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Murphy vs. (Hernando) de Soto

In this month’s Ideas on Liberty, I take on Hernando de Soto’s WSJ op ed calling for stricter regulation of derivatives. An excerpt: Regardless of what caused the crisis, government efforts to regulate derivatives will only lock in undesirable aspects of the current market and ensure that politically connected players reap artificial gains. It is […]

The Danger in Macroeconomic Tautologies

Tyler Cowen has been on fire lately. Check out this: You’ll also read many commentators breaking national income into its components of C, I, G, and X-M (consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports) and asking where the growth will “come from” to “drive” the recovery. Of course national income accounting is an identity, so […]

Would North Korea Get Spanked by its Neighbor?

I cannot verify the claims of this FFF piece (HT2AWC), but the author, Carlton Meyer, is a former “U.S. Marine Corps officer who participated in military exercises in Korea.” He writes: If North Korea attacked South Korea, the South Koreans would fight from mountainous and urban terrain which heavily favors defense, and complete air superiority […]

Austrians: Our Victory Is Complete

Discussing Krugman’s racy PIMCO quote, Scott Sumner says: As everyone knows by now the once kooky and discredited Austrian business cycle model has now become conventional wisdom. Easy money creates bubbles, which inevitably cause depressions when they pop. It’s Greenspan’s fault. Paul and I are still not on board the Vienna express, but we are […]

What’s the Best Way to Short Treasurys?

Von Pepe sends these articles (here and here) on ways to short U.S. Treasurys. If anyone has free time and a Bloomberg, can you give us some scenarios with current prices? E.g. I’m interesting in statements like: “If you buy this particular put option on 10-year Treasury futures, then on January 2, 2011, so long […]

Random Thoughts on Faith and Reason

* If nothing else, people who go to church once a week are reminded 4 times a month that there exists Truth with a capital T. That fact alone gives otherwise “simple” people a tremendous advantageous over much more clever atheists who subscribe to modern doctrines that deny this. * The most important question about […]

Franklin Sanders, the "most dangerous man in the mid-South"

Betsy Hansen, a summer fellow at the Mises Institute, has a good article today at LRC describing the fate of a guy who fought the fiat money system: Mr. Sanders fought gallantly given the impossible circumstances in which he found himself. He ran a gold and silver bank for more than a decade, serving customers […]

Restitution versus Retribution

One of the areas where I am more advanced–or misguided, depending on your viewpoint–than most of my conventional libertarian colleagues regards prison. Simply put, I think the institution of prison itself is a barbaric, counterproductive relic of State involvement in law enforcement. The typical libertarian thinks that in a just society, only actual aggressors would […]