The Grasso Affair

The attack on a private contract was among the most unsettling aspects of the Grasso affair. He broke no law and only requested that the NYSE Board abide by the terms to which it agreed. His deferred payments over the years amounted to loans to the New York Stock Exchange for which he could reasonably assume to be compensated. Instead, he was demonized by the press, the topic of possible congressional hearings, and forced out of a position he had intended on maintaining for another three years.

The deficiencies of the poverty rate

The New York Times runs a piece on the poverty rate by Jared Bernstein that correctly says the old measure of poverty is dated and inaccurate, but concludes that an accurate rate should be higher than the official data. A better study is done by Robert Rector of Heritage, as published in the Review of Social Economy (1999), which calls for replacing the idea of a “poverty rate” with a measure of overall material hardship.

We’re All Keynesians Now

Thanks, Dick. In Southeastern Michigan, all the Keynesians are lining up to praise demand-side economics. In a couple of weeks, the UAW (United Auto Workers) will be passing out $3,000 signing checks to union members, and hence, the Detroit area is said to be the country’s one great target for a sure economic boost. A University of Detroit Professor remarked, “We have to get them to spend this in Michigan and get them to spend it now.

Rothbard Battles the Mainstream

In order to publish in mainstream academic journals, must Austrians “water down” or soft pedal our ideas so that they will not seem “too radical”? Murray Rothbard, thankfully, never followed that strategy, but it still did not preclude him from publishing in a number of highly ranked journals. In Rothbard’s early years as an economist, his writings for professional journals in the 1950s are some of the most radically and explicitly Austrian that those journals probably ever published.

Will the US Privatize Iraq?

  • Will the US Privatize Iraq(Lew Rockwell, LRC): With the announcement of these reforms, we are supposed to imagine the future of Iraq as a big democratic Hong Kong, with bustling businesses everywhere, with an international flavor, where taxes are low and property is secure and commerce is the watchword above all else. Utopia! And what a contrast to today, where no one is safe under a US military dictatorship. And just think: the US will shepherd the whole transition.

Correspondence

The Mises Institute receives tremendous quantities of correspondence every day--economics questions, ideas and links, praise and criticism--but this note especially caught our eye: “I am, by temperament, communitarian, not libertarian, but I love you Mises.org guys with your undogmatic, dynamic,  out-of-the-box thinking.  So different from the Chicago School of Economics with their inflexible, deterministic ideology. And, wonder of wonders, I find myself agreeing with you about 85% of the time. You are the wave of the future, hang in there.”

 

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