The Edison Project has turned out to be a model of how not to reform schools (via LibertyGuys), as this DelcoTimes (Chester, PA) points out. Edison was paid the same regards of the results, and the school board shifted its budget and energy from supervising schools toward supervising Edison.

This BBC story looks like a retelling of Grant Nulle’s piece “Pass the Buck.”

There is a program at the School of Journalism of New York University called Business and Economic Reporting. Now, you don’t have to be Austrian to deplore the state of literacy in economics in most reporting that bears on the subject, so it’s good to see that such a subject has received the attention implied by the establishment of a defined program at none other than the university at which Ludwig von Mises himself held his last (unpaid) post.

Now that it is clear that privatization of Social Security really means the imposition of a new (even the first ever) forced savings program, we are starting to see some speculation about what it would mean for equity and bond markets. BusinessPundit points to an article in CFO that explains how forced savings leads to forced investment which leads to distorted price signals:

John Attarian, economist and journalist, and one of the leading experts on the history and economics of Social Security, died suddenly, December 31, 2004, at the age of 48. He was born November 25, 1956, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Economics in 1985. He worked as an independent writer, author, and novelist.

PrudentBear.com has an essentially Austrian analysis of the business cycle by Jeff Ferguson: Is a Secular Bear Market Inevitable?

Did anyone catch President Bush’s endorsement of anarchism today? At least I reckon that’s what he must have meant when he said “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.” As one of the unwilling, I was very happy to hear this.

Here’s a letter I just sent to the editor of the Wall Street Journal concerning the toadying op-ed in that newspaper’s edition of January 20 concerning the administration’s fradulent Social-Security “privatization” initiative. It’s on the strong side (the way I do), but they once published something else I sent them in the same vein: Like Our Parents? John W.