Presented by Tom Woods at the Mises Circle in Houston, 14 January 2012. Includes an introduction by Douglas E. French.
Apparently, you are supposed to think you only have a choice this coming presidential election between a big-government, status-quo Democrat or a big-government, status-quo Republican and that no matter who you vote for, it will be for naught when it comes to tackling the deficit.…
A featured article in this month’s issue of Mother Jones is entitled “Rich People Create Jobs! And five other myths that must die for our economy to live.” If rich people don’t create jobs, where do they come from? Hmm… You can see where the argument is going. The gist…
David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who wrote Dubya’s “Axis of Evil” line, doesn’t like Ron Paul for president, and doesn’t think you should, either. He makes a pretty convincing case. Let’s look. Paul is “a boutique candidate, appealing to a very particular fringe within the GOP.” Yes, we wouldn’t want…
FPJ — Paul Krugman tried to slam Ron Paul in his most recent column by writing: Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode,…
FPJ — WWPKD? Much more than Ben Bernanke has done. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Krugman criticizes the Federal Reserve chairman following his much-anticipated Jackson Hole announcement for not doing enough to reduce unemployment and foster economic growth. But he spares Bernanke his strongest criticism, which he reserves…
I previously observed how Paul Krugman recently argued that the U.S. government must not cut spending and balance the budget because running up endless debt that can never be repaid is good for the economy. You can go read what he said for yourselves, but that’s it in a nutshell.…
“I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush.” — Senator Barack Obama, May 2008 Omissions of Grandeur The New York Times reports on a U.N. report that criticizes Israel for killing several protestors who attempted to cross the border fence from Lebanon in May. The…
A U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Congress shall have the power “To regulate Commerce … among the several States”) means the federal government can coerce you under threat of punishment into purchasing services from private companies. Among other Orwellian arguments, the…
Foreign Policy magazine this month features an article entitled “Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade“, which is a decent overview of the opium problem – as far as it goes. Unsurprisingly, however, in doing so, it proverbially ignores the elephant in the room, and in doing so represents part of…
Foreign Policy Journal — Michael Lind writes a top-9 list of “most annoying sky-is-falling clichés in American foreign policy” under the headline “So Long, Chicken Little” in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy, with his second pick being, “The world must adapt quickly to the end of fossil fuels”, including…
The Independent has this headline: “Britain punishes Israel for Gaza naval bombardment“. Britain’s “punishment” is to revoke five licenses for arms exports to Israel. The article explains: The British Government has reacted to Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza last January by barring further exports of components used in naval…
The global economy continues to shudder under the impact of the U.S. financial crisis. Reuters reports that “From Iceland to Italy, officials scrambled to contain the fallout from the deepest financial crisis since the 1930s…. European banks have been hit hard by the fallout from a crisis which began in the…
The New York Times reports that to meet the present financial crisis, the privately owned Federal Reserve is “resorting to the oldest action in its book”, printing more money out of nothing for which Americans are charged interest to use, as the House of Representatives rejected a recent bailout bill proposed…
There is continuing talk that the cause of ever-increasing oil prices is the result of a speculative investment “bubble”. As an example, a Washington Post subtitle the other day read, “Trading Loophole for Wall Street Speculators Is Driving Up Prices, Critics Say”. This seems to be increasingly becoming the given…
World leaders met at the U.N. this week to discuss the growing food crisis in which the cost of food around the globe continues to increase. Conclusions reached included that more food aid should be delivered to the hungry, small farmers should be provided with seeds and fertilizer, restrictions on…
There still remains some controversy over the real reasons the U.S. went to war in Iraq. The official reasons for the war, that Iraq had WMD and threatened to supply them to terrorist organizations, namely al-Qaeda, intent upon using them against the U.S., have long since proven to be false…
The corporation is, by nature, an exploitative entity. I’ve pointed this out in conversation only to have the notion summarily rejected, the defense being that this corporation or that corporation is not exploitative, so the hypothesis must therefore be false. The fallacy should be obvious enough, however, to the careful…
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