The HayekBlog reports on an LATimes story on immigration and informal employment. The official unemployment rate is said to be rising among the population earning the lowest wages, and many speculate that this is due to the proliferation of off-the-books work taken up by immigrants.
From Harry Landreth and David Collander, History of Economic Thought (4th ed., 2002), pp. 494-496: Until 1960 Austrian economics was considered part of the mainstream; but as neoclassical economics faded and as mainstream economics opted for formal model building, the Austrians reemerged as dissenters. ... These differences, while substantial, did not place Austrians out of the mainstream until the 1960s.
City Journal provides a run-down of the wacky theories of Richard Florida, an economist who argues in a recently published book that in order to grow economically, cities must attract “creative workers “the kind who start and staff innovative, fast-growing companies”
To lure this workforce, Florida argues, cities must dispense with stuffy old theories of economic development—like the notion that low taxes are what draw in companies and workers—and instead must spend heavily on cultural amenities and pursue progressive social legislation.
The US Agriculture Department’s boorish manipulation of the mad cow scare last December is coming back to haunt it. Several reports are out today indicating that the single confirmed case of BSE at that farm in Washington State was not sick after all. Newsday reports that
On another Times editorial:
Fact 1: some people lose from globalization in the short run (high-wage Americans who are temporarily unemployed).
A huge variety of personal and social problems trace to a single source: household water heaters set at too low a temperature. This new but persistent problem that is due entirely to the nagging of environmentalists, governments, and safety paranoids. Defy them all in one fell swoop. [MORE]
The Washington Post weighs in. Best result of this brouhaha: gain for readers for Sechrest’s work.
This work presents a detailed account of the rise of German aggressive nationalism, culminating in the onset of the Third Reich and its Führer. Mises stresses the role of state-granted monopolistic privileges through the organization of cartels.
[An excerpt from Omnipotent Government: The Rise of Total State and Total War, originally published in 1944 by Yale University as the first full-scale examination of German-style National Socialism as a species of socialism in general.]
