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This essay is for anyone who spends a good part of his or her day online, and doesn’t yet use news aggregation. If you already use it, click to the next item. The abbreviation of the day is RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is used by only a small percentage of web surfers. Most people have no idea that it even exists, at least not now. Those who do use it, however, find that it has changed the way they go about keeping up with information.

Year’s end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

The Mises Institute is sad to report on the death of Charles Tomlinson, 72, a friend of liberty and author of “The Myth of the Tree Shortage“ on Mises.org, a wonderful piece of research and writing that drew on his experience in forestry in the Southern US. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2001 and hadn’t expected to live past 2002. He had written an essay about dying, in which he said:

This CNN article explains that the TSA has a test program in which it issues cards to frequent fliers who volunteer for a background check. This allows such fliers to bypass the usual airport searches. Right now the program is free, but the government may eventually charge a “modest fee” for participants.

Surely, no one would dare to apply the Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy to the human tragedy that is still playing itself out along the rim of the Indian Ocean. And yet Chris Westley has discovered that at least one economist has done so.

Carl Menger, from his classic treatise, on the origins of the means of payment.

A peculiar and dangerous feature of the Social Security privatization movement is how it proposes to create a new forced saving program to run parallel with the old one, rather than simply trusting people to manage their own money. The privatizers rarely discuss this openly but it’s pretty clear why they want to do this: they do not trust the free market to manage people’s savings habits.

Lately a lot of people have been talking about Paul Samuelson’s Journal of Economic Perspectives article on globalization and free trade. The actual paper is available here through MIT.