Fantastic satire about the current sovereign debt crisis:

By Pat | Published: 6/3/2010

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Tulipmania

By Pat | Published: 6/2/2010

I’m starting (as I type this) my Mises Academy online course, “Tulips to Plywood Palaces:
Bubbles in Theory and History,” taught by Dr. Doug French, director at the Mises Institute.

The course description:

Doug French, president of the Mises Institute, will teach a nine-week course, June 1-August 2, 2010, based on his book Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money (Mises Institute 2009). Applying the Austrian theory of money, banking, and business cycles, he will examine the economic, social, and cultural signs of bubbles, examine their causes and the responses, and deal with the spectacular rise and fall of housing and others markets in our own time. He covers Tulipmania, the South Sea bubble, the Mississippi bubble, John Law’s monetary theories and more.
He will offer a narrative of each event with a special focus on the cause and effect. The conventional view is that bubbles in history represent a kind of mass hysteria rooted in animal spirits or irrational exuberance – and that each represents a failing of the market to rationally stabilize investment. French will examine the monetary angle to show that bubbles have a more fundamental relationship to monetary inflation.

Dr. French

Very excited!

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Are the World Bank and the IMF really capitalist ideas?

By Pat | Published: 3/24/2010

(Note: the word “capitalism” in this essay is meant to refer to the free market, not state capitalism. This article was also published in The Free Press.)

Often times when one listens to or reads the arguments of those who make it their job to “overthrow the capitalist system,” one will be subjected to the notion that many of the ills of the status quo (which is invariably labeled as “capitalism”) are due in large part to certain institutions which, it is insinuated, are inherent to a capitalist system. Usually such insinuations are peculiar to me, as, more often than not, the exact opposite is true. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are two institutions that often take the brunt of the “anti-capitalist” storm, but do they really deserve such treatment?
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Health care and the free market

By Pat | Published: 1/28/2010

(This article was published with some revisions for size in The Free Press, an FSU campus circular. That version is available here.)

Lately it has been taken for granted by many politicians, pundits, and political spectators that the current health care ills faced by certain people or groups in the United States are ills caused by, and part and parcel to, a “free market” health care environment. Sound bytes about the fact that some 15% of individuals in the U.S. are without health insurance (a statistic that, despite claims to the contrary, has not really changed in the last twenty years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), the fact that the U.S. has the highest health care costs per capita, or that costs have continued to increase, have been bantered around as proof that the free market has failed, and that that failure is an indication that the government must step in to provide where the market cannot.
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You live, you learn?

By Pat | Published: 2/6/2009

So, the hard truth is that finding mature people at any age is nearly impossible, and finding authenticity even more so. I think that particular truth is especially evident in an abnormally contrived, artificial place like Florida.

I thought I hated the loss of innocence, but I think that that may have been another manifestation of my hatred for stupidity. No one my age knows what they are doing or who they are, because they look for answers from the crowd (which is made up of other people who do not know who they are, either), they do not follow their conscience, they are not honest with themselves. Their opinions, and even personality traits, change with the social wind.

And people in this country today wonder why they are not happy when they finally “grow up” and get what they thought they wanted. True happiness is achieved by knowing and being truly honest with one’s self, or at least the attempt thereof. When you do something that seems socially expedient and beneficial in the relatively short term, without consulting your conscience, you are signing your own warrant for misery.

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