[This article appears in the Winter 2005 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. This issue is delivered immediately in electronic format with a new subscription  ($29).]

In his celebrated article “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” Murray Rothbard wrote that

Jim Cook has an outstanding column that posted today, wherein he notes Mises and Drucker:

Financing Excess

A role for government is to insure against every possible risk that markets do not cover, says Harvard Business Professor David Moss:

Peer review, the sacred cow of the scholarly world, is often a hurdle that those of us with less-than-conventional ideas sometimes find difficult to overcome.

To answer a reader question, I revisited Rothbard’s transition plan for 100% gold. This is cut and pasted from the Mystery of Banking (Richardson and Synder, 1983), pp. 265-267.

Fed Res outright debt holdings + Fed Repos + Foreign CB Custody accts = Total (blns)

End Dec 04 ....... $717.8 ....... $33.0 ....... $1340.3 = ....... $2091.1

End Dec 05 ....... $744.2 ....... $45.3 ....... $1522.0 = ....... $2311.5

Difference .................................................................. $220.4

Outstanding Marketable debt issued by UST

Dec 04 ................................................................. $3943.6

Dec 05 (est) .......................................................... $4164.0

A recent article from the Guardian joins the growing outcry against free trade. Its central message is that countries adopting “neo-liberal” market reforms, recommended by academic economists, have done worse than those countries that ignored the supposed experts and spurned free trade. Every time I reread the article—with the subtitle “A look at Vietnam and Mexico exposes the myth of market liberalization”—I discover more and more fallacies.