Pick and Choose Your Government Intervention
I’m not on board the anti-Splenda train. Here’s an article that tweaked my tweakables in regards to those who have a love-hate relationship with statism (mine is all hate).
Kochanowicz on Calculation
In the early days after socialism’s fall in Poland, Jacek Kochanowicz of the University of Warsaw wrote the introduction to our 1990 edition of Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. That introduction, which is quite significant given the time and place, is now online.
Tsunami cash exceeds aid need
“The international medical relief agency Médecins sans Frontiares is tracking down hundreds of thousands of donors worldwide to its Asian tsunami appeal and offering them their money back.”
They received too much tsunami cash! (See also this older article on the same.) What was the reason behind all that government aid?
Move Over Sacajawea; Hello Podunk
The US Mint has a great, new idea. (Courtesy of The Onion.)
Never Too Big to Fail
From a pre-junk bond demotion piece on GM, sent to me by Robert Blumen:
More Fun than Truth
Say what you will about Levitt and Dubner, but they sure know how to sell a book. The co-authors (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner) of Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2005) apparently sent early copies to influential bloggers, they set up their own promotional blog , they just had an op-ed (based on a book chapter) in USA Today, and—honor of honors—Levitt recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
The New Deal in One Lesson
Chris Westley explains that the only thing new about New Deal policies was their name and the people administering them.
Should Journals Be Online?
A friend is busy trying to persuade the publisher of an old-line journal to put the back issues online, and the publisher has a predictable response, albeit one that you hear less and less of these days: if I put the journal (substitute article, book, etc.) online people won’t pay for it. Variation on the theme: if you give away the cow, people won’t buy the milk.
Here is the compressed case for going online:
George Bernard Shaw on Calculation
My wife alerted me to this surprising passage from An Unsocial Socialist. Did Mises read Shaw? (This came out in 1883.) The whole opening of Chapter X is funny, but here’s the best excerpt:
The State and the Desire for Certainty
I’ve been skimming over the early JLS issues and have particularly enjoyed the articles generated by Nozick’s attack on anarchy. One article in particular raises an issue that has bugged me for a long time: Certainty as a goal in social affairs, (e.g. “No Child Left Behind”). Jeffrey Paul in “Nozick, Anarchism and Procedural Rights” (PDF) exemplifies this position in his argument against anarchy (emphasis mine):
