Who can forget the heroic Henry Ford, when he was the only major manufacturer in the auto industry to not sign Hugh (Old Ironpants) Johnson’s Automobile Code under the National Industrial Recovery Act?

A WSJ editorial celebrating the life and times of W.F. Buckley sums up the pre-Buckley right as follows: “a loose assortment of isolationists, protectionists, traditionalists, anti-Semites, Southern Agrarians and just plain cranks.” It’s a standard cliche but still: it’s a remarkable way to describe Mencken, Nock, Garet, Chodorov, Flynn, and Hazlitt--all intellectual leaders of the Old Right.

New on the Mises film page: The Mouse That Roared (1959)

Paul Kasriel is an Austrian economist who is the Director of Economic Researchat Northern Trust. In a recent commentary, he employs the Austrian insight that inflation distorts relative prices as well as the general price level:

From Paul Kasriel’s commentary:

Zimbabwe’s Money Supply – Enquiring Minds Want To Know

A number of questions have come in asking just what has been Zimbabwe’s money supply growth. Here it is for M2: 1999 35.9%; 2000 68.9%; 2001 128.5%;2002 191.7%; 2003 430.0%. To reiterate, if printing money created real wealth, then Zimbabwe, for example, would be one of the richest countries in the world.

(Originally published July 1, 2004.)

Our old friend Bruce Bartlett today, writing in the NYT, says that Clinton ought to be regarded more highly by the friends of freedom—especially in light of the disastrous Bush years. He frames up what many of us have thought for some time: see Thornton for example.

If we aren’t attentive, Bill Buckley’s antiwar pronouncement, issued in an interview with the New York Times, could be relegated to a minor footnote in this week’s news pages, whereas it really speaks volumes about the history of the last 50 years and the fall of American freedom in the push for perpetual war. [Full Article]

Greenspan is still blamed for fueling the .com bubble, and now it seems that he is rightly being blamed for the rise in price inflation. This morning’s NYT quotes economists from investment houses pointing the finger straight at the Fed. For example, there’s Alan W. Kral, portfolio manager at Trevor Stewart Burton & Jacobsen in New York. “We believe that inflation has returned...and the cause of it has been an overexpansive monetary policy for almost 10 years.”