[Republican administrations often pose moral and practical questions for libertarians, insofar as many jobs become available in government, whether directly employed by the White House, or regulatory agencies, as a writers and intellectuals. Is it right or wrong to accept such jobs? And regardless of who is in power, many free market economists face the ongoing dilemma of working in state-funded institutions. Freedom-minded citizens, too, face the problem of whether it is proper to work for the public sector and in what capacity.

Oliver Twist is alive today and recovering in a hospital in Beijing. The Dickensian saga of 13-year-old Xu Qian Qian fills one column on the front page of the Wall Street Journalfor December 7, 2004 and, with color photos and maps, a full page inside Section A.

The original theory behind state-supported television was that it would give voice to those excluded from the marketplace. After all, commercial television’s interests are not necessarily in line with the national interest. What about the millions of the poor, benighted Americans who don’t fit into the few demographic targets that commercial television serve in order to maximize profits?

Britain’s National Association of Pension Funds wants a Citizen’s Pension (the report is here). Every UK resident over State Pension Age should get £105 a week from the State. Linked to average earnings, it would provide “adequacy, simplicity, inclusion, encouragement to save, efficiency, and certainty”. That’s really going some. Let’s start with “certainty”.

A discussion on a private email list brought up a familiar topic: When is it permissible for self-described anarchists (let’s restrict ourselves here to anarcho-capitalists) to take government money? This is a tricky question, and I have yet to see someone offer a satisfactory list of necessary and sufficient conditions. Usually when an-caps argue about this, they end up shooting more and more refined analogies back and forth.

At the barbershop, I sat down to the house computer and found it unusable, crammed with spyware/adware with no obvious way to run a program to clean it. After speding an hour with the machine and realizing it would take another few before it was clean, I began to ask questions about how it became this way. Well, it turns out that this is the second machine in a year that has met this fate. The first was abandoned.

As a precondition to joining the European currency, member states had to abide by quantitative fiscal criteria, explained below, sharply limiting their room to maneuver. Since the adoption of the fiscal pact and the launch of the euro, many countries chose to flaunt it, to the chagrin of others that steadfastly adhered to it. This article explains how over the past 14 months a seemingly indomitable EU budgetary instrument has been rendered redundant.