In the latest money supply report, the M3 measure of money supply surpassed the psychological barrier of $10 trillion. It is up 7.1% over the latest year (52 weeks) and at an annual rate of 11.2% over the latest 13 weeks.
The various government agencies that finally got around delivering aid to people hit by Katrina often brag about the 2.2 million Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) they handed out. Surely these did some good for someone, somewhere, but I can also report that MREs are everywhere these days in the Deep South, and wastefully so.
The marketplace is a wonderful place, writes Chris Westley, except when it’s MarketPlace, that public radio program that airs mornings and evenings in the United States. It’s a reliable source of economic fallacy, state celebration, and anti-commercial bias. Since there is no shortage of privately provided business media in print, radio, and television, why must government fund MarketPlace? FULL ARTICLE 
The Mises Institute is very pleased to introduce a lost work of genius: Basic Principles of Economic Value, by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk.
In this book, Mises’s teacher and a huge figure in the history of thought explains and argues for the subjective theory of value, the theory of marginal utility, and their relationship to price.I realize this is silly, but it was too funny to pass up. Check out this Bob Murphy homepage. The guy is me, except for his middle initial and, oh yeah, he’s against tax cuts, pro inflation, and pro-minimum wage.
David Hughes sends the following:
Slate carries a fascinating article by Fred Kaplan on Thomas Schelling’s role in the Cold War. I highly recommend Fred Kaplan’s book, The Wizards of Armageddon. It contains an insightful account of the central role the RAND Corporation played in the development of game theory. The RAND Corporation, formerly Air Force Project RAND (for Research and Development), was started with a huge grant from the U.S.
Contrary to myth, Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one, writes George Reisman.
A mini-debate has ensued, starting with Michael Mandel weighing in on the chief methodological problem with game theory — its presupposition of the adoption of perfectly mutually-adjusted strategies by actors. Tyler Cowen ignores this critique by taking the somewhat dialectical position of saying that if it improves our ability to think through economic problems, then it’s useful.
As Walter Block, Roy Whitehead and I argue in a forthcoming law review article, “The Duty To Defend Advertising Injuries Caused By Junk Faxes: An Analysis Of Privacy, Spam, Detection And Blackmail” (and as I have argued elsewhere), spam and related activities can in principle be a crime—a type of trespass—since it is a means by which the spammer uninvitedly uses another’s property.
