MSNBC is reporting that the icepick purportedly used to kill Leon Trotsky may be offered for sale by its present owner, Ana Alicia Salas of Mexico City. Salas’ possession of the ice pick came about due to her father’s position as a secret police commander in the 1940s.
Looking around the web for information on the proposed trade treaty with Latin America (DR-CAFTA), I bumped in this Heritage Foundation “defense” of the treaty:
Michael Oxley, Republican co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, admitted during a London conference that the law “was not a perfect document” and that some of it was “excessive.”
He complained that after WorldCom collapsed, “it was difficult to legislate responsibly in that type of hot-house atmosphere.” He added: “But I am proud of the bill.”
I was particularly moved by this passage from Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (also available from Amazon.com), reviewed here by David Gordon. DiLorenzo is one of the few people to take an honest look at Lincoln, instead of treating him like a saint and making excuses for his atrocities.
Herbert Spencer was one of the 19th century’s greatest defenders of peace and freedom. I’ve recently posted some chapters from his book Facts and Comments, published in the penultimate year of his life, on the evils of militarism and the reciprocal relation between imperialism, statism, and the brutalisation of popular culture. This is the first time these still-all-too-timely essays have been made available online:
In a recent post on Liberty and Power, one of the posters refers to: “‘polycentric’ law, or the idea that multiple forms of law can overlap within the same geographic area. Law need not be, and in fact is not, a monopoly within a specific geographic region.”
I asked there–is there any reason to use the term “polycentric” to describe what is basically anarcho-capitalism, other than the tactical reason of trying to avoid alerting mainstream people that what is being discussed is anarchy?
In a previous blog post I highlighted the absurd pretending game by leading Fed officials that interest rates are somehow something which are not affected by Fed policy, even though Fed policy like focuse on the setting of interest rates. The latest Fed official to do this are William Poole.
Modern monetary systems operate on the ability to turn debt into money. Mises’ business cycle theory showed that this process results in unsustainable distortions in the productive structure of capital and of relative prices between different capital goods. Mises also showed that, and left to its own devices the credit expansion would unwind in a credit contraction as relative prices corrected. However, central banks have for the most part been unwilling to let the system correct on its own.
