Air Force Ex-Offical Had Ties to Boeing During Contract Talks (WSJ$): “A former Air Force official who now works for Boeing Co. had several personal ties to the aerospace giant while she was negotiating on behalf of the government a controversial plan valued at over $20 billion to lease Boeing jetliners as airborne refueling tankers.
Paul Krugman, the Keynesian masquerading as an economist at Princeton, in today’s column in the New York Times writes about the “lump of labor” fallacy of economics. For the most part, he seems to get it right. However, our hero simply is incapable of writing anything on economics without committing at least one major fallacy. Today, Krugman gives us the Broken Windown Fallacy with a huge shattering of glass. Right in the middle of his column, he gives us this gem:
The Wall Street Journal today reports that the World Bank will release a report tomorrow on business regulations that concludes that the less business is regulated, the healthier is the economy. But why wait until tomorrow for the report?: it’s right here. The report features an incredible array of data, all nicely assembled.
The Bank for International Settlements has published a working paper by Barry Eichengreen (Berkeley) and Kris Mitchener (Santa Clara) that discusses the Austrian view of the 1920s boom that led to the crash. The authors cite Mises, Robbins, Rothbard, and Hayek: “The Great Depression as a Credit Boom Gone Wrong“ (No. 137). Abstract:
According to the WJS$, Denmark has slashed the excise tax on Scotch whisky by 45%, or more than $5 per bottle. “Scandinavian countries traditionally have taken a hard line on the hard stuff, but the effect has generally been to encourage tax avoidance. Swedes circumvent the national liquor-store monopoly by loading up their cars in Denmark; Danes in turn drive south to Germany to buy their booze.
Debating the Socialist Calculation Debate: A Classroom Exercise
ZENON X. ZYGMONT
Western Oregon University - Division of Business & Economics
Rupert Darwall, writing the Telegraph, offers a good summary of Mises’s “economic calculation” argument bureaucracy. Darwall’s piece on British health care bureaucracies is a rare example of an op-ed that actually explains why government services don’t work, even when reformed with targets and goals and other public-sector, good-governnment gizmos.
A September 21 announcement by the G-7 finance ministers endorsed less intervention in the foreign exchange market, and triggered a large sell-off of the US dollar. On the day of the announcement, in relation to the end of August, the US currency fell by 4.8% against the Euro and 4.1% against the Yen.
