The second anniversary of America’s expedition into Iraq passed with relatively scant fanfare. Since hostilities in Mesopotamia commenced, thousands of American and Iraqi casualties have been tallied.

David Skarbek of Cantillon’s Paradise is not impressed with Freakonomics by SD Levit and SJ Dubner, which is a bestseller by standards of economics books. It is, he says, too heavy on vulgarity and pop-up author ads and too light on analytics.

Randall McElroy writes to us about Catallarchy’s May Day blog, a very nice summary history of the calamity that was communism.

I have always been puzzled by the exact mechanisms through which the government keeps us from using gold as money, and my recent inquiries on a private email list of economists only confirmed my view that it is not legal tender laws per se. If I understand the laws correctly, then it seems the only thing preventing a bunch of gold bugs from moving to some place like Montana and starting up their own community that uses gold as money, is the sheer inconvenience of it. I.e.

The above are one of the parties fighting the General Election in Britain on the 5th May. Their ‘Manicfesto’ is delightful, although some references are veddy British: http://www.omrlp.com/

A sample: “All WMD’s (weapons of Mass Distraction) will be made highly visible so that we can find them.” “Any politician wanting to start a war will be shipped off to the country in question with a bag of conkers [chestnuts]. They can then conker the country themselves.”