As professor Salerno notes below, he was recently interviewed on C-SPAN, fielding questions from both a neutral commentator and a dozen phone-ins.

It is arguably one of the most concise discussions on the money supply, inflation, expansion of credit, the gold standard and the Federal Reserve.

As an extra bonus, Larry Sechrest, who spoke at the latest Austrian Scholars Conference, also called in to discuss plans of denationalizing currencies.

Here is the perma link to the Adobe Flash version.

Here is my interview on the gold standard on C-Span.

Rare offerings by Garet Garrett, Raymond de Roover, Jerry Kirkpatrick, and Wilhelm Roepke (one with an intro by Hayek!), all in free literature.

In this lost essay Louis Spadaro, the economist writes that "If the part played by profits in the economy is found to be misrepresented for purposes of analytical tidiness, the need for correction is all the more urgent in an age of increasing recourse to government action. Inasmuch as realism in our economics points to the same need, it would be unwise to cling to any theory -- no matter what its other attributes -- which sacrifices this need for reasons of arbitrary neatness; more, it would be scientifically indefensible."FULL ARTICLE

I've updated my advice here.

This article is a translation of a 1959 interview in the Argentinian newspaper La Presna. It appears here in English for the first time, thanks to the Hayek Foundation. "The Austrian-born North American economist, writer, and teacher, Ludwig von Mises, who, we are informed, arrived from New York early yesterday morning, spoke with us about his activities in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, he will give a series of talks in the Faculty of Economic Sciences with the sponsorship of the Center for the Promotion of the Free Economy, chaired by Mr. Alberto Benegas Lynch." FULL ARTICLE

The easy path to kicking up a storm in the libertarian world is to say: libertarianism doesn't account for cultural variation throughout the world, and not everyone is actually prepared for liberty and prosperity; indeed, certain cultures prefer kinds of authoritarian and community rule. So it is with Tyler's post here about his libertarian heresies (if you want people to respect your point of view, call it a heresy), with good responses by Robert Murphy and Daniel Klein.

This is hardly a new criticism of libertarianism. In the 1960s, when the Volker Fund had been backing so much great scholarship, some higher ups in the organization were converted to the idea that culture and religion was actually more foundational than politics and political ideology, and so this is where the focus must be. An edited book came out of that new insight: The Necessary Conditions for a Free Society edited by Felix Morley (1963) -- a book that contains insight but didn't amount to much actually.

I once asked Guido Hulsmann about this issue of culture as it relates to freedom. What about societies that are internally warlike or communitarian, or that eschew individualism in favor of group privilege and family rule, or are not inclined toward entrepreneurship or in which ideas such as individual rights just don't matter, or where contracts and fairness are not recognized as values as important as conquest and domination? Should libertarianism account for the reality that there are vast preconditions for liberty to emerge that require some cultural upheavals?

What I was trying to get at is the critical question: what should the state do about this? His answer really stuck with me, but I won't attempt to quote him directly. What he said is this. Whatever the cultural conditions and preferences of a people, no matter how strong the tendency toward conquest and graft, regardless of whether contract and fairness are respected or not, there is nothing the state can do to improve the situation. A society might be warlike and poor without the state; that is true. It might be brutal and impoverished. But imposing a state on that society will only exacerbate its worst tendencies and crowd out its best tendencies. The state offers no benefit to any society under any cultural conditions anywhere in the world. The state institutionalizes and entrenches bad things and forestalls the emergence of good things. Thus the focus on the state in libertarian doctrine.

Actually I found that answer very compelling, and haven't forgotten it.

The interview on Brian Lamb is up!

In response to requests:

I'm enjoying watching the suffering of the White House in light of the Scott McClellan book as much as the next guy.

And yet somehow I think we've been through this before. In fact, it seems to happen with every presidency. The spokesman for the president or some top employee serves him faithfully for years, through all the lies, the bad policy, the calamity of power, the corruption, the arrogance, and the abuse. Then he bails out and writes a tell-all book and everyone is shocked, shocked that such things could go on in the White House.

Why must we go through this every time for a hundred years? It is a bit absurd because somehow the broader lesson is never learned. We take away from these experiences the lesson that Bush is bad or that Clinton is bad or that Bush senior was no good or that Reagan wasn't really cutting budgets or that Carter felt out of control or that Ford was clueless or that Nixon was a abusive or that Johnson was really corrupt or that the JFK image thing was a joke and on and on.

Maybe it is time to rethink that whole institution? That is what we do in regular life. I'm a bread baker but if every last time I made bread it came out like a stone and tasted awful, people might begin to suggest that I try some other hobby. So it is with the presidency as we imagine it today. It is unviable. How many times must we re-learn this lesson before something changes?

We get a lot of abuse, those of us who publicly defend private property rights and voluntary arrangements against the varied depredations of government. Having to constantly face such attacks is a substantial part of the cost of speaking out, and probably explains why more people don't take the risk.

For those who might be considering publicly taking up the cause of "life, liberty, and property," I offer the following example to give you a taste of what you can expect.

Note that it is far from the most egregious example I could relate; it is not intended to discourage you, but only to prepare you for the cost you may have to bear -- to help you develop the requisite toughness. FULL ARTICLE

OTTAWA - The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of traveling with such devices...

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement...

The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not...

I've really grown to appreciate this book over the years: Reclaiming the American Right, and it is back in print and in the Mises.org store.

It was written in 1992 and appeared first in 1993, and it has aged rather well. Justin Raimondo writes an entire chapter on the main figures of the "old right" including Nock, Garrett, Patterson, and others who opposed FDR's welfare-warfare state. He makes the argument that this group is more representative of the true spirit of American conservatism: love of liberty and hatred of the planning state. You can argue with his thesis and terms but not the remarkable intellectual history here. He seems to have read everything and he provides excellent summaries of their main works. I discovered this myself when doing all my work on Garrett and only checking this book later to find that he had read all the novels and provided excellent summaries of them. So my respect for this book has only increased over the years.

I have doubts about his proposed attempt to save the right from itself. It strikes me that the enterprise is futile at this point, and that the right has been so completely transformed since those days that there is no sense in longing for any form of restoration. On the other hand, he does make a strong case for the old right and its coherence as a movement and intellectual force.

In any case, the book is back and it is as challenging as ever!

We are slowly getting there with the Literature section, posting the critical works from the history of economic thought. Two great additions:

• Selected Writings on Economics, by Nassau W. Senior (writing from 1827 to 1853, including his letters on the Factory Acts)


• An Outline of the Science of Political Economy, by Nassau W. Senior (1836)

Contemplating the grotesque potential side effects of bioethanol subsidies in the world's most developed economies is almost unbearable. While everyone is affected by higher food prices, for some people they mean only giving up a new pair of shoes or a night out. For others, however, the more costly food puts their very subsistence into question. No doubt, the politicians who came up with the idea of subsidizing the diversion of grain to the production of bioethanol did not intend to starve the world's poorest people; but the fact that the consequences were unintended does not absolve them of responsibility. FULL ARTICLE

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (p. 243):

It has been asserted that the physiological needs of all men are of the same kind and that this equality provides a standard for the measurement of the degree of their objective satisfaction. In expressing such opinions and in recommending the use of such criteria to guide the government's policy, one proposes to deal with men as the breeder deals with his cattle. But the reformers fail to realize that there is no universal principle of alimentation valid for all men. Which one of the various principles one chooses depends entirely on the aims one wants to attain. The cattle breeder does not feed his cows in order to make them happy, but in order to attain the ends which he has assigned to them in his own plans. He may prefer more milk or more meat or something else. What type of men do the man breeders want to rear — athletes or mathematicians? Warriors or factory hands? He who would make man the material of a purposeful system of breeding and feeding would arrogate to himself despotic powers and would use his fellow citizens as means for the attainment of his own ends, which differ from those they themselves are aiming at.

If you subscribe to the literature feed, you already know this but here are three really nice additions to the online library:

• Men, Motors, and Markets, by Dean Russell (1959). It is a nice modern history of the car in light of economics and innovations


• The TVA Idea, by Dean Russell (1949). Here is a fantastic blast against FDR's Stalinist scheme


• Introduction to Economics, by John V. Van Sickle. This is a surprisingly good economics textbook from the 1950s, too dated to reprint but really worth a look.

The new edition of Economics in One Lesson is at Amazon. It wouldn't be a bad idea to click or even to place an order there, since that will cause it go up in the search engine results.

The remnants of socialist central planning killed the kids. Yes, the government is to blame. The survivors and their families are right about that. But they have another enemy as well. It is the deadly ideology that set out to put government in charge of economic life, which includes building structures to house children for educational purposes. They can add the tragedy of the Xianjian Primary School to the list of deaths caused by socialism. FULL ARTICLE

Consumers shell-shocked by ever higher records for oil and gasoline prices may have been surprised by the mild Producer Price Index (PPI) update recently issued. The Labor Department says that energy prices fell 0.2 percent, and in particular gasoline prices fell by 4.6 percent. This struck me as odd. It reminds of a line from Chico Marx: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" FULL ARTICLE

Rather than write a standard historical narrative, Nicholson Baker presents on each page a separate fact, often taken from contemporary newspaper accounts. A number of these facts show Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in less than a favorable light, and this has proved too much not only for Pryce-Jones but for John Lukacs as well. For Lukacs and his ilk, Churchill is the Schwannritter of the 20th century, and inconvenient truths must not be permitted to jar unwary readers from the veneration properly his due. FULL ARTICLE