I recently read the revised edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent The Housing Boom and Bust. One of the most striking things about the role of housing in the financial crisis is the resonance of the “villains, victims, and valiant government” narrative that goes as follows: greedy bankers exploited everyone while the regulators were asleep...
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My Division of Labour co-blogger Noel Campbell hits a home run with today’s post on immigration. Two key quotes: Arizona doesn’t have an illegal immigration problem; Arizona has an organized crime violence problem. What created the incentives for organized crime (and its penchant for violence) to develop? Well, the War on Drugs, of course....
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Art Carden speaking @ In Defense of Capitalism conference from Nicki Brøchner on Vimeo.

Here’s Peter Klein’s new book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur, also available for $0 download from Mises.org. The Capitalist and and the Entrepreneur: Essays on Organizations and Markets

Why is liberty always on trial? Why does the burden of proof rest with freedom, private property, and voluntary exchange rather than coercion, socialized property, and compulsory exchange? Why is the assumption or assertion that some people should govern others almost always implicit in the discussion? Cross-posted at the Mises Blog.

2000 watt camping generators are advertised at Aldi for about $150. That got me thinking about ways to evade price gouging laws in Gulf Coast states. Rather than speculate, I sent the following email to Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum via his website: Greetings, This is not a complaint. I hope you can assist...
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...is either Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society” or Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Here’s a link to Hayek’s paper, in honor of his birthday (HT: Steve Horwitz).

Property and Plunder Frederic Bastiat (from pp. 6-7 of the FEE edition of The Law): “Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property. “But it is also true that a man may live and...
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Here’s an excellent (and short) video of Tom Palmer discussing the Broken Window Fallacy (HT: Steve Horwitz). It’s a venerable fallacy, but it’s one from which I hope we might be recovering. A couple of quick Google searches couldn’t turn up anyone saying that the recent earthquake in Haiti will be good for Haitian...
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I joined Twitter a few months ago; you can follow me here. Here’s an interesting article on the effective use of Twitter. I just made a note to myself to give Twitter assignments in my classes this Fall (“use exactly 140 characters to explain X”). Cross-posted at Division of Labour.