Paul Craig Roberts replies to two articles on Mises.org, with his piece “Clarifications on the Case for Free Trade.”

Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, and Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, have written an article in The New York Times of January 6, 2004, in which they question the benefits of free trade in conditions in which there is mobility of capital and thus effective mobility of labor, as well as mobility of goods.

Jay Hancock in the  Baltimore Sun

Dear Mr. Greenspan:

Take a look at this sophisticated market exchange process:  BarterBing. It is a potential solution to some of the problems associated with our depreciating dollar and reduction in consumer purchasing power.

Most sports fans know that the St. Louis Rams were the beneficiaries of one of the greatest tax dollar giveaways of the 1990s.  The deal was based on the theory of public goods as it applies to pro sports: arenas are public goods because of non-appropriable, pareto-relevant externalities that they generate.  And so the government should build them.

To add to Reisman, more than fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises recognized and carefully spelled out the limited applicability of Ricardo’s law of comparative cost or advantage. In those conditions of free international movement of capital  and labor in which the law does not apply (e.g., in the later nineteenth century and currently), Mises reached precisely the opposite conclusion of Paul Craig Roberts.

Now  this is brilliant politics: everyone is fascinated with outer space, The Great Unknown, the Final Frontier, and all that...and it has the added benefit of distracting the country from the Democratic primaries.

From the great Spanish scholastic Juan de Mariana, writing in the late 15th century:

Re-issued today in several major U.S.

2003 was, as most years are, a mixed bag for freedom in the world. But for those who believe that ideas matter, one of the year’s brightest spots was the publication of an English translation of Benjamin Constant’s 1810 Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments by Liberty Fund.