Honda Tells U.S. Auto Makers to Try Harder (Reuters): U.S. auto makers will have to pull up their socks in the face of increasing inroads by Japanese competitors into the U.S. market, Honda Motor Co President Hiroyuki Yoshino said on Wednesday.”They should try harder,” Yoshino told reporters when asked about the Japanese auto makers’ steady carving of a greater share of the U.S.
It began with Bob McTeer’s article in the WSJ (June 4), and my response (June 12). Now we have E. Frank Stephenson of Berry College responding to my letter as follows (June 18):
Arriving in our offices this week courtesy of Josef Sima of the Liberal Institute is Mises’s book Bureaucracy in Czech. Magnificent!
Top Euro Banker, Cleared of Scandal, Can Now Head ECB (BBC): [Jean Clauide] Trichet is a highly-respected central banker, and few doubt that he is qualified for the job of ECB president which includes setting interest rates for the 12 nation eurozone. ... “With Duisenberg gone, we’ll hear more talk about growth and less about inflation,” said Anais Faraj, an economist at Nomura.
Good for Jack Kemp, defending Martha
“Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I.”
The current economic conditions in the U.S. compared to the conditions of the period from 1995–2000 have generated, according to Edmund Phelps (”False Hopes for the Economy and False Fears,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2003), two false hopes for the economy and two false fears. But is he justified in his interpretation of these false hopes and false fears?
How much of society’s security from rights violations, and justice for those who are caught, do we owe to the government’s police and courts? The usual answer is: most or all of it. Andrea Elliot in the New York Times, however, documents the workings of a completely private system we all take for granted: the routine policing of department stores done by the stores themselves (”In Stores, Private Handcuffs for Stick Fingers“).
Consumer Prices Flat in May, say the headlines. But the BLS press release tells a more complicated story: “During the first five months of 2003, the CPI-U rose at a 2.3 percent seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR).This compares with an increase of 2.4 percent for all of 2002. The index for energy, which rose 10.7 percent in 2002, advanced at a 16.5 percent SAAR in the first five months of 2003.
