It was only a decade ago that the Clinton Administration had decided that Microsoft was an Enemy of the People and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to litigate the company into oblivion. While the principals in that set of lawsuits have gone on to other things, the “anti-monopoly” propaganda machines are turning their sights elsewhere. It seems that Google, the powerful and innovative Internet search engine, now enjoys the title of “Most Hated Company.”

The Washington Post reports on the Call to Service campaign: “Worried that too many young Americans are turned off by the idea of working in government, Congress has provided $600,000 for a research project to develop strategies to raise interest among college students in federal service.”

Note that this is not actually recruitment. This is funding for a study group to examine strategies for recruitment.

The Big Kahuna himself, Government, has been creating — er — waves in the surfing world as the Beach Bums’ supplier of choice, Clark Foam, has finally succumbed to its unremitting regulatory onslaught and closed its doors.

Fed Chair-in-Waiting Benjamin Bernanke is a “Great Depression Buff”, reports the Wall Street Journal. Based on extensive research, he has drawn some important conclusions:

I just ran accross this article by Murray Rothbard: Ludwig von Mises and Natural Law: A Comment on Professor Gonce. “Professor” Gonce’s paper, published in the prestigeous Southern Economic Journal, made several absurd assertions, all of which anyone with even a passing familiarity with Mises would recognize as such. Rothbard thoroughly debunks these claims about Mises. Here are Gonce’s claims about Mises:

Introduction by B.K. Marcus:

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was not always a free-market liberal. When he matriculated at the University of Vienna, he was one of the many fervent young social reformers whose faith in “government science” had them convinced that carefully engineered interventions from the state could improve the lot of the toiling masses. He was passionate and focused, and determined to make a difference.

I am finding much in the news today discouraging and even disparaging the idea of personal responsibility and self ownership. Here are but three examples:

A perennial among the nostrums of statist “economists” is complaining about the populace’s penchant for buying and holding precious metals, notably gold. The French used to be mentioned frequently in this vein. FDR, of course, just made it illegal for Americans to own gold bullion or coin after 1933.

“Peak Oil” alarmists often point to the double-digit production declines taking pace in the fields on the UK continental shelf as a harbinger of our inexorable reversion to the pre-industrial primitivism these self-hating Malthusian members of the ‘plague-species’ so crave.

However, as the appended news article reveals, any drop-off is more a matter of simple economics than of complex geomorphology — not that the insufferable and increasingly fiscally-embarrassed UK Chancellor, Gordon Brown, would grasp the point.