Thomas Friedman visits the offices of Google (NYT): I recently went out to Silicon Valley to visit the offices of Google, the world’s most popular search engine. It is a mind-bending experience. You can actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that everyone in the world is searching for.
The New York Times Magazine on Adam Wildavsky, Randian bridge champion.
Prophetic words from Duke Law Professor Steven L. Schwarcz, writing in a symposium issue of the University of Cincinnati Law Review (Summer 2002):
Robert Bartley calls for a world fiat currency and a world central bank.
The newest member of the Hillsdale College economics faculty is Robert Murphy, Kuzweg Fellow this summer at the Mises Institute.
A Glimpse of Reality by Thomas Sowell (Creators Syndicate): Competition means that there are winners and losers. When someone wins big, that is not a sign that the competitive process did not exist or had something wrong with it.
As U.S. trade deficits continue to pile up, and as the economy continues in its slow-growth patterns, a number of economic commentators have been accusing American corporations of causing the trouble by “exporting jobs.” Now, given the bounty of economic myths that economists and media pundits seem to foist upon us, one should not be surprised at anything we read in the academic literature or popular press, but the newest set of fallacies that we are hearing is especially insidious.
Crony Capitalism in the United States (Economist.com): The mortgage markets may now be mature enough not to need Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac any more. Certainly, the two companies think that they have outgrown their original brief. Both have moved away from buying, packaging and selling mortgages towards retaining them instead. Because they can raise money cheaply, there is profit to be made from buying and holding higher-yielding mortgages. A consequence has been the swelling of their balance sheets.
I have just finished watching the fascinating seven-part fourteen-hour documentary New York, produced by documentary film maker Ric Burns for PBS. (Ric is the brother of Ken Burns, the producer of lengthy documentaries for PBS on jazz, baseball, and the civil war).
In spite of themselves they managed to do a pretty good job of telling the story of the rise and fall of New York. The story of New York city is the story of commerce, then of how central planning destroyed what commerce created.
It seems that the US government has once again been misleading its subjects. It turns out that marijuana may pose fewer long term risks than many legal products and certainly fewer than the risks posed by government itself (e.g. Iraq)
