Potpourri
==> Lew Rockwell has a forthcoming manifesto on anarcho-capitalism.
==> Hmm, this is one case where fiat money may have been preferable.
==> Responding (on Twitter) to my Mises Canada post about TARP, John Taylor reminds us of some of the details of Paulson’s offer that banksters couldn’t refuse.
==> Arnold Kling on Solow on Piketty (HT2 MR). Money line: “Piketty’s nightmare scenario, in which capital accumulates and has a high return, is a terrific scenario for wages in absolute terms.” As someone who wrote a dissertation on capital & interest theory and heard crickets for years, I’m excited that people actually care about this stuff. In retrospect, I should have been a Marxist.
==> Wait, do I sound cynical? Let me quote from this Slate article:
It sounds like a bad joke: America’s liberals have fallen for a Marx-referencing, Balzac-loving French intellectual who has proposed a worldwide tax on wealth. If Thomas Piketty (pronounced “Tome-AH PEEK-et-ee”) were not traveling around the United States on a triumphant book tour, you might think Rush Limbaugh had made the man up in one of his more blustery rants.
But no, he is quite real. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty’s 685-page tome about the history and future of inequality, has improbably climbed to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.
==> A reader of Free Advice sends an appropriate YouTube he created. And Steve Miller-Miller (a comedian in the libertarian world who wrote the sketch “Everybody’s a Little Statist Sometimes”) calls in to the Mike Salvi show to explain why being a fry cook is better than being a libertarian activist. (WARNING: The young kids these days have potty mouths.)
Bon, do you plan on writing something on Piketty’s book, for Mises Canada or something?
Bob*
In retrospect, I should have been a Marxist.
Krugman could have been your Engels.
I also talk about how anarchy would work in a practical sense.
That should be … interesting.
Is he going to tell us about the feudal estates of tiny, medieval Iceland, or cell phone towers in glorious modern-day Somalia?