--Art Carden

Here's David Friedman on anarcho-capitalism, embedded at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. You can get, among other things, the first edition of his classic The Machinery of Freedom at his website. This would, of course, make an excellent companion for a reading group studying For a New Liberty.

Addendum: Here's Friedman arguing that we should get rid of criminal law. It's great background for data entry on the history of legal systems.

--Art Carden

1. Chris Coyne and I are working on a couple of papers and a short book about the Memphis Riot of 1866. Here's the first paper. We're presenting the project at the Instituto Bruno Leoni's Mises Seminar in October and, we hope, a few other places this coming academic year.

2. My blogging here at DOL is going to get lighter going forward. In addition to being absolutely slammed with research commitments until about 2112, I'm going to be writing a weekly column for Forbes.com (my so-far-irregular contributions to date are here) and twice-weekly posts for the Mises Economics Blog. I'll be fighting a more systematic battle against economic illiteracy at a rate of about 1200 words per week.

--Craig Depken

From the July 27, 1910 NYT:

Mother Earth, like all femininity, defies man to learn her age. Scientists still admit their defeat. Their latest estimate credits her with "not above 70,000,000 years or below 55,000,000 years."

This estimate, given in a publication by the Smithsonian Institution, is the result of studies by Frank Wigglesworth Clarke and George F. Becker of the United States Geological Survey. Prof. Clarke, in a paper entitled "A Preliminary Study of Chemical Denudation," presents a review of all available data of the proposition from a chemical point of view. Mr. Becker discusses the question, in a paper on "The Age of the Earth," from a philosophical point of view.

Philosophy vs. chemistry? I think I would take the chemistry.

From today's Wikipedia entry:

The age of the Earth is around 4.54 billion years (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%). This age has been determined by radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples.

Well, at least the scientists/philosophers from 1910 were closer to the truth (albeit just a few orders of magnitude away) than those who claim the Earth is only 6,000 years of so old.

--Art Carden

From AL.com. How many other cities have spent $850,000 on lobbyists since 2008 fighting for the same contracts and funding? Here's co-blogger Mike Munger's great article "Rent-Seek and You Will Find."

--Lawrence H. White

Great news: George Selgin's important work The Theory of Free Banking is now freely available online at the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty site. This is essential reading for anyone wondering whether there is a viable alternative to our failed central banking regime.

P. S. Anyone includes Thomas Sargent, whose interesting recent working paper on the question of laissez faire versus legal restrictions in money and banking would benefit from some reference to the free banking literature beyond the work of Neil Wallace.

--Edward J. Lopez

Here is an example that complements the usual money examples.

Google Invests in Wind Farm
Barbara Hernandez, PC World
Jul 20, 2010 7:28 pm

Google plans to become carbon neutral at the same time promote green energy by entering into a 20-year agreement to buy power from an Iowa wind farm. The farm, part of NextEra Energy Resources in Story and Hardin counties, will sell Google 114 megawatts of renewable power. Google says that the energy it will buy is enough to power several of its data centers.

[...]

In reality, Google will not directly power its server farms with NextEra Energy. ... The wind energy Google buys, it explains, will be sold back to the regional grid. That in turn reduces -- by 114 megawatts -- the amount of non-renewable energy created to maintain the regional power grid.

--Lawrence H. White

The government's fondness for spending without taxing implies, through the government budget constraint G = T + ΔD + ΔM, some combination of the compulsions to borrow and to print money.

In the latest installment of the Econ Journal Watch podcast series , I talk to Jeff Hummel about the intersection of debt finance and seigniorage. Will Greece, Spain, et al., default? Or will the ECB try to inflate away its fiscal problems? What about the US? I'm worried about inflation, but Hummel argues that default is a political equilibrium: it stiffs foreign creditors without angering domestic money-holders.

--Lawrence H. White

Kurt Schuler's applause-worthy new project is an ongoing effort to build a freely accessible comprehensive database of historical financial statistics for as many countries and as many years as possible. The initial framework is now online here, hosted by the Center for Financial Stability. Researchers are invited to use the database and to contribute to filing in the gaps. Data series include:
•Exchange rates: low-frequency data.
•Monetary authorities: assets and liabilities; income and expenditures.
•Deposit money banks: assets and liabilities; income and expenditures.
•Other banking institutions: assets and liabilities; income and expenditures.
•Other financial institutions: assets and liabilities; income and expenditures.
•Monetary aggregates.
•Interest rates: low-frequency data.
•Prices, production, labor.
•International transactions
•Government finance.
•National accounts and population.
•Summary data on the history of financial institutions

--E. Frank Stephenson

This week's kerfuffle over USDA employee Shirley Sherrod reminded me of a WSJ piece from 1992 on the numer of farmers vs. the number of Agriculture Department employees. While the article, by David L. Littmann, makes a great point about USDA's bloat, it also contains a memorably silly chart. The chart, reproduced below, predicts the nonsensical situation in which there is a negative ratio of farmers to USDA bureaucrats. Of course, such a ratio could never exist because one cannot have a negative number of farmers.

--Art Carden

Here's Stossel.

Economics question:

Some commentators are calling for what might be called a strategic immigration policy whereby we allow in immigrants with good educations and good English skills. That way, they will augment our high-tech industries.

True or False? Uneducated, low-skill Mexican immigrants who speak no English do not augment the American high-tech economy. Explain your answer. Hint: Bryan Caplan has discussed something similar at Econlog, but I encourage you to try to work it out yourself before consulting The Google.

--Noel Campbell

From my Personal Yoda, Angus, over at Kids Prefer Cheese:

And so it begins.

--Edward J. Lopez

Essay question:

Consider Leonard Read's famous 1958 essay, I, Pencil:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—-no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—-if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—-well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Next consider Jeffrey Riggenbach's biographical essay, Henry David Thoreau: Founding Father of American Libertarian Thought, July 2010:

But this is not to say that [Thoreau] had no practical skills. Actually, he was a man of many skills. Not only could he teach school and make pencils and tutor children and garden and serve as a literary man's assistant, he could do all sorts of other work as well. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it in his 1880 essay on Thoreau, "there were few things that he could not do. He could make a house, a boat … or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar," and "he could do most things with unusual perfection."

Write an essay that addresses these two conflicting claims.

Hint: consider making use of the talk, "When Ideas Have Sex," by Matt Ridley, July 2010.