At last, journalists are looking into Chile’s system of “privatization.” This NYT piece points out an important difference with the US case: “Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.” Even so, “the transition period has turned out to be longer and more expensive than ant
How nice to see Russell Robert’s The Invisible Heart getting some attention. It’s a wonderful novel about a high-school economics teacher and his attempt to explain to others close to him why economics matters and what it teaches us about the world.
I knew that the New York Times review, which I’d heard was coming, would be in a class by itself. But I had no idea that I was such a dangerous person that it would run on the editorial page. I told radio talk show hosts all week that if the Times’ review of my book wasn’t a hatchet job, I’d buy them dinner. Needless to say, and as I fully expected, I’ll be eating at home this week.
Yes, the Bush administration has paid intellectuals to echo its political priorities. What’s more surprising, actually, is all those who toe the line without being paid. Never wonder again how it is that the pharaohs were treated as gods, how Kim Il Sung and Nicholai Ceausescu got away with making monuments and billboards to themselves and forcing everyone in the country to address them by endlessly proliferating honorifics, or how the greatest despots in world history were surrounded by sycophants until their last breath.
Sarbanes-Oxley has been one hellish nightmare for the free market. I work for a very large public company, in the auto industry, in the corporate finance group, and we concentrate on North America, Mexico, and (formerly) Singapore. With our 4Q financials and year-end, financial reporting wrap-up, the SarbOx nightmare is at the forefront of my mind.
Interesting article by Dr William Coleman on the “anti-economics” movement.
Coleman says, among other things: “I want to put the possibility — not the likelihood, but the genuine possibility — that anti-economics could succeed. I want to put the possibility that economics — real economics — might die. Why do I say this? Because real economics has died before. “
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So this is how the New York Times greets Thomas Woods’s book, which, far from being “conservative” in the sense of the Bush adminstration, celebrates old-style liberalism, as in laissez-faire, anti-war, pro-trade, anti-authoritarian state, pro-revisionist history, anti-corporatist, anti-coercion, pro-voluntarism, pro-decentralism.
The ‘05 federal budget deficit is set to break last year’s record, reports the Washington Post.
The Institutional Risk Analyst does an excellent job of exposing the massive financial fraud known as Social Security. By connecting the financial dots, the article demonstrates that the government has effectively invested public pension funds in its own debt - something no private firm is allowed to do. The commingling of Social Security trust funds with the Treasury’s general fund has enabled politicians to “borrow” (spend) the surplus Social Security funds.
