I am always annoyed when money is referred to as a “store of value”. Value is not a substance that can be stored; it is demonstrated in action.
As Mises writes, “Value is the importance that acting man attaches to ultimate ends. ... Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. ... It is reflected in human conduct.”
Future Shock at the Fed (New York Times, requires free registration)
O Sage! O Confidence Man (Forbes magazine, requires free registration)
American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work (PDF).
A recent post lauded the UK as a homeland of free enterprise, based on some broad statistics about immigration. The World Bank study alluded to here throws a rather different light on the numbers.
One of the best writers of the old liberal school was Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the Whig historian, essayist and statesman. He was an unashamed advocate of economic freedom and a writer who excelled at pointing out the errors of logic and abuses of power he saw at work around him, who, according to Walter Olson, “has a fair claim to being the most influential of the British classical liberals.”
[This is Albert Jay Nock’s (1870–1945) introduction to Spencer’s forgotten 1884 classic, The Man versus the State.]
