Gary North today defends limited liability with this core claim: “you cannot logically deny the legitimacy of enslavement for debt without becoming a defender of limited liability”. I disagree. There is a middle ground between these two extremes: liquidation of assets of the debtor and partial payment, with the recognition of further debt due.
A relatively new product, GloTell , is now available to farmers and chemical plants, whose anhydrous ammonia tanks are sometimes raided by theives. The clear liquid product is added in small quantities to an anhydrous ammonia tank. Upon exposure to air, the product turns bright pink, and stains anything it touches for days, being visible under
The husband of an acquaintance has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on a guily plea of importing endangered orchid species. Although this has been unfolding for months, I just found out last night. The whole affair was very well summarized by the pollenatrix back in a March entry . My heart goes out to George and his wife Kathy, the
OK, so it’s not Rocky and Bullwinkle . But it seems like it. Bryan Caplan claims to have demonstrated that time preference is superfluous to the explanation of positive interest rates, since marginal utility all by itself explains positive interest rates. He says: “If you are stuck on an island with two bananas for two days, a perfectly patient
Writes Thomas DiLorenzo : “I just signed a contract with Random House which will publish my new book, Lincoln Uncensored, next year. It’s all new material, with nineteen chapters broken up into three sections: ‘Things You’re Not Supposed to Know about America’s Sixteenth President’; ‘Economic Issues You’re Supposed to Ignore’; and ‘The Lincoln
I think Paul Craig Roberts gets it wrong when using the subject terms. Let me clarify according to my understanding: An economic advantage is when one person or group can produce a given result with more economy than another. This is very general, and can be broken down into categories: labor advantage is when production can be carried out at
It was as simple as this. On Saturday evening, at 7:30 pm, I noticed that the air coming from the vents in the house was not cool. Checking outside, I found that my compressor was not working. Browsing through the yellow pages, my wife located and called an air conditioning repairman, and put me on the phone. He did a brief Q&A with me, and
Joe Kissell writes today on the Antikythera Mechanism , which seems to be an analog computer constructed by a Greek in 82 BC. Much of the technology embodied in the device was lost, only to be reinvented hundreds of years later. What does this teach us? It reminds us that the “historian’s bias” is conservative, but can lead us into error. Just
Davd Gelernter’s post confuses me. I think it is because he is confused. He says “capitalism strikes me as the spoiled brat of the political and philosophical universe... Everyone knows about capitalism’s successes; we need to spare a little attention for its failures too.” And what is an example of the failure of capitalism? Why, the highly
While I have not read Hidden Order by David Friedman, he offers up this selection today on hawk-dove equilibria. I regard it as an error for such analysis to be silent on internal motives for behavior. In particular, lots of people wish to be virtuous, and work at it; and lots of people struggle against their vices. A great number of people are
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
