

1. Has the US experienced bans like this (on a product that’s cheaper, tastier and presumbaly better-liked by the American consumers) before? What were they and under what circumstances? What was the outcome?

Laurence Vance has observed three points about the federal government’s mandated handicapped parking spaces, as required for every private business.

Shoplifting as Social Commentary:

Decade after decade he fought militarism, protectionism, inflationism, every variety of socialism, and every policy of the interventionist state, writes Ralph Raico.

People are not happy about this latest round of gas price increases; and, not surprisingly, they are demanding answers — and “solutions” — from the wrong people: the political classes. At the cutting edge is Hawaii, where gas prices will soon be controlled by law, not markets.

Hawaiians are about to find out in the near future that the “solutions” they have supported are going to have the opposite effect of what supposedly was intended.

The study of the brain, also known as neuroscience, from its modest beginnings as a branch of physiology, has expanded considerably in recent years, now poised to become the queen of the sciences. The advent of techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for example, have attracted many with little interest in traditional neurobiology, which is largely concerned with tracing anatomical pathways and elucidating electro-chemical communication between brain cells.