[Libertarian Analysis 1, no. 1. (Winter 1970): 14–28]

Libertarians tend to fall into two opposing errors on the American past: the familiar “Golden Age” view of the right-wing that everything was blissful in America until some moment of precipitous decline (often dated 1933); and the deeply pessimistic minority view that rejects the American past root and branch, spurning all American institutions and virtually all of its thinkers except such late nineteenth-century individualist anarchists as Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner.

This interesting news clip (BBC?) draws attention to the newest trend in traffic regulation: eliminating all signs and even clear distinctions between roads and sidewalks. The point is to address the perverse incentives associated with imposed “safety”: the safer we believe we are as drivers and pedestrians, the more recklessly we behave.

Take a look at this article, which (briefly) describes the arrest of a Korean minister who was implicated in a black market organ transplant ring. According to the story, this clergyman and his cohorts were taking “premiums from terminally ill patients in return for arranging tours to China for transplant surgeries.” How dare anyone actually find organs for desperately ill patients! What was the compensation to the conspirators? Again, according to the article,

Here is my preface to the newly published Polish edition of Democracy--The God that Failed.

In human history, for better or worse decisive turns in the course of events occur. The most recent of such turns was in 1989 with the implosion of communism all across central and eastern Europe. This had been predicted seventy years before by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), a native of the Polish city of Lemberg (Lwow).

Edward Chancellor, author of a very expensive report on the credit bubble, and the classic Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation presented a talk last summer to the Global Borrowers and Investors Forum on The Destabilizing Stability of the Greenspan Era.

In “Trial and Error: The scientific system does little to prevent scientific fraud. Is there a better way?” , New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2006, author David Dobbs, in the wake of the Hwang Woo Suk cloning fraud, says:

Should central bankers actively undertake to burst asset bubbles, or should they stand around and watch them run out of steam, then try to clean up the mess by cutting interest rates? This has been the subject of a recent round of debate between central bank economists and other interest macro thinkers:

Stupid in America: How We Are Cheating Our Kids:

I have so far not commented on one of the strangest developments in the world of statistics-how the Federal Reserve have decided that the M3 measure of money supply will be “discontinued” without saying why . Since they came with no explanation there have been lots of speculation as to why they did it.