States cannot own property

MSNBC has a transcript of some events at a speech given by Mrs. Bush at a public hall attached to a firehouse (also see this article. A mother, wearing a shirt saying “President Bush, you killed my son”, started objecting in the middle of the event. She was arrested outside of the hall, while she was being interviewed by several reporters. It is clear that the reason she was arrested was to silence her (the charges were dropped).

Humphrey Bogart, Globalization and “Sweat Shops”

50 years ago the delightful romantic comedy Sabrina (1954), starring Audrey Hepburn and directed by Billy Wilder, was released. The other two stars of the film play the scions of a wealthy business family that own and manage an international business conglomerate. Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart) is the older, responsible brother who is passionately devoted to the family business. David Larrabee (William Holden) is the younger playboy brother who doesn’t understand his brother’s calling.

What’s Hayek got do with it?

The spirit was nice, but something is odd about the argument at TCS that runs this way. CBS didn’t know that its Bush memos were suspicious but the blogs did and corrected the record even before CBS could investigage. The suggests that Hayek is correct that a spontaneous, decentralized system of knowledge dispersal works more efficiently than a centralized one. There is a good case to be made against the mainstream media, of course, and the blogosphere is great. But why resort to Hayekian explanations in this case?

Mises on Blood for Oil

Ivan Eland, Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, writes in a recent article:

[I]s the conventional wisdom correct that the United States needs to exchange blood for oil? Many economists don’t think so. Before the first Gulf War, two Nobel laureates in economics — Milton Friedman on the right and James Tobin on the left — stated that no war for oil was needed. In fact, the Persian Gulf countries need to sell oil more than the United States needs to buy it.

The Expense of Social Security ‘Privatization’

In the best article ever to appear in the mainstream press on the truth (well, some of the truth) about the statist scheme called Social Security privatization, Toner and Rosenbaum note: “But behind the sweeping promise are some harsh political realities that could loom large in this fall’s debates and the final clashes of the presidential campaign. Mr. Bush has never proposed a specific plan to reach his goal - and, critics say, for good reasons.
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