Art Carden says that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof presented an ambiguous message with his slide show of Cambodia. But the  accompanying article, which is anything but ambigious. In the piece, entitled “Inviting All Democrats,” the author blasts liberals like Dean and Gephardt for failing to recognize that a global minimum wage would be devastating to Third World inhabitants. In favor of free trade, Kristof concludes: &#82

Re: Rothbard on Debt:  The argument that “we owe it to ourselves” when it comes to government debt is even older than Keynes and his followers --especially Abba Lerner who emphasized this idea.

In addition to Stromberg’s  citation regarding the underrated James Mill, there is also pp.58-63 of Rothbard’s “Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals In Social Change Toward Laissez Faire” available  here . Shall we call it the Millian Law of Association?

Bloomberg reports on a bailout of the banking system in China.  According to the article, they used 1/10th of their foreign exchange reserves to “boost the capital adequacy” of their two largest banks.  “Boosting capital adequacy” is a euphemism for bailing the bankers out for bad loans under the fraudulent system of fractional reserve banking.   The Chinese central bank has accumula

Paul Craig Roberts raises an interesting point when he writes: “If Mateusz Machaj were correct that ‘there is no difference between mobility of factors of production inside or outside a country,’ there  would be no subject matter for international trade theory. All trade would be regional trade.”

In light of MNR’s article, the question has come up about more references to the repudiation that followed Reconstruction in the South. John Tice Moore, “Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South,” in C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics, ed. J. H. Roper (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), and J. Mills Thornton III, “Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Reconstruction in the Lower South,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J.

I cannot decipher what Craig Roberts is saying. But this I know: the case for specialization and trade in no way requires factor immobility; nor does the theory of comparative advantage require factor immobility for its applicablity.  What Ricardo or Mill or Mises or anyone else said is ultimately immaterial; the theory of comparative advantage applies regardless of how mobile or immobile factors of production might be.

Some vocal supply-siders ludicrously claimed that the Fed was not inflating fast enough during the 90s, citing the depressed price of gold as proof.  This is because they are unable to see financial asset inflation - the oceans of money that the Fed was pumping out was going into the stock market, the bond market, and real estate.   Gold itself was in a bear market partly because real money is shunned during the periods where financial assets are inflating rapidly, and partly because the