It will be interesting to see what happens in this story, from this morning’s Post-Dispatch. The basics: 

Bryan Caplan jumps all over Lew Rockwell for blasting CEA chairman Ben Bernanke. Bryan argues that Ben and Mises hold the same position on paper money, namely that “under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.”

Every month, so the numbers show, the U.S. is getting deeper into debt. Each trade deficit needs external financing. Thus with each monthly figure that shows a deficit in foreign trade, the U.S. foreign investment position is deteriorating.1

Tibor Machan engages in some conjectural history to imagine how the world might be different had government never intervened to protect the environment but rather left all matters to property owners to sort out.

In his testimony on June 9, 2005, before the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has again raised the issue of the divergence between the federal funds rate and long-term rates. 

Alan Greenspan views this divergence as a puzzle. At the end of May the yield on the 10-year Treasury-Note stood at 4%—well below the 4.6% recorded in June last year when the Fed embarked on its tighter interest rate stance. Moreover, the yield on Moody’s long-term Aaa Corporate Bonds fell to around 5% at the end of May from 6% in June 2004.

The nomination of California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. District Court of Appeals has escaped from its Senate filibuster purgatory that illustrated much of the worst of politics. But the attacks that she is an “extremist” who is “out of the mainstream” continue. However, what has been most striking about this episode is how, unlike many in the judiciary, much of Justice Brown’s assailed thought and approach reflects some other extremists Americans at least claim to hold in high regard—our founding fathers.

Looks like an interesting new book coming out by Peter Huber, THE BOTTOMLESS WELL: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy.

I hope he explains the benefits of nuclear power (2). Someone should review this for the JLS....

Politicians are well-known for saying one thing before a certain group, and the opposite when standing in front of others. For example, a Republican member of Congress may tout free markets and decry “excess government regulation” in one speech and then shamelessly call for “protection” for textile firms in his own district. Not surprisingly, thanks in part to the Internet, critics have begun a near-cottage industry that exposes these contradictions, although the information that is revealed rarely causes a politician to go down to defeat.

On an email list, Milton Friedman was referred to as a socialist, and Pete Boettke responded,