What if they don’t want a government? Must one be imposed?
These are my questions to news reports that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a surprise trip to Baghdad in a desperate effort to jumpstart stalled efforts to form an Iraqi government. The lack of a governing coalition in Iraq was simply the latest of many events that haven’t gone the way the war planners predicted they would.
As many of our readers will know, anarchism comes in both free-market and socialist varieties. Free-market anarchists (or “anarcho-capitalists”) like Gustave de Molinari and Murray Rothbard favour replacing the monopolistic state with competing private services in a fully capitalistic social order based on private property and free exchange.
The Norwegan party Fremskrittspartiet (The Progress Party) who in last year’s election became the second biggest party in Norway with 22.1% of the votes and who according to the polls have now surpassed the Labor Party to become the biggest party, will soon hold a “Ideology course” (Thanks Ninja economist for the tip) to edu
The New York Times ran a just-the-facts story about Argentina’s increasingly egregious price controls—beginning in browbeating, moving to controls on beef, spreading to all consumer goods, and ending in export bans—that somehow failed to report any information on central-bank policies, as if price increases and the money supply have nothing to do with each other.
Several Austrian professors have said that they appreciate Greg Mankiw’s principles text on economics, as a solid intro to mainstream thinking (it is mercifully free of most Keynesian anachronisms) and a good foil for Austrian perspectives. Certainly one has to appreciate his honesty in saying that he never read any Austrians in grad school and hasn’t read any Mises at all since, but he did read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and liked it, and is adding a note on Hayek for the 4th edition.
Mark Trumbull of the Christian Science Monitor has revealed insights from comparing the concurrent First Job Contract riots in France with the demonstrations in the US over new legislation concerning immigration in the March 31 edition.
The comparison between labor policies and markets in the European Union vis a vis the United States is made up largely of familiar observations, but the contemporaneous street events in both places throw a bright light on the details.
Taxes have a long and ugly history. The pharaohs, of course, were big taxers and spenders. You don’t build pyramids stuffed with luxury goods for the next life by letting your constituents buy untaxed corn. Even Solomon the Wise squeezed his subjects like the vintners squeezed grapes. A thousand wives means a thousand wedding rings and a thousand peek-a-boo nighties, and a thousand honeymoon cottages. His administration rarely ran a surplus. “And he did evil in the sight of the Lord,” says that big black book found in hotels and courtrooms.
60 Minutes recently profiled what it called a conspiracy of hedge funds and stock research analysts to drive down the stock price of a Canadian drug company called Biovail. Joe Nocera of the New York Times did an admirable job of debunking this story and clarifying how markets actually work, versus the impression that markets are corruptly manipulated by “secretive,” “unregulated” hedge funds.
