The following question was posted to the Hernando de Soto thread. I’m moving it here to keep the discussions separate.

I have a question and wanted to post it on the main venue but I don’t know how or if I can so I’ll try here.

At the site http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html

there is a long Anarchist Individualist FAQ,

Under section ;

G.2.1 What about their support of the free market? ,

Marc Faber has published three interesting pieces on historical asset bubbles — the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi scheme. Faber is one of the more interesting heterodox economists writing today. I believe that he is aware of the Austrian school and has been influenced by Mises and Hayek. The theme of credit expansion, either through central banking or other forms of paper claims, runs through all of these pieces:

This year the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott (KP) for their contributions in the design of macroeconomic policy and for the identification of the main causes of business cycle fluctuations. Here I discuss their theory of the business cycle and how it stacks up against the Austrian understanding.

Apparently the UK paper The Guardian was trying to promote a Kerry win. Some of the reactions by upset Americans are funny, and also somewhat ironic given the US approach of “regime change.”

On April 5, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the confiscation of gold from US citizens, in one of the most heinous acts of mass-robbery imaginable. Below is the text of Roosevelt’s order.

Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates By virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5(b) of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended by Section 2 of the Act of March 9, 1933, entitled

 

From the New Statesman comes this claim: “The origins of modernist ideology further complicate the picture. The key figure was the Viennese architect and in-terior designer Adolf Loos, who coined the famous slogan ‘Ornament is crime’ in 1908. His own political affinities lay with the laissez-faire Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Frederick von Hayek.

From The Rude Awakening Newsletter (Wednesday, October 20, 2004): The IMF was conceived in July 1944 at an international conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. John Maynard Keynes and Harry White, according to the exhibition in the IMF’s main foyer, envisioned the IMF “helping each county set a fixed but changeable exchange rate for it currency BASED ON GOLD.” After WWII, the U.S. already held most of the world’s money in the form of dollars and gold reserves. But by 1947, the U.S. had accumulated 70% of the world’s gold reserves. Today, the U.S.

Most states and municipalities that lose business in spite of offering companies tax breaks walk away, but one town is fighting back.

The following mutually beneficial exchange takes place in Tom Sawyer, and the author concludes with a nugget of wisdom that seems to have been lost on intellectuals for a century or so:

“Say -- what’s that?” [Tom asks Huckleberry Finn]

“Nothing but a tick.”

“Where’d you get him?”

“Out in the woods.”

“What’ll you take for him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to sell him.”