CNN reports on the Christmas Price Index, based on the items in the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song. It’s up 19% this year.
Americans are paying as much as $14.99 a lb for beef. This compares to $2.48-3.10 a lb in Australia (converting from $A per kilo.). One reason: US quotas on beef imports from Australia. “Since 1995, the US beef market has operated under a quota with county specific allocations to major supplies. Australia has a beef quota of 378,000 tonnes, with an import duty of roughly US4c/kg.
Reading Arnold Kling has always left me somewhat befuddled. In the past, I’ve pointed to his supposed libertarianism and his contradictory positions. In his latest column, I am even more bemused, yet again, at the same time, entirely clear on what the deal is. Confused?
The NYT’s Floyd Norris marvels this morning (registration required) at the increased importance of self-employed workers in the government’s rosy employment figures announced this week. These workers, notes Norris, account for 6.6 percent of the workforce, up from 6.1 percent when Bush took office. While there are about 2.25 million fewer jobs today than during the height of the boom, the government’s tally of the officially employed increased by 328,000 since last July. T
Andy Mukherjee writes on Bloomberg that the biggest threat to the growth of India’s economy is excessive government spending.
Fiddling While the Dollar Drops (David Ignatius, Washington Post): “The dollar is sinking these days on good news and bad, and the explanation is pretty simple: Investors around the world are worried that the Bush administration’s policies are eroding the value of the U.S. currency. So they’re rushing to unload greenbacks, in what could soon become a full-blown financial crisis.”
In case you didn’t click the link when Professor Garrison first blogged this, this Samuel Brittan piece (from remarks delivered in Vienna!) is very interesting. Brittan rejects the Austrian theory of the business cycle on grounds that we didn’t see a “relative contraction in consumer spending” in the 1990s occuring alongside the credit-fueled investment.
The introduction to the German edition of Democracy, The God that Failed is published in English (LRC). The American edition is available at Mises.org and Amazon.com.
