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Jonathan J. Bean (∞); David T. Beito (∞); Brad Birzer (∞); Mark Brady (∞); Burton Folsom (∞); Anthony Gregory (∞); Keith Halderman (∞); Robert Higgs (∞); Steven Horwitz (∞); Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (∞); Lester Hunt (∞); Troy Kickler (∞); Roderick T. Long (∞); C.J. Maloney (∞); Wendy McElroy (∞); Paul Moreno (∞); Charles W. Nuckolls (∞); James Otteson (∞); Ralph Raico (∞); Sheldon Richman (∞); Chris Matthew Sciabarra (∞); Jane S. Shaw (∞); Aeon J. Skoble (∞); Amy H. Sturgis (∞)

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Mark Brady

A trillion-dollar catastrophe writes Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian.

"The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. It was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11. As such it illustrated how little international relations have advanced since the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Its exponents are still blinded by incident."

And yet some libertarians tell us it was all worth it!

Posted on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Brady

The Guardian and Russ Roberts

I was pleasantly surprised to read in today's Guardian, which many of you will recognize as a broadly left-of-center newspaper published in London, an editorial praising economist Russ Roberts' weekly podcast.

"Mr Roberts has a dry wit and hostly politeness and gives his interviewees more space than they would get on any broadcast outlet. Both presenter and most guests come from various points to the right of the political spectrum and their arguments are sometimes – how shall we say this? – barmy, being far too trusting of free markets. But with EconTalk it is the journey that counts – and Mr Roberts lets the arguments unfurl at just the right pace for both non-specialists and economists. He shows listeners how economics approaches questions differently from other disciplines. And at the end of an hour, the dismal science doesn't seem so bad after all, but a fun and useful set of tools to approach some of society's biggest questions."

Posted on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

C.J. Maloney

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

The recent decision by the Federal Reserve to keep its balance sheet stuffed to bursting with whatever the Wall Street banks decide to throw onto it came as no surprise and crushed any hope that the Fed would tone down its policy of quantitative easing (QE) — or credit easing (CE), as Mr. Bernanke prefers to call it. With the US economy stalled despite the trillions of "stimulus" funds larded out to the politically connected, the people who helm the Federal Reserve likely felt they had no other choice. This was too easy to predict; for the past few decades the response of US monetary authorities to any crisis has been the same — print more money.

Click To Read The Rest

Posted on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 9:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, August 29, 2010

C.J. Maloney

This One's A Toughie...

On the one hand, anything that comes out of the mouth of a man like Fidel Castro can be safely discounted, being that he is a politician. But on the other hand, if Bin-Laden was found to be on the CIA payroll (as Castro claims), would anyone really be all that surprised?

Posted on Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, August 27, 2010

Mark Brady

Playing the Genocide Card

Tara McCormack has written a thoughtful review of The Politics of Genocide, a recent book by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson that challenges the idea that external intervention can be a force for good. Sadly, far too many libertarians are all too happy to defend particular instances of U.S. and Western meddling in foreign countries. The book was published by Monthly Review Press in spring 2010.

Posted on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, August 26, 2010

David T. Beito

Montgomery (AL) Blacks Protest "Eminent Domain Through the Back Door" (Saturday)

Property owners in Mongomery, in cooperation with the Institute for Justice, are organizing a press conference for Saturday to organize opposition to the city's demolition of homes (many owned by blacks in Rosa Parks' old neighborhood) through "eminent domain through the back door." Christina Walsh has a powerful story:

On Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you. Oh, and you’re paying for it.

This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it works: The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.” It mails you a notice that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).

Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and if you don’t pay it within 30 days (or pay your installments on time; if you owe over $10,000, you can work out a deal to pay back the city for destroying your home over a period of time, with interest), the city can sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder.

Alabama law empowers municipalities to do just this. Officials can demolish structures that they determine, “due to poor design, obsolescence, or neglect, have become unsafe to the extent of becoming public nuisances…and [are] causing or may cause a blight or blighting influence on the city and the neighborhoods in which [they are] located.” Keep in mind, so-called standards like “obsolescence” are so vague they can mean anything, so even a well-maintained home that government officials don’t like the look of can be fed to the bulldozers.

While this may sound like eminent domain for private gain, it’s not. This is a completely different section of Alabama’s code that the city of Montgomery is now abusing habitually to tear down homes it does not like in a predominantly African American community — once home to Rosa Parks.

Jim Peera, who fought the city for years to keep a property he was rehabilitating himself — the kind of entrepreneurial private redevelopment that should be encouraged, especially in this economy — obtained copies of demolition records that indicate hundreds of homes and properties have been demolished over the past five years in Montgomery. Some may have posed an immediate threat to public health and safety — but that was certainly not the case with all of them.

Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 2:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gus diZerega

New Yorker Article on the Koch Brothers

The New Yorker has just published an article on the influence of libertarian businessmen Charles and David Koch.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

While doing her research author Jane Mayer interviewed me as I knew Charles Koch 40 years ago or so, while in high school and college, and dedicated my first book to him, Robert Lefevere, and Cliff Ketzel.

She got her facts right regarding what I said. I did a post on her article that elicited a heated response from a very orthodox libertarian, and in return replied with a discussion of the Kochs and libertarianism today that some readers might find of interest.

The initial post and the discussions that followed are at

http://blog.beliefnet.com/apagansblog/2010/08/the-new-yorker-the-kochs-and-me-mostly-not-me.html

Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Robert Higgs

Regime Uncertainty: Are Interest-Rate Movements Consistent with the Hypothesis?

Regime uncertainty has gained increasing recognition as the current economic troubles have persisted with little or no improvement since the economy reached a cyclical trough early in 2009. As described in my 1997 paper, regime uncertainty pertains to

the likelihood that investors’ private property rights in their capital and the income it yields will be attenuated further by government action. Such attenuations can arise from many sources, ranging from simple tax-rate increases, to the imposition of new kinds of taxes, to outright confiscation of private property. Many intermediate threats can arise from various sorts of regulation, for instance, of securities markets, labor markets, and product markets. In any event, the security of private property rights rests not so much on the letter of the law as on the character of the government that enforces, or threatens, presumptive rights.

In the latter half of the 1930s, many investors feared that the government would destroy the private enterprise system and replace it with fascism, socialism, or some other extreme transformation of the existing economic order.

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 1:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Brady

The Weird Fashion for Bashing Faith Schools

Brendan O'Neill is in top form.

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, August 21, 2010

David T. Beito

Ron Paul on the Mosque Fiasco

Ron Paul is a rare example of a politician who gets better with age. In this statement he scores a direct hit on conservative anti-mosque hysteria:

“The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.
“Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

Posted on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 11:47 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Gus diZerega

No Copyright Law may have fueled German Development

Germany's intellectual and economic development apparently was aided by the lack of enforceable copyright law.

Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David T. Beito

More on Demolition of Black-Owned Homes In Montgomery, Alabama (Short But Powerful)

Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 10:54 AM | Comments (4) | Top

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Mark Brady

Neal Ascherson Reviews the New Biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper

Good stories, memorable lines.

Posted on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 5:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Robert Higgs

Can the Dead (Capitalism) Be Brought Back to Life?

I pose this question seriously, not as a physiologist, but as an economic historian. I am provoked to raise the question by an advertisement that Amazon sent me recently, calling my attention a book titled Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy. Seeing this sales pitch, my immediate reaction was my usual sadly amused reply to such a question: Can capitalism survive? What an odd question! Assuming that capitalism ever existed at all, it has been dead for at least a century.

At first glance, I did not recognize that the book being advertised is one for which, in a sense, I am responsible. It turns out that the “new” book is only an old (portion of a) book, now adorned by a new subtitle and two new introductory paragraphs by the Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson. If I reveal that the book’s author is Joseph A. Schumpeter, many readers will recognize it immediately as Part II of that famous economist’s best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, first published in 1942, with subsequent editions in 1947 and 1950.

Posted on Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 9:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

C.J. Maloney

The Mob Disapproves

First Lady’s have “poll numbers?” Who knew…

Posted on Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

The Trillion Dollar Question: Should the National Debt be Repudiated?

I have been predicting that the U.S. government would default on its debt since 1993. At the time, no one else was making such an outlandish forecast. Now those who are discussing the prospect as at least a realistic possibility are far too numerous to cite. But worth mentioning are the recent Congressional Budget Office issue brief, which substitutes the word "restructure" for "default," and two articles by economist Laurence Kotlikoff, one in the Financial Times and the other for Bloomberg.

What is more interesting is that a few have begun advocating a U.S. debt repudiation.

Posted on Saturday, August 14, 2010 at 5:19 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Friday, August 13, 2010

Jonathan J. Bean

“Born in the U.S.A.”: Damon Root’s Reminder of our Proud Exceptionalism

From Damon Root’s “Hit and Run” blog over at Reason, a splendid reminder of how open-minded (and open border) the United States was in the 19th century. Imagine Republicans standing up and arguing that the Chinese and all other immigrants have a “natural right” to migrate wherever they choose. And the Republicans preserved the right of their children to be here as full-fledged citizens born on U.S. soil. (They lost the 1882 debate over Chinese entry into the USA but correctly predicted that the Exclusion Act would be remembered as a “blot” on our civilization).

From the Fourteenth Amendment (1870):

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 11:47 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

C.J. Maloney

A Moment of Clarity

Finally, amidst the carnage, someone looks up instead of down and comes to a perfectly rational conclusion regarding the supremely idiotic War on Drugs. It is said that Afghanistan is America’s longest running war – that is incorrect. Our War on Drugs has been decades long, and is all the sadder because it is us we are hitting over the head. I hope for the sake of the Mexican people that they listen to Mr. Fox, and I hope for the sake of the American people that we listen, too.

Posted on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 9:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, August 9, 2010

David T. Beito

Great Zora Neale Hurston Footage

The libertarian-oriented black novelist Zora Neale Hurston (who also briefly appears) filmed this footage in 1928 chronicling her anthropological field work. The scenes include a baptism and Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the last slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1859.