The European Union is blackmailing Thailand to buy 6 aircrafts from Airbus for €1.3 billion ( roughly $2.4 billion) or face steep tariffs on its fish and prawn exports. A few weeks ago they also imposed high tariffs on exports of cumarin in order to protect a french company who also manufactures cumarin. Now after the tsunami even the EU negotiators find these demands somewhat embarrasing (though apparently not embarrasing enough to drop the demands).

Free-trade stalwart Jagdish Bhagwati graces the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal for January 17 with an informative discussion of the truths and untruths of current arguments about trade being aired in and about the World Trade Organization. Bhagwati has already forgotten more about trade than most of us will ever know, and much of what he has shared with his public has been refreshingly well reasoned and free of cant.

“Right now, the economy in Nigeria is such that 25 cows is considered having a lot,” says Chicago Bears defensive end Adewale Ogunleye, who is first in line to succeed his uncle as king of the Nigerian city of Emure.

“Well, 25 cows doesn’t do anything for me, so I think I’ll be in Chicago for a while.”

So says Brad deLong : “Most of the time I’m a straightforward Keynesian aggregate-demand guy... The Austrian theoretical framework thus seems to be the only tool at hand. And when all you have is a hammer... “

Journalist Rick Perlstein recently asked for my forecast on the future of the Republican Party. It’s an important question. American political culture takes election victory to be the ratification of truth, which is why this question is usually addressed from the point of view of whether the party will continue to hold power. I would rather address the issue of what power has come to mean to the Republicans: namely, everything. The Republican love of liberty, which seemed to be a sincere impulse of the party’s core during the 1990s, has been reduced to mere sloganeering.

Two lefty blogs, Daily Kos and Atrios, have figured out that some big businesses are pushing for nationalized health care as a way of reducing their labor costs. What’s not clear is whether these bloggers are happy about this lobbying trend. As for explanation, if the site managers are following trackbacks, see Mises on how interventionism begets ever more of the same.

Count on Bloody Old England to bring us this: this week’s Economist reports a book in which Richard Layard, a member of the House of Lords, finds that high incomes should be steeply taxed because high incomes make other people less-happy with their own incomes, precipitating the fabled “rat race” of consumptive competition.

The audio for my lecture last week is now online: “On the Need to Raise Taxes in Alabama.“ (See also the schedule of this series, sign up for a local alert, and see the full media page.)

I’ve been reading through a book I came across in my city library called The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. The author is from NYU, and his name is Siva Vaidhyanathan. In a section titled “Intellectual Property is Neither,” Siva states:

For more than a century, one of the most popular economic doctrines in the world has been the exploitation theory. According to this theory, capitalism is a system of virtual slavery, serving the narrow interests of a comparative handful of businessmen and capitalists, who, driven by insatiable greed and power lust, exist as parasites upon the labor of the masses.