We recently received the following question:

Jack Crooks in the Asia Times argues that the Fed’s interest rate movie could mean a big setback for China’s economic growth. Quoting Mises on the trouble with Credit expansion, he also offers this little chart to account for how US interest rate policy has beeen indirectly responsible for the artifical boom.

What do you do with a state – a highly centralized and militarized state – that has unconstrained hegemonic ambitions and is a proven threat to its citizens and other nations around the world? This is a question that has vexed liberally minded thinkers for centuries. In particular, much to the sadness of any real American, it is a question that many people at home and around the world are asking about the United States, especially since the election revealed explosive political divisions inside the country.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Liberty & Power]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) [sic] has released a report to Congress calling for the consideration of a new system of key national indicators covering economic, social, environmental and cultural areas. Here is the report, which calls for planners to have access to only the best quality data.

Is Scott Peterson guilty? He probably is, but I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that the legal system as a whole is guilty of a crime: the imprisonment and enslavement of 9 12 jurors. These jurors have been taken from their normal lives and sequestered in a hotel like prisoners, and have been forced to accept a compensation lower than they otherwise would have accepted for such a job, and to do a job that they otherwise wouldn’t have done. Their entire lives have been put on hold for these last several months.

Why read Menger’s Principles, now online for the first time? When Mises reviewed Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, he proclaimed “Henceforth all essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard.” The same must be said doubly for Menger’s Principles of Economics,published first in 1871.

After reading my recent piece on Republican fiscal policies, former Hillsdale College colleague Kirby Cundiff convinced me that one of my arguments was fairly weak. Because Reagan had cut marginal rates but “closed loopholes,” I was trying to gauge the overall effect.

Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs knows that Africa’s economic woes have nothing to do with poorly defined property rights institutions. They have everything to do with not enough wealth transfers from rich countries to the poor.