A Credibility Meltdown for the World's Leading Climate Scientists
NewLiberty on the LvMI Forum shares a bevy of links covering the recent climate scandal that seems likely to become even bigger than the Yamal Controversy...
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091120/full/news.2009.1101.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8370282.stm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576009,00.html
"So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics."
...as well as a torrent of the actual leaked emails and documents.
Elsewhere in the web, the heroic Bishop Hill provides us with an extensive collection of summaries of some of the more interesting "CRUgate" e-mails.
But LvMI Forum member Le Master has his own choice nugget to share. He enjoins us to particularly "check out the PDF in the documents folder. It's a five-page document titled The Rules of the Game. It seems to be like a primer for propagating the AGW message to the average subject of the UK. The document suggests that it is a precis of a longer document housed at the Web site of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs."
Hopefully some readers here will follow Le Master's example and make the leaked emails and documents their weekend reading, and post what they find here or on the relevant forum thread. Many eyes make light work!
Let's give them something to talk about in Copenhagen.
Bleed this patient more, more, more
NYT: New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step
Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.
It might be fun to think of similar headlines in history, e.g.: New Consensus in Salem Sees Too Few Witches Burned.
Common Misconceptions about Plagiarism and Patents: A Call for an Independent Inventor Defense
Defenders of patents commonly say they are against innovators' ideas being "stolen" or "plagiarized." This implies that patents simply permit an innovator to sue those who copy his idea. This position betrays either disingenuity or ignorance about patent law. Let me explain.
Under copyright law, someone who independently creates an original work similar to another author's original work is not liable for copyright infringement, since the independent creation is not a reproduction of the other author's work. Thus, for example, a copyright defendant can try to show he never had access to the other's work, as a defense. The reason for this is that the fundamental copyright is, well, a right to copy one's original creative work. By the nature of creative works that are subject to copyright, it is very unlikely someone would independently create the same novel, say, or painting, as another author. (And if copyright only protected literal copying, it would be much less a problem; but unfortunately it protects a bundle of rights including also the right to make "derivative works".) But, in the rare case where author 2 independently creates a work very similar to that of author 1, it is not an infringement of author 1's copyright, since author 2 did not copy anything.
Patent law is different. Very different. Most defenders of IP do not seem to be aware of this difference--one reason they should not be opining in favor of legal regimes they know little about. When patent defenders say that patent abolitionists are in favor of plagiarism and idea theft, they imply that patent law is like copyright law--that it simply prevents people from copying others' ideas.
Continue reading "Common Misconceptions about Plagiarism and Patents: A Call for an Independent Inventor Defense" »
John Mackey on Mises
"Also, I don't think von Mises and Hayek and the other Austrian economists have gotten enough credit for.. . their theory of the business cycle. I really do think we are experiencing. .. what Austrian business cycle predicts. If you print a lot of money and you send it through the economy you'll have certain bubbles and those create market distortions and if the bubble's big enough and it goes on long enough when it pops, it creates great harm in the society. I think that's what we're living through right now. That kind of bubble in the stock market and the real estate market."
Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement
I posted the following comment to Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing post Competition and Google Book Search:
Cory, Google is not perfect but the attacks on them for attempting this seem to me to be demonizing the wrong party. The problem is copyright law--a state legal system. The state is, as usual, to blame. Why some people are trusting the same state that foists IP law on us to protect is us mystifying. In attacking Google they are allying with the state (see my post Google Digital Library Plan Opposed by German Chancellor), which is the real enemy. I don't see any choice for google to accomplish the quasi-digital libertarian of orphan and other works other than its creative legal-settlement route.
Continue reading "Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement" »
Omnipotent Government: Fantastic New Look
Libertarian Press owns the rights to Omnipotent Government by Mises, and we couldn't strike a deal to publish it ourselves, so we did the next best thing: we designed a great cover for it and asked them to do a special print run. This is an amazing work by Mises, better than Road to Serfdom by Hayek and probably the most anti-Nazi book ever published, especially because he rightly examines the essential socialism behind Hitler's regime.
Truly hard to believe
The far-left is worried that Obama is excessively influenced by Ludwig von Mises.
I know. It's nuts. Discussion on the forum.
A Pro-Free-Market Program for Economic Recovery
The most important single step on the road to economic recovery is the establishment of a 100-percent reserve system against checking deposits. Ideally, the 100-percent reserve would be in gold. FULL ARTICLE by George Reisman
The Myth of the "Old Right"
The writers and intellectuals who made up the most visible contingent of the "Old Right" were in no meaningful sense on the Right at all. They were on the Left, where they had always been. FULL ARTICLE by Jeff Riggenbach
Good Inflation
Cash-economizing inflation is benign because it is an outcome of individuals striving to optimize their property holdings through the voluntary exchange process. Indeed, it improves economic welfare. FULL ARTICLE by Joseph T. Salerno
R.I.P. Rocky
While the debate is revving up in Washington this week to decide how the government intends to take over the healthcare industry, the passing of my childhood doctor has me remembering how it used to be.
"For four decades, untold numbers of Abilene area residents called Dr. Rorabaugh their doctor. He started practicing in Abilene in 1959 back in the days when doctors charged $3 or $4 per visit and made house calls."
Financial Censorship Growing
If you want to buy a book or DVD from the Web site of Writer David Irving, you'll no longer be able to use your American Express card, and that wasn't Irving's idea. It was the idea, evidently, of New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents the district of Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York. Accusing Irving of neo-Nazism for Irving's defense of Adolf Hitler's actions as Führer of Nazi Germany and his revisionist inquiries into the Holocaust, Hikind wrote a letter to American Express and got eleven other New York elected officials to add their signatures to his.
Congress, of course, got the ball rolling for financial censorship in a big way when it barred use of credit cards to fund bets with offshore gaming Web sites, but this might be the first case of a "private" shutdown at the initiative of a group not exercising actual "legal" power over the card operator.
You can still buy books and DVDs, even reserve a place at a series of private meetings he's holding with fans in the US (Irving is British) currently using your Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal accounts, at least so far. Hikind may not be pursuing the matter further as he's currently in Israel, encouraging Americans to purchase real estate in East Jerusalem on formerly Jordanian territory occupied by Israel since its 1967 War.
Economists Can Be Hilarious
Given our dismal reputation, I am happy to report that some economists' recent defenses of the efficient-markets hypothesis are laugh-out-loud funny. Just watch EMH economists try to defend their theory from either refutation or triviality. FULL ARTICLE by Robert P. Murphy
The Strike-Threat System
While the book primarily concerns itself with the economic consequences of the strike-threat in our labor market, it presents an equally devastating argument for the superiority of the free market in the determination of the wage rates of labor. FULL ARTICLE by Robert G. Anderson
Taxes
It is said, "There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts upon industry: it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself." FULL ARTICLE by Frederic Bastiat
Tucker Speaking on IP
Jeffrey Tucker will be giving a lecture on the evils of Intellectual Property this afternoon at Auburn University. He will be in the Student Center Room 2107 from 5:30-6:30. This should be an exciting event for those who are able to make it on such short notice.
Here is Jeffrey Tucker's lecture from yesterday evening.
The Fed Plan: Two More Years of Stupid Things
The WSJ reports on an interview with a Fed official who says that the central bank will keep rates at 0% for two more years at least. But right now, banks have no reason to lend (zero earnings) and no one has any reason to save (zero earnings), and the risk associated with long-term projects is nowhere reflected in these obviously phony rates signals. What's striking too is that the plan hasn't work, just as it didn't work in Japan. And yet the Fed persists.
End of an Era for Hillsdale?
Hillsdale College is starting a Charter School, and while there is no mention of this in the press release, Charter Schools rely on government money. That's what makes them different from regular private schools. Here is a 1989 explanation by George Roche of the long struggle of this college against ever accepting government money.
It turns out that the housing rebound was illusory
It is possible to know what is in the papers without reading them.
NYT: New home construction slowed unexpectedly in October to the lowest level in six months, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, resurrecting fears that the housing market may be slow to recover.
Beckmann's Economics as if Some People Mattered, or, Small is Not Beautiful
The late, great Dr. Petr Beckmann was editor of the great journal Access to Energy, founder of the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links), author of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (Amazon; PDF version) and the pamphlets The Non-Problem of Nuclear Waste and Why "Soft" Technology Will Not Be America's Energy Salvation. (See also my post Access to Energy, and this post.)
I just came across another favorite piece of his and have scanned it in: Economics as if Some People Mattered (review of Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher), first published in Reason (October 1978), and reprinted in Free Minds & Free Markets: Twenty-Five Years of Reason (1993). Those (including some libertarians and fellow travelers) who also have a thing for "smallness" and bucolic pastoralism should give this a read. Some excerpts:
Small is Beautiful is the title of a book by E.F. Schumacher. It is also a slogan describing a state of mind in which people clamor for the rural idyll that (they think) comes with primitive energy sources, small-scale production, and small communities. Yet much--perhaps most--of their clamor is not really for what they consider small and beautiful; it is for the destruction of what they consider big and ugly.
... The free market does not, of course, eradicate human greed, but it directs it into channels that the consumer the maximum benefit, for it is he who benefits from the competition of"profit-greedy" businessmen. The idea that the free market is highly popular among businessmen is one that is widespread, but not among sound economists. It was not very popular in 1776, when Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was pulished, and it has not become terribly popular with all of them since--which is not surprising, for the free market benefits the consumer but disciplines the businessman.
If the free market is so popular with business, what are all those business lobbies doing in Washington? The shipping lobby wants favors for U.S. ships; the airlines yell rape and robbery when deregulation from the governmental CAB cartel threatens; the farmers' lobby clamors for more subsidies. Whatall these lobbies are after is not a freer market but a bigger nipple on the federal sow.
And also Lew Rockwell's Rockwell's Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, George Reisman's The Toxicity of Environmentalism and Environmentalism Refuted, and Robert James Bidinotto's Environmentalism or Individualism?, and other piece mentioned in my post Environmentalists Are a Cancer on the Earth.
More cash for fewer clunkers
The CPI rose three tenths of one percent in October and one of the big factors was the rise in used car prices. Used car prices increased 3.4% in October. This is no doubt due to the hundreds of thousands of cars taken off the market and destroyed by the cash for clunkers program. This is good news for those trading in used cars to buy a brand new one, but bad news for those struggling to get basic transportation to get to work.
Blast from the Past
Here is my interview with Lew Rockwell on Murray Rothbard's 60th birthday. Some hilarious moments and really great insights. You will enjoy this. The book we are discussing is Man, Economy, and Liberty. Here is the media page. If you like this and would like some more along these lines, let me know.
The Market Can Regulate Automobiles
The free market possesses the means to regulate itself. Automobiles are not too important to be left to the free market to manage. They are too important to be left to government. FULL ARTICLE by Daniel Hewitt
Rothbard's Magnificent Essay on Mises
No one has yet done what Murray N. Rothbard has so brilliantly succeeded in doing in The Essential von Mises. He has given us, in a brief but remarkably comprehensive form, an outline of Dr. Mises's outstanding contributions. FULL ARTICLE by Henry Hazlitt
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