[This article is excerpted from chapter 6 of Epistemological Problems of Economics]
Subjectivist economics would be guilty of an omission if it did not also concern itself with the objections that have been raised against it from political and factional standpoints.
Professor Hans F. Sennholz is the outstanding student of Ludwig von Mises whose lifetime work specialized in monetary and financial economics. This book is one of his great legacies to economic science. The title Age of Inflation reflects its subject matter and the date of original publication: 1979, the year of the outbreak of double-digit inflation in the US.
Looks like the critters in Washington have done it again. Whenever someone finds a “loophole” (or, as it should be called, an island of liberty), they want to shut it down.
This time, it has to do with the price of milk in Arizona and California. Hettinga’s dairy farm was offering 2 gallons of milk for $3.99 and of course the rest of the industry, seeing that Hettinga was competing “unfairly,” called on Daddy State to save them. Thus,
In “George Mason: Protectionism at its Worst,“ T. Norman Van Cott makes the case that despite Mason’s important contribution to America’s revolution and to the principles of American government (particularly in the Virginia Declaration of Rights), his involvement in the slavery issue reflected nothing more than self-seeking. I do not disagree with his analysis of Mason’s positions on slavery.
This article was originally published in the Cato Journal 2, No. 1 (Spring 1982): 55–99.
Reading the thread on global warming below, I see a common mistake that pops up in a lot of arguments at the intersection of science and policy. With all due respect to the participants in the thread, they are largely talking past one another. This often happens in arguments over global warming, and I think there’s a specific reason for it: there are really two separate questions in the global warming debate, and both sides tend to conflate the two, treating them as though they are the same issue with the same answer.
The universe is full of mysteries; like when does the phone company collect the coins in pay telephones? (Have you ever seen a guy in a phone company uniform lugging a satchel full of quarters out of the airport phone booths?) Why is it that your driver’s-side windshield wiper is ALWAYS the faulty one? And why do we Southerners say “lyberry” instead of “library”?
This latter question leads me to one of the great political conundrums of our time. Why are municipalities in the book-lending business?
I apologize for posting something that isn’t completely germane for this blog, but this New Yorker article on the White House’s plans for Iran is truly frightening (especially to people in the Middle East). One of my game theory students tipped me off to it because some of the analysis is “strategic,” but I told him that I didn’t think the following had accurately captured the utility functions of the “Islamo-fascists”:
