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A Clever Tax Strategy May Backfire - New York Times is an impressive reporting job by Flloyd Norris. I can only vaguely understand this tax-avoidance strategy but, regardless, who could possibly symphathize with the hunters as opposed to the hunted? The Strategy as Norris presents it: An investor with a large block of stock does an options collar

I have some vague memory of a time when the idea of American conservatism had something to do with a suspicion of an omnipotent autocratic state. William Kristol, though, is doing his best to erase that bit of intellectual history. (via Eschaton

Kwame Antony Appiah, in a piece for the NYT Mag designed to be the “it” article of January 2006, says that trade does change culture but it doesn’t erase it; exposure to technology and universal media content improves the good parts of life while discouraging the worst aspects of tradition. While reading this essay, I kept thinking of Raico’s

To answer a reader question, I revisited Rothbard’s transition plan for 100% gold. This is cut and pasted from the Mystery of Banking (Richardson and Synder, 1983), pp. 265-267. Even though, for the past few years, private American citizens have once again been allowed to own gold, the gold stolen from them in 1933 is still locked away in Fort

This is an entertaining video put out by the European Central Bank. It discusses what inflation is and how it can be controlled. But it is entertaining on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it is shot through with subtle fallacies and self-serving avoidance of the topic of what it is, precisely, that creates new money. It also

Listening to Verdi’s La Traviata for Sunday night entertainment, I’m charmed yet again by the scene when the lovers Alfredo and Violetta decide to move to the country and out of the city, no matter what the cost. Everyone is scandalized by this decision to live so luxuriously instead of choosing the cheaper route of city living. Then it turns out

I just received an email from a person who follows the work of the Mises Institute, and was confused by this site’s large archive of audio by Robert LeFevre , the founder of the Freedom School and a great libertarian publicist in the last century. This correspondent said that LeFevre was interested in politics only, so it makes no sense for him to

Lawrence Kotlikoff has responded to Laurence Vance’s criticism of the FairTax idea. So that it doesn’t get lost in the ever-longer thread here, here it is as a separate post. It seems to me that that his whole response underscores what a great job Vance did. Smoke and mirrors indeed! Reviewing Laurence Vance’s Book Review “There’s No Such Thing as

Francis Dumouchel employs Rothbardian logic to defend vampires—satire indeed.

Here is a rare and wonderful thing: an analysis of how DC think tanks really operate: The problem with too many think tanks is that they have become captive of politics. Many people in these organizations aspire to be political appointees—indeed, many are former political appointees. So they say and write what they believe will help them land a