John Berlau of CEI writes in National Review of some little known aspects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act:

“one section of the law threatens to become the most extensive day-to-day regulation of American business since FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, the price-and-output regulatory scheme struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court in 1935. Just as the NIRA created industry boards that had to approve prices and output, Sarbanes-Oxley’s Section 404 and its regulatory extensions mandate that the most minute bookkeeping practices have to be okayed by auditors.”

In this essay, liberalism will be understood to mean the doctrine which holds that society — that is, the social order minus the state — more or less runs itself, within the bounds of assured individual rights. In the classical statement, these are the rights to life, liberty, and property.1

Our society holds up invention as the spearhead of progress. Those who first discover an idea are the ones who receive the Nobel Prizes and earn their places in the history books. But in Man, Economy and State, Rothbard shockingly argues that technological invention is relatively unimportant in the progress of civilization. Instead, capital is the far more important, and limiting factor. In fact, he claims, “there is always an unused shelf of technological projects available and idle.” Why idle? “. . .

Landing on my desk this afternoon are the new issues of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (V 8.1), edited by Joseph Salerno, and the newly redesigned Journal of Libertarian Studies (V 19.1) under the editorship of Roderick T. Long.

Coyote Blog has a fascinating analysis based on experience running nature camps of the impact of rising minimum wage laws: Case Studies on the Minimum Wage (Thanks Cafe Hayek)

The Schiavo case, aside from the specifics of the family dispute at the heart of that case, raises fundamental economic questions that cannot be avoided. The welfare state is central to this case, since much of the payment for the services Schiavo received came from that entity. It is increasingly a factor in most institutionalized end-of-life scenarios.

A law school buddy emailed me some comments about some recent developments in eminent domain law, e.g. this Slate article about Kelo v. New London—a case before the US Supreme Court, that concerns the state’s right to condemn private land and give it to private developers.

At the latest Conservative Political Action Conference, Ann Coulter proposed her own strategy to take back the universities by holding professors accountable with what she termed a “new McCarthyism.” It received an enthusiastic reaction among the mostly student crowd.

Two sites to follow: BettingOdds and Tradesport. Current favorites: 1) Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi (Milan), 2) Francis Cardinal Arinze (Nigeria), 3) Oscar Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga (Honduras), etc.

The Business Roundtable, with 160 of the largest U.S. companies, says its members paid $10 million each on Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance in 2004. Section 404 of the SOX has caused greater-than-anticipated personnel, consulting, auditing, and software expenses, according to a survey by Financial Executives International.