My sixth AOTP post is up: Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis. I start out with the Austrian theory of the business cycle and end up with anarchy. 🙂
Author Archive | Roderick
Ailin’ Palin
Heard a great line a few minutes ago from Sarah Silverman on Olbermann (paraphrasing): “Sarah Palin is as vacuous and annoying as a beauty pageant winner, but without the desire for world peace.”
On the other hand, right now I’m seeing people on Maddow’s show hooting and hollering about Palin’s ties to the Alaskan Independence Party. Now I’m not a great fan of that party or its right-wing populist agenda (it’s affiliated with the Constitution Party, ew); but the main thing that has the liberal talking heads freaked out is the party’s advocacy of secession and its un-Americanism. Well, guys, suddenly jingoistic nationalism doesn’t look so bad when your own team gets to do it, huh?
The Blessings of Compulsion
Compulsory IP licensing (where anyone can use your IP but they have to pay you a fee) is not my ideal – I favour getting rid of IP entirely – but it does seem preferable to the current system, both on rights-based grounds (having to pay to exercise your rights to free speech and press is less unjust than not being able to exercise them at all) and on consequentialist grounds (the creator of the IP can’t restrict the flow of information).
Barry Deutsch has an interesting post on AOTP arguing that comic-book artists like Jack Kirby would have benefited much more from compulsory licensing than from conventional copyright.
Dracula in Pellucidar
— Is it dark yet? Can I finally go out to feed?
— No, master, it is never dark here in Pellucidar.
— Damn.
Names and Faces
The Murphy Institute’s latest flyer has a picture of me on the cover from my 2006 visit (that’s me uncharacteristically tiny at the end of the table next to Eric Mack). Other pics include my good friend Elizabeth Brake (p. 4), my former IHS mentee Steve Wall (p. 7), and my former UNC colleagues Cheshire Calhoun (p. 10) and Tom Hill (p. 16).
In other news, my editorial collaborator Tibor Machan comments on the NY Times piece on my colleague Kelly Jolley; this may perhaps be added to the list of things one is glad to know.
Making the Grade
So Sarko chimes in on the financial crisis with the following economically and historically illiterate remark:
Self-regulation as a way of solving all problems is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.
I hereby give Sarko an F.
In economics? In history?
Hell no, he’s not getting off that easily. The man doesn’t know how to use the phrase laissez-faire; I’m giving him an F in French.