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
Keynes, the Man
Maynard was tapped for coveted membership in the secret society of the Apostles, an organization that rapidly shaped his values and his life. Keynes grew to social and intellectual maturity within its confines. FULL ARTICLE by Murray N. Rothbard
Curing Virulent Health Care Myths in the LvMI Forum
In my last post on recent discussions in the Mises Institute Forum, I highlighted the "ardor for erudition" among Forum members. However, the Forum's gaze is not only drawn to timeless truths and aureate authors. Hot-button issues are also given their due.
Regarding such issues, there are a great many virulent myths floating around out there in the internet leftyverse; it's easy to get infected by one. So, many come to the LvMI forum as a sort of intellectual clinic for an argumentative antidote against the latest strain of strained state apologia.
One of the issues most stricken with fallacies, and thus most in need of curative care, has been health care itself. In the following, I will quote the three best recent posts on this topic.
Forum Member "Snowflake" reported the passage of Obama's healthcare bill in the House with his own splendidly biting commentary:
220-215. 50.6% voted for the plan, 49.4% against. Rounding up the winners' vote to 100% and the losers vote down to 0%, democracy is clearly of the people and by the people.
The Affordable Health Care for America Act will apply to everyone whether they want it or not because that's just how it works this is a democracy case closed.
A short summary of provisions is posted on wikipedia, but I would like to add some clarifying notes for all those naysayers out there who doubt the wisdom and good will of lobbyists who spent millions of their own dollars pushing this bill through. All for our benefit.
They are as follows:
"prohibit health insurers from charging different rates based on patients' medical histories or gender [and] prohibit health insurers from refusing coverage based on patients' medical histories" Because you have a right to the pooled resources of other people. They have NO right to deny you entry into their free and voluntary associations."repeal of the exemption for insurance companies from anti-trust laws" Because otherwise government would be in violation of anti trust laws, and government is NOT a monopoly.
"requiring most employers to provide coverage for their workers or pay a surtax on the worker's wages up to 8%" Because those greedy employers hate poor people! If the government didn't require employers to offer health benefits they wouldn't."An expansion of Medicare to all low income Americans." Because what if someone needed pharmaceuticals or they'd die? We need to stop people from dieing so lets massively expand the pharm industry. It had an annual 17% growth rate before this bill, I wonder what will happen next? :D
"provide a subsidy to low to middle income Americans to help buy insurance." The subsidy will also be paid for by low and middle income Americans."a central insurance exchange where the public can compare policies and rates" Because that information isn't available anywhere else!
"a government run insurance plan (public option)" Because the free market isn't competitive enough for some reason..."requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance or face penalties" Because people are dumb! What if you had an accident and didn't have insurance? You should have bought insurance! For your own good you should be forced to buy some.
"a 5.4% tax on personal income over $500,000 (individuals) or $1,000,000 (families)" Because those people are rich and greedy! Don't worry though, The valuable rich people of society like doctors and lawyers will more than break even under our expanded health care system.
"reductions in projected spending on Medicare by $400 million per year" Because we'll spend less... eventually. But right now we need to expand the $#@! out of health care. We can stay on budget just like we always do.
"a 2.5% excise tax on medical devices" Because we're going to pay for health care by taxing health care...
Anyway, I hope this answers your questions! Libertarians just seem not to get it. Hang in there mises people, you'll come around sometime ;)
In his thread "How Do you Talk to the Average Person about Health Care?" Forum member "Democracy For Breakfast" posed the following condundrum:
A lot of people buy onto the myth that Canada's health care system is "flourishing", I don't know why but everyone seems to think that Canada has a great system.
"Poptech" responded with a mini-armory of some excellent resources:
This part is easy, have them watch these videos:
Health Care: Does Canada Do It Better? (Video) (6min) (ABC News)
Sick in America (Video) (41min) (ABC News)
And read the following:
Canadacare May Have Killed Natasha (New York Post)
Canadian Health Care (Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Wait times for surgery in Canada at all-time high: study (CBC, Canada)In Canada, the average wait for a simple MRI is three months. In Manitoba, the median wait for neurosurgery is 15.2 months. For chemotherapy in Saskatchewan, patients can expect to be in line for 10 weeks. At last report, 10,000 breast cancer patients who waited an average of two months for post-operation radiation treatments have filed a class action lawsuit against Quebec's hospitals.
In his thread "Why Is Healthcare So Expensive?" Forum member "jct181" asked...
I understand why a universal healthcare plan will drive healthcare costs up. But why is American healthcare currently so expensive? What is going on in the current market that is keeping costs up?
"Bogart" came forward and answered with an excellent summation:
Here are my top 5 reasons in order of most significant to least significant. These are all caused by government intervention in the marketplace for health care:
1. Price/Payment Fixing by Medicare, CHIP, Medicaid, etc make it difficult for people without insurance to afford health care. Moreover the government has laws about who care providers can serve and what they can charge if participating in these programs. So health care providers have no reason to to compete on price as all the folks using these services have no incentive to economize. The result of this fascism is predictable: Higher prices and Fewer Choices.
2. Regulation of the development, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, advertising, etc of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, alternative medicine etc only helps those large organizations who have expertise in managing the process over those other providers. For example: Kellogs is removing a claim on cholesterol reduction under pressure from the FDA. Why, who does this help, it certainly does not help consumers of food. It does help cholesterol reducing pharmaceuticals.
3. Licensing of doctors, nurses, etc. These licenses are extremely difficult to get. They are given out by "accredited" agencies to people they favor only. The medical industry would save billions by letting the licensing be done by private organizations. Then people would have the ability to request the certifications of their providers. You can have the following done by non-certified people: parenting, educating, communicating, manufacturing, producing food, etc. Why does the government need to license doctors when it does not license who makes your food?
4. Regulation of insurers, people are not allowed to buy insurance across state lines and insurers have lots of mandates on them that increase costs. If the mandates were removed and people could buy insurance across state OR BETTER YET INTERNATIONAL boundaries then the price would be dramatically reduced.
5. Insane liability system for negligence. This part is completely nuts. There is a weird lottery where the whole system is at the whims of a jury. How about a system where the two parties the plaintiff and defendant each select an arbitrator or agree on one to hear the case. Then the arbitrators would pick a third who has binding authority. This would not only save billions but would be much fairer to those who have been damaged.
Social democrats like to point to health care as one of "their" issues, because to them, the case for government-provided universal health care is a slam dunk. But a Misesian, armed as he or she is with the insights of the Austrian tradition, isn't even given pause by such presumptuous preening. Whether the issue is health care, education, or even public roads, sacred cows are always on the menu in the LvMI Forum.
A Mathematician, A Different Kind of Mathematician & A Statistician
Barack Obama named his first two appointees to the Federal Trade Commission today. Befitting a body that has the unrestricted power to regulate every U.S. company without regard to the Constitution or the laws of economics, Obama named two career lawyers in good standing with the antitrust establishment:
President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals today:
Julie Brill, Nominee for Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Julie Brill became the Senior Deputy Attorney General and Chief of Consumer Protection and Antitrust for the North Carolina Department of Justice in February 2009. A resident of North Carolina and Vermont, Brill is also a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia University's School of Law. Prior to her leadership at the North Carolina Department of Justice, Brill was an Assistant Attorney General for Consumer Protection and Antitrust for the State of Vermont for over 20 years (1988-2009). Brill has also served as a Vice-Chair of the Consumer Protection Committee of the American Bar Association Antitrust Section since 2004...
Edith Ramirez, Nominee for Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Edith Ramirez is a partner in the Los Angeles office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, LLP where she specializes in intellectual property and complex litigation matters. She has a broad range of experience representing plaintiffs and defendants in copyright, trademark, antitrust, business tort, and other general business litigation cases...
For those keeping score, with Brill and Ramirez the FTC will now consist of two law firm partners specializing in antitrust, one former state assistant attorney general for antitrust, a law professor who specialized in antitrust, and a former staff lawyer for the Senate's antitrust subcommittee. If that's not diversity, I don't know what is.
MyMises
I was pleased to receive a call from a user who is devoted to the MyMises feature of Mises.org in the top right hand part of the header (it appears from anyone who registers in the community). He says that it is the most valuable feature of the site. It allows him to run across a great article or sound file or whatever and save it for later reading. He then is able to maintain a complete record and archive of the items on the website that he appreciates the most. It also assembles your own tags and tagged documents for archiving purposes.
Salamanca Live Blog