Close down the classrooms, says Amitai Etzioni (writing on the attack on Hoppe), if professors may only say what the hard data backs and nothing else. (Hoppe Victory Blog is open.)

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most famous political commentators about America. 

On a recent visit to San Jose State University, I sat in on a Money & Banking lecture by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. (I am assuming he doesn’t mind me discussing this here...) He drew a supply-and-demand diagram for the housing market, and said that due to transactions costs, the number of exchanges in the real world is actually to the left of the “equilibrium” quantity.

There are very few times in a student’s life when he or she can escape the drills and drudgeries of modern university coursework to pursue broad research under the direction of masters in a field. Even graduate school can be too regimented to cultivate the kind of research that leads to great discoveries and path-breaking scholarship. That is why the Mises Institute offers resident fellowships during the summer to graduate students, post-docs, ABDs, and some undergraduates.

Good heavens, what kind of despotism would codify into law the principle that a part of the country may not secede, and that “non-peaceful” means will be used to prevent it. The world has united in opposition to such a country as this, with the State Department openly protesting. See the Washington Post on China’s new anti-secession law.

Also see Secession, State, and Liberty, David Gordon (ed.)

When pro-inflation economists try to argue that inflation does not merely have redistributive effects, but can actually increase total production one of their most frequently used arguments (Often stated in implicit rather than explicit terms ) is that inflation can help erode the real value of artificially increased minimum wages set either directly by governments or indirectly by unions. Since minimum wages will destroy job opportunities for low-skilled workers, eroding it through inflation will help increase employment and production.

A woman was fined for holding an apple while performing a maneuver in a car. Aside from the absurdity of this, it cost the government far more to prosecute her than what they obtained from the fine:

A NURSERY nurse was fined £60 yesterday for holding an apple in her hand while driving around a bend after police used a spotter aircraft, a helicopter and a patrol car to win the case.