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Is It a Curse to Have a Printing Press?

Michael Pettis seems to think so, in this blog post (HT2 Tim Swanson): …I was recently interviewed for a TV show about – yet again – the awful continuing prospects for the dollar as a the dominant reserve currency. Besides expressing my deepest skepticism that the most recent hullabaloo about the dollar was likely to […]

Changing Demographics Will Wreck Social Security and the Stock Market

During a meeting with my co-author Carlos Lara yesterday, he raised a point that is obvious but that I had never considered: As the US population ages, this will exert huge selling pressures on the US stock market. Why? Because 401(k)s and other IRS-created retirement vehicles have a built-in exit point. As Nelson Nash explained […]

Potpourri

* A review of Gene Callahan’s novel, Puck. Incidentally, I read Gene’s book and thought it was cool. But it’s a bit weird. (Basically, my opinion of Gene.) * A scathing review of Transformers 2. My friend warned me off this (over the phone) when I was standing outside a movie theater during a recent […]

The Bogus Deflation Scare

This is amazing; a Bloomberg article explains why we don’t need to fear falling prices! (HT2 Jeff Tucker) I almost wonder if the guy read my book the Depression, because here his analysis is very similar to mine: In reality, anyone with a sense of economic history would have been aware that the whole deflation […]

Nevada Development Campaign Taunts California Legislators

I didn’t realize they were so blatant about it… Anyway the Nevada Development Campaign makes a compelling argument to business owners to relocate out of the Golden State. I’ll be writing an op ed on this in the next few days, which will have the relevant stats (like how many people moved out of California […]

Robert Novak Dies at 78; My Favorite Novak Clip

Conservative columnist Bob Novak has died at 78. Below is my favorite Novak clip, where he decided that James Carville wasn’t worth any more of his time.

Judge Rules That Google Must Give Up Name of Anonymous Blogger in Defamation Suit

This doesn’t seem like a good sign: A Manhattan judge ruled yesterday that a blogger can’t hide behind a web of anonymity while flinging the ugly words “skank” and “ho” at somebody online. The sternly worded ruling orders Google to give up the identity of an anonymous blogger-assailant who inexplicably devoted an entire blog — […]

Wouldn’t Rich People Go On Murder Sprees In a System of Private Law?

In the previous post, I relayed some (good) objections from a reader of my pamphlet [.pdf] describing a stateless society. One of the objections went like this (paraphrasing): “In Murphy’s vision, ‘crimes’ are actually codified contractually, and the punishments are typically monetary. So that means rich people could go on killing sprees, and just pay […]