From Mike Ewens at AWC blog comes this: Iraq’s Dinar Gives Geenback a Run for its Money, and its paragraph with unintended irony:

A common view promoted by advocates of “free” or public education is that a system primarily based on fees would cause many children to forego an education. Subsequently, literacy rates would decline, and America would slide down a slippery slope toward low economic growth and stagnation. Whether education is part and parcel to economic growth is not the concern of this article. Rather, the charge of illiteracy in a fee-based or privatized system seems to be weak at best, considering the history of education in America and England.

As the American economy reels from the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s monetary manipulations, a burgeoning sovereign debt, an interventionist foreign policy, as well as a bevy of other no less onerous government-orchestrated distortions in the marketplace, it is fascinating to note the scorn with which the country’s legislators, trade unions and manufacturing concerns regard China.

I think that anarcho-capitalists, libertarians, and Austrian economists should be interested in Free Software (FS) and Open Source Software (OSS). I believe there is much to gain from studying FS and OSS. It would allow us to bring computer-oriented individuals into the larger picture of a free society overall.

From Toby Baxendale:

As a businessman with a degree in economics, and trying in my spare time to keep up with contemporary developments, I read in my LSE Alumni magazine, that the 2003 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Engle from NYU Stern School of Business, a fellow old Alumni recently spoke at the School. The blurb on Professor Engle says the following:

He writes: “The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.” But have a look at this chart. Had spending stayed on the Clinton-era trendline, the budget would still be balanced even with the revenue decline.

Dear Professor Krugman:

In Can CAN-SPAM Can Spam?, Brady Johnson in TidBITS writes on the new federal anti-spam act. It is no surprise that the law is a massive act of nullification of state laws, “One heavily criticized component of the Act is the provision preempting all state laws addressing spam with certain very limited exceptions.”

From Marginal Revolution -- “4. The more concerned we are with price stabilization, the more our economies take on properties of commodity money standards...” - Mehrling Allowing central bankers to attempt to stabilize prices is equivalent to allowing a General Motors ONSTAR operator to remotely drive your vehicle at the speed limit on the expressway using a rear-facing video feed through a geosynchronous satellite network.

Judging from this news report at CNN, it appears that the judge in Martha Stewart’s trial is not going to allow her to present a defense.