Beyond The Broken Spectrum

More phony-white-liberal crocodile tears have been shed over the issue of academic freedom than perhaps over any other. More academics have waxed more eloquent over it than over perhaps any other topic receiving their tender attention. In the eyes of some, it has been equated with the very basis of Western civilization. In the eyes of others, judging by their anguish, it has been equated with the Second Coming!

There is not a day that goes by that does not see the American Civil Liberties Union in a virtual state of apoplexy over some real or imagined violation of academic freedom. And all this seems pale in comparison with the gnashing of teeth and frothing at the mouth by labor unions of professional academics and teachers in this fair land of ours.

From the name itself, academic freedom would seem to be innocuous enough. All it would seem to mean would be that academics, like anyone else, should have freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, and freedom to quit a job. The usual freedoms that everyone has.

Such is not the case, however. “Academic freedom” has a very special meaning: the freedom to teach the subject matter in whatever way the academic in question wishes the subject taught, despite any wishes to the contrary that his employer may harbor. In other words, the employer may not fire the academic as long as he teaches the subject matter in any manner that the academic, not the employer, wishes. (more…)

Mises Daily: Friday, January 29, 2010 by George F. Smith

Having failed to learn what causes depressions and how to treat them when they arrive, our nation’s leaders are steering us straight into a monetary catastrophe. Predictably, the major media voices are clinging to the assurances of Keynesians, who see new wads of debt and paper money and conclude that the good times are ready to roll again; don’t pay any heed to the millions still looking for work.

The free-lunch Keynesians even tell us how we got into the crisis and what saved us. Paul Krugman speaks for many when he blames market deregulation for the meltdown and hails the Fed’s printing press as our savior.

What does this mean? It means we can laugh at rumors that the Fed’s cheap credit brought on the crisis. We can laugh even harder at the claim that Fed monetary pumping will ensure an even greater disaster down the road. And we can save our biggest laughs for that lucky guesser, Peter Schiff, whose knowledgeable detractors laughed at him in 2006 when he predicted the current meltdown. (more…)

Drug companies manipulated the World Health Organization into downgrading its definition of a pandemic so they could cash in on a swine flu outbreak, it is claimed.

An inquiry heard yesterday that the WHO allegedly softened its criteria for declaring a H1N1 flu pandemic last spring – just weeks before announcing there was a worldwide outbreak.

Critics said the decision was driven by pharmaceutical companies desperate to recoup the billions of pounds they had invested in researching and developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares in 2006 and 2007.

Read more: Daily Mail

By Ron Paul, LewRockwell.com

You may not have heard of the American Community Survey, but you will. The national census, which historically is taken every ten years, has expanded to quench the federal bureaucracy’s ever-growing thirst to govern every aspect of American life. The new survey, unlike the traditional census, is taken each and every year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s not brief. It contains 24 pages of intrusive questions concerning matters that simply are none of the government’s business, including your job, your income, your physical and emotional heath, your family status, your dwelling, and your intimate personal habits.

The questions are both ludicrous and insulting. The survey asks, for instance, how many bathrooms you have in your house, how many miles you drive to work, how many days you were sick last year, and whether you have trouble getting up stairs. It goes on and on, mixing inane questions with highly detailed inquiries about your financial affairs. One can only imagine the countless malevolent ways our federal bureaucrats could use this information. At the very least the survey will be used to dole out pork, which is reason enough to oppose it.

Keep in mind the survey is not voluntary, nor is the Census Bureau asking politely. Americans are legally obligated to answer, and can be fined up to $1,000 per question if they refuse! (more…)

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

All this talk of unemployment is preposterous. Think of it. We live in a world with lots of imperfections, things that need to be done. It has always been so and always will be so. That means that there is work to be done, and therefore always jobs. The problem of unemployment is a problem of disconnect between those who would work and those who would hire.

What is the disconnect? It comes down to affordability. Businesses right now can’t afford to hire new workers. They keep letting them go. Therefore, unemployment is high, in the double-digits, approaching 17% or more. Among black men, it is 25%. Among the youth, it is 30% or higher. And the problem is spreading and will continue to spread so long as there are barriers to deal-making between hirers and workers.

Again, it is not a lack of work to be done. It is too expensive to pay for the work to be done. So ask yourself, what are those things that prevent deals from being made?

Let me list a few barriers: (more…)

Mises Daily: Thursday, January 28, 2010 by Mateusz Machaj

A few days ago, the Fed announced that it had “earned” a record-high amount of money in 2009. Then it turned $46 billion over to the Treasury. Here we are in the midst of a serious recession, with the unemployment rate high, the housing market still in a slump, and the stock market making only small steps toward recovery. In this climate, the Fed is making profits.

That’s impressive, isn’t it? Unfortunately, the Fed’s huge earnings are a signal that the economy is still in terrible shape and that its condition is worsening.

Let us take a closer look at the Federal Reserve’s balance sheets, at least to the extent that they are available to us. One year before reaching their record-high profits, the Fed’s assets consisted of nearly $500 billion in government assets. These consisted of Treasury bonds and assets issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giants of the real-estate market whose solvency is guaranteed by the federal government. Since Fannie and Freddy are currently owned by the state, their assets should be treated as state securities. (more…)

The first night of class, this little man with thick glasses perched on a Durantesque nose, sporting a bow tie and a pocketful of pens, shuffled into the room. He began talking the moment he stepped through the door, poking fun at the silly politicians who were deriding the “evil” oil companies for supposedly using the Gulf War to gouge consumers.

It was a typical Rothbard tale, illuminating how the free-market price system efficiently distributes goods, while government intervention mucks things up. He then launched into his History of Economic Thought story, which during the fall 1990 semester had a monetary theme. There was no time to take roll or go over a syllabus; we had centuries to cover. (more…)

Ron Paul delivers an address on the state of our republic. Notice how his address is straight forward, filled with facts and examples, and does not pander to people’s emotions. Compare this to President Obama’s State of the Union address, which will lay blame everywhere except at the feet of the government or federal reserve and will try to play on the emotions of people without citing any real facts or examples.

According to the National Taxpayers Union, 42 senators in 2008 voted to spend more tax dollars than socialist Bernie Sanders. They include his neighbor Pat Leahy; Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, who just can’t understand why their home state is in fiscal trouble; and the Eastern Seaboard anti-taxpayer Murderers’ Row of Kerry, Dodd, Lieberman, Clinton, Schumer, Lautenberg, Menendez, Carper, Biden, Cardin, and Mikulski. Don’t carry cash on Amtrak! Not to mention Blanche Lambert Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who apparently think Arkansans don’t pay taxes so federal spending is free. Sen. Barack Obama didn’t vote often enough to get a rating in 2008, but in 2007 he managed to be one of the 11 senators who voted for more spending than the socialist senator. Read More

I’m finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It’s a fascinating thing to behold.

People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights.

People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place.

People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t.

People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency. (more…)

[Libertarian Review, August 1975.] Mises Institute

Though short-shrifted in most history books, the Panic of 1819 was an unforgettable nightmare for early Americans. Banks throughout the country were unable to make good on customers’ claims for specie and were forced to close their doors. Creditors foreclosed on deeply indebted farmers, city dwellers, and speculators who had bought cheap public land. Wages as well as prices dropped precipitously. Interest rates climbed and people moaned over the “scarcity of money.” Utmost in the minds of American leaders and influential journalists was the question, “Why did the boom die?”

The Panic of 1819, Murray Rothbard’s incisive and extremely well-styled Columbia University dissertation, provides an answer and a fascinating history of the era.

The panic and depression were a result of a huge monetary inflation. After the War of 1812, the economy flourished, as loosely chartered State banks issued redeemable notes far beyond specie. The quantity of money multiplied rapidly. In 1815 alone, bank notes increased from $46 million to $68 million.

Eventually, bank notes began selling at a discount, as foreigners and money brokers profitably claimed the notes for specie. In addition, the Bank of the United States’ began to call on branches to redeem other bank obligations. The monetary expansion ended abruptly and a wave of bankruptcies ensued. (more…)

Article from the Mises Institute

A year ago George Melloan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “We’re all Keynesian’s Again.” You remember last January — change was on its way. We had a new rock-star president and he was going to get us out of the mess that Wall Street had got us into. “Now is the time to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down,” President Obama told Congress. The new president has a worldview that is “all but in name Keynesian,” Carl Horowitz wrote last spring.

Meanwhile the guy running the Federal Reserve is an expert on the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke wasn’t going to make the same mistakes the policy makers made during the 1930s. After all, he pointed out back in 2002 when he was just a Fed governor,

the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

And the new guy at the Treasury, well he used to run the New York Fed; he worked for Kissinger Associates, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Monetary Fund — so Washington figured he knew how to fix the economy. The Treasury secretary is so in touch with the market that he and his wife tried to sell their $1.6 million home in 2009 for more than they paid for it in 2004. They have been unsuccessful and forced to rent the place out. (more…)

Article from Mises Institute

Whenever a natural disaster or violent insurrection causes the downfall of a corrupt government, various commentators cannot resist labeling the result “anarchy” and then citing the chaotic situation as an apparently obvious refutation of the ideas of Murray Rothbard. Critics of Rothbardian anarchocapitalism often point to mafia-infested Sicily, gangland Chicago, modern-day Colombia, Somalia, and of course now Haiti, as ostensible examples of a free market in police and law.

The week after the earthquake hit, commenter “Greg” posed this typical question on my blog: “How’s that anarchy thing working out in Haiti?” (more…)

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Read More

Former Law Enforcement Against Prohibition member Bradley Jardis has been removed from the organization due to his public stance that he would no longer arrest medical marijuana patients. Here is his announcement: (more…)