From Lew Rockwell.com, Gary North on Bush’s massive deficit spending.

Re:  Jeff’s post on making soap, in San Francisco people now pay to sign up for arts and crafts workshops to learn how to do this. In fact, it’s become a  cottage industry  (and also here) of its own. Ah, the luxuries of prosperity!

...How much mutual funds should charge, how stock research should be marketed, that the EPA’s regulatory burden is too weak, the New York AG office deserves extorted penalties from securities firms more than the supposedly-harmed investors, the proper distribution of Red Cross funds, the correct result of voluntary labor contracts, which private emails should be made public, and the correct interest rates that banks can charge.

Now the  Commerce Department says the  economy shrank by 0.5% in the 3rd quarter of 2000, fully 6 months before the  NBER says the recession began (the previous data having said that the GDP increased throughout the year).

The other day I found myself in an antique/junk store staring at a huge old iron kettle, and I wondered out loud how many one could feed using that for soup. A man next to me, who looked to be in his 70s, said: that’s not for soup; that’s for rendering hog fat!

Along the same lines, Rothbard mentions in passing in What Has Government Done to Our Money that nails were once used for currency. Rothbard mentions Scotland. But in the early days on the American frontier too, nails were so scarce that people often would burn down a home before they moved on.  The reason was so they could collect the nails to be reused.

As reported today, foreign interest in US Treasuries are down.  Bid to cover is down to 1.78 now.

Two days ago I took my kids out to lunch. The place I took them is essentially a hamburger joint, with a very thin veneer of New York hip added on. While we were eating, a conversation in the nearby kitchen caught my ear. What I heard was, “In the 1930s, everyone thought this problem was solved.”

Sam Vaknin of UPI on the heroic “shuttle traders.”