A thoughtful article in Asia Times discusses Bush’s trade war. Besides all the usual arguments about free trade benefiting both sides, and tarrifs helping producers while hurting consumers, there is the dollar problem: “China could retaliate by refusing to invest its trade surplus in US treasury bonds. Or it could sell some of its already gargantuan bond holdings. “
The Austrian School Flunks (Jerusalem Post, Nov 29, 2003): “There is nothing new in Campan’s analysis – it is a rehashing of the basic ideas of what economists call the Austrian School, a group of economists whose leading thinkers include Friedrich Hayek, Carl Menger and Ludwig van Mises.
Gene Epstein, writing in Barron’s ($), recommends two Austrian books this week:
For a challenging but fascinating work, try Marx to Mises (1992), by David Ramsay Steele; it bears the subtitle, Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation, where “post-capitalist society” refers to socialism and communism.
Peter Foster on why the anti-capitalists reserve their special venom for this great firm.
Billions have been spent on public parks in the last couple of decades. Why, then, does it seem that most of the good playgrounds date from the 1950s, while the new playgrounds as beautiful as they are boring. New playgrounds use fancy materials, have a maximum number of tubes, and every shaped slide you can imagine. But the new slides are slow and tubes are only good for crawling through. The materials bounce but somehow don’t challenge you.
Asia Times writes about the Impact of Declining US Capital Inflows. Due to the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, Americans have enjoyed decades of consumption at the expense of the rest of the world. They export, we import. They save, we spend. In return, we send them dollars that Al and his cronies at the Fed create with their confetti machines. And what do foreigners do with these dollars? They turn around and invest them back into US s
“It’s academic conference season again, and thousands of papers will be read badly by scholars to sleepy fellow scholars.” Some advice from William Germano, courtesty of Arts and Letters Daily.
Just as Bush’s open-ended war on terror provides ample illustrations of a politician paying off electoral debts, his administration’s aggressive trade policies smack of blatant favoritism. Indeed, steel, lumber, textile, and agricultural lobbies all rejoice at Mr. Bush’s penchant for protectionism and subsidies as much as the military-industrial complex savors America’s assertive, post 9-11, forays abroad.
