• People variously comment on the wonderful charts that appear on Mises.org. Frank Shostak and Sean Corrigan do their own, but many of the others come from a fabulous resource for free data and charts: www.economagic.com. Try it out!

Tallying up the government payroll used to be a somewhat reliable way to measure the size of government. No longer: contracting out has become more common. Under this system, the government decides what needs to be done, the taxpayers pay the bill, and the profits land in private hands. Some people call it privatization, or we might just call it market-based socialism.

• Deflation hysteria spreads to Eurozone (BBC)    
• Inflation, not deflation, is the real danger (Fin Times)    
• Durable goods orders fall (Reuters)    

‘You’ll think I’m off my trolley, but Bush has the most positive approach to Africa since Kennedy,’ says Bob Geldorf. Rory Calhoun reports from Addis Ababa in the Guardian.

Feds to states:  The dictation of private banks’ ATM fee policies is our job.  Go harass someone else.  Article in the Charlotte Business Journal.

Martin Wolf, writing in the paid subscriber section of the Financial Times, has written a somewhat heterodox piece about business cycles, including this passage:

“I favor a much smaller government, but I do not favor the Bush tax cut. Or, to be more precise, I would support a tax cut if one had been proposed. But so far President Bush has neither proposed nor implemented a tax cut—only a tax shift.” Alexander Tabarrok on “What Tax Cut?“

In my last piece, I argued that we may not be measuring inequality correctly and that, if we examine our ability to substitute the goods available to the poor for the goods available to the rich, we may find that the gap between rich and poor is shrinking.

Economy, Not Iraq, on America’s Mind (Newsday.com): “For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the American people are more concerned about the nation’s economic woes than about terrorism, war or Iraq, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. About 65 percent of Americans approve of Bush overall, but his ratings on the economy are at 50 percent or below, the data show.”