Lots of great stuff on teh interwebs recently. HT to everyone for links to the following:

1. Will Wilkinson on "The Progressive Fallacy on Free Speech." A good passage: "Corporations are not essentially villainous agglomerations of money and power. They are a convenient form of social organization that enables large numbers of people to undertake cooperative endeavors."

2. Speaking of progressives and conservatives, Steve Horwitz talks about constitutional consistency. Why have constitutions if we're just going to chuck them out the window when they get inconvenient?

3. Speaking of consistency and the Constitution, Andrew Napolitano argues that military tribunals for suspected terrorists are unconstitutional without a formal declaration of war. Presumably, we have a constitution to prevent just this kind of thing.

4. Speaking of Steve Horwitz, here's his new NBR post. The takeaway point, which I'll add to future discussions of capital, production, and macroeconomics: capital goods are more like legos than like Play-Doh.

5. Roderick Long discusses the tea party movement. So does Gene Healy. As always, I wonder what the starting point is for narratives of decline. I'm also a little concerned that some of the tea partying isn't so much about principled objections to government power as it is about people being upset that someone else might get the first-class upgrades they were expecting on the government subsidy gravy train (cf. "keep your government hands off my Medicare").

6. Radley Balko discusses a new article in The American Conservative that takes an impressively data-driven look at the relationship between immigration and crime and finds that, contrary to a lot of hysteria, immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) aren't causing a crime wave. I agree with Radley: given the resonance of all things anti-foreign with a lot of conservatives, this was a gutsy journalistic move for AmConMag. I'm guessing that Darryl Weathers from the Construction Workers' Union is not amused.

7. Speaking of foreigners, people have complained that the Chinese are manipulating their currency. As Mark J. Perry explains, they're doing us a favor if they manipulate their currency to make their exports cheaper.