Hans-Hermann Hoppe will speak at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, at the Ludwig von Mises Lecture, May 31, 2005. Here is the promotional flyer. His topic: “Monarchie, Demokratie und die Idee einer natürlichen Ordnung,” is based on the paper in English here.
As I noted earlier Paul Krugman rejected the Austrian business cycle theory a few years ago, calling it “about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire.”[A theory of fire refuted by Antoine Lavoisier in the late 18th century]. Krugman wrote that he saw no reason why a investment bust would result in a recession because it would be compensated by increased consumption.
In a move that has previously only been imagined in the punchlines of jokes, a group of emergency doctors in Great Britain is promoting the idea of a ban on long, pointed kitchen knives in a new editorial in the British Medical Journal.
Following up on a previous blog, Australian Schapelle Corby was convicted of drug-smuggling in Bali, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Breaking down in tears, Ms. Corby embraced her family before Bali thugs took her to a prison cell. Ms. Corby prays for justice every day.
Social security is neither social nor secure. It is not social because the transfer system provokes the very dependency it is said to heal, and it is not secure because the comprehensive modern welfare system undermines economic prosperity. As a coercive system of transfers from the active to the inactive, from the saver to the consumer, and from the producer to government, social security systems have an inherent tendency to destroy the formation and transformation of capital and to inhibit the division of labor.
In an article On Left and Right published on Antiwar.com yesterday, Robert Paul Wolff, avowed Marxist and professor of Afro-American Studies, issues a call for leftists and libertarians to work together against the imperialist state. Interesting, but so what, right? Well, there’s a story here.
The US Supreme Court ruled, on Monday, May 23rd, 2005, that to compel people to support its propaganda with which they disagree does not violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the one about everyone having the right to freedom of speech. Yes, the court acknowledge, no one may be coerced into funding some private party’s advertisements or related speech. But when the government or some part of it decides it will proselytize for something, it can make us all fund it.
In this paper the author claims to point out an inconsistency between Mises’ conception of value as an ordinal relation, and Mises’s elucidation of the central role entrepreneurial action plays in the market process.
