Forbes runs Richard Vedder’s argument that state spending on college and universities is a bad investment.

Yesterday Joe Salerno gave an interesting talk on “The Debate on the Socialist Calculation Debate” (audio or video). I completely agree with Salerno et al. that there is an important difference between the Hayekian knowledge problem and the Misesian calculation problem, but in the journal battles over this, something never quite sat right with me. During Joe’s talk yesterday, I finally put my finger on it...

David Veksler, via Wired, draws our attention to a great product called “Spray on Mud” which gives your car that authentic “off-the-road” look and which is useful in another way. As the ad says: “Sprayonmud is NOT to be used to obscure number-plates or the lights on your vehicle.”

A new company is being formed by the Nasdaq and Reuters to provide stock research for nearly 700 companies that currently lack research coverage by any major brokerage firm on Wall Street. Why do brokerage firms not cover these companies? Since the Wall Street research settlement engineered by Eliot Spitzer, brokerage firms were forced to scale back their operations and can no longer afford to cover smaller market cap companies.

Milton Friedman reminds readers of Opinion Journal that he is still an education socialist. The separation of finance (public) and administration (private)? Imagine how that would system would affect, say, WalMart or Dell. At the least, it would require compulsory shopping laws—a correlary to the compulsory education that Friedman still believes has “some justification.”

Here is an interesting list of libertarian philosophers.

Coda: what appeared in my inbox, which is blogged here, seemed to be only a helpful reference tool. In fact, and on closer look, it seems to be something else entirely, with conspicuous exclusions and plenty of other problems. If it is useful, use it; if not, toss it.

Catching up on in-box items I missed, I just had the chance to read the funny New York Times article on investment gold bugs: “Believing (and Believing and Believing) in Bullion.” It’s a charming piece of reporting that does no harm to the sector of the investment community that is devoted to gold as a investment.

To answer another question concerning the move from hard money to paper money--from the origin of money in Mises “regression theorem“ to the destruction of money in what Salerno and Huelsman have called the “progression theorem”--I had the occasion to reread J.G. Huelsman’s excellent piece on political centralization from the JLS. The whole article is worth revisiting.