from Radley Balko, writing for foxnews.com.
It’s a story that most Mises.org readers know, that anyone who reads NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof knows, and that anyone who paid attention in an economics class knows: sweatshops are a godsend for the sweatshop worker.
The New York Times reports As Household Debt Rises, New Risk in Higher Rates. The article reports on the increasing trend toward zero-interest loans and adjustable-rate mortages. Borrowers perceive these loans as having no risk because of their belief in the continued and guaranteed appreciation of their homes. They are also making a bet on the persistence of low interest rates for the duration of their mortgage.
An article in the April 5 issue of Time reminds us how deeply ingrained collectivist habits of thought are in this country. The piece deals with the Chicago school board’s decision to stop holding back (or “flunking” as it used to be called) so many students. The article begins like this:
Just as Clinton and Gore did, John Kerry has started to make his peace with the market economy, in rhetoric in any case. From a Wall Street Journal interview comes the following (thanks P&S):
In a sad testimony to the degeneration of its economic thinking - as well as to the shocking erosion of its editorial consistency — the Pink’Un, the Third Way interventionsist daily journal, otherwise known as the Financial Times, clearly thinks it is better to eschew economic flexibility in favour of the kind of ‘job security’ which only comes at the expense of capital allocation, credit expansion and government support programmes:
The US has lost the war. Now its efforts in Iraq will be defined for the history books by the photos of psychosexual torture methods used by US soldiers and civilian contractors in Baghdad. There is no avoiding this. The mask as moral liberator was ripped off long ago. The danger now is that the US presence will live up to the worst caricature of the most fundamentalist Islamic cleric. [MORE]
Many people are unaware of it, but there has always been a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Overlooked in scripture, he has been there nonetheless, waiting with rancid, baited breath to gallop across the world and leave his destructive hoof-prints in the rubble of Western civilization. He is, according to many government spokesmen and media pundits, the Horseman called “Deflation.”
by Larry Sechrest (Sul Ross University)
