Utopia, you are standing in it!

Murray Rothbard depicted as a dragon slayer in the April 18th, 1993 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal

After reading about this image in Joseph Becker’s article, “Memories of Rothbard at UNLV“, I really wanted to see it. First I looked for it on search engines, but it was nowhere to be found. After that I tried to find a copy of the newspaper that Becker cited in online databases, but all I found was the text of the articles. Frustrated, I checked the LVRJ website, which said to look for copies in the Clark County Library. Their website referred me to another online database that I could not access remotely.

Fortunately, a friend came to the rescue. She volunteered to go to Nevada and manually search through the library’s microfiche archive. She found the original newspaper images and sent them along. Thanks to her, now ancaps everywhere…

Puja Mehra has a nice piece on the tricky (and difficult to understand) history of Indian Rupee when it was linked with Sterling Pound before and after independence.

The rupee’s depreciation to more than 70 to a dollar just ahead of Independence Day led to historical comparisons of the value of the rupee. These can be misleading, as political freedom did not automatically result in India’s monetary independence in 1947. The rupee’s association with Britain was prolonged by factors beyond India’s control.

On a sterling standard 1931 onwards, the rupee, linked to a depreciating currency, depreciated along with the sterling.

It perhaps won’t be examined by students at the Treaty-led Massey University, where staff are cocooned from indelicate thinking about Maori representation by their protective vice-chancellor . But ACT leader David Seymour is crediting his Smaller Government Bill with prompting Winston Peters into action on the Māori seats.

A press statement he issued at the weekend alerted us to Peters  telling Sky News he would propose an amendment to a Labour MP’s bill.  This would have the effect of putting the future of the seats to a referendum.

An account of what he said has been reported by Television One:

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has reiterated his intent to push for a referendum on the future of the Māori seats in Parliament.

Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing series of posts documenting BDS fails.

Political BDS fails

BDS has nothing useful to contribute to the Middle East peace process

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement does not have anything useful to contribute to the peace process, and will never bring reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians closer. Then again, that has never been its aim.
– Michael Freeman (Counsellor for civil society affairs, embassy of Israel, London)

Top 70 Moments of BDS FAILS in 2018

On August 8, 2018 the BDS movement published a list of what is claimed were the “Top 70 Moments of Solidarity & BDS for Palestine in 2018” and stated that “together, we grow it stronger every day”. The list can be found here.

North West Friends of Israel has put together  a list of 70 BDS failures. Here are their Top 10:

1. On May 14…

In a recent tweet, my old friend Alan Reynolds plugged a 2003 op-ed article (“The Case for Insider Training”) by Henry Manne railing against legal prohibitions against insider trading. Reynolds’s tweet followed his earlier tweet railing against the indictment of Rep. Chris Collins for engaging in insider trading after learning that the small pharmaceutical company (Innate Pharmaceuticals) of which he was the largest shareholder transmitted news that a key clinical trial of a drug the company was developing had failed, making a substantial decline in the value of the company’s stock inevitable once news of the failed trial became public. Collins informed his own son of the results of the trial, and his son then shared that information with the son’s father-in-law and other friends and acquaintances, who all sold their stock in the firm, causing the company’s stock price to fall by 92%.

Reynolds thinks that what Collins did…

Steve Williamson recently plugged a new book by Kartik Athreya (Big Ideas in Macroeconomics), an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which tries to explain in relatively non-technical terms what modern macroeconomics is all about. I will acknowledge that my graduate training in macroeconomics predated the rise of modern macro, and I am not fluent in the language of modern macro, though I am trying to fill in the gaps. And this book is a good place to start. I found Athreya’s book a good overview of the field, explaining the fundamental ideas and how they fit together.

Big Ideas in Macroeconomics is a moderately big book, 415 pages, covering a very wide range of topics. It is noteworthy, I think, that despite its size, there is so little overlap between the topics covered in this book, and those covered in more traditional, perhaps old-fashioned, books…

There is an interesting case in Washington state where Taylor Smith, 18, is facing a charge of reckless endangerment after she pushed 16-year-old Jordan Holgerson off a bridge.  Holgerson was contemplating the 60-foot plunge and hesitated. Smith insists that she was just trying to help her make the decision — both Holgerson would end up in a belly flop that left her with multiple injuries.  A conviction for the gross misdemeanor can result in as much as a year in jail and a maximum fine of $5,000.

Nice editorial by Mint as we just bid goodbye to India’s former Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee.

Politicians are thick upon the ground in India. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a rarer breed: a statesman. It was a stature he acquired despite himself at times. In a political life that spanned seven decades, he rose to become one of India’s most consequential prime ministers and a colossus of the Indian Right.

His political life had four distinct stages. In the 1930s, K. B. Hedgewar’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was still in many respects a fledgeling organization, digesting diverse influences—from Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the Hindu Mahasabha to, most importantly, V. D. Savarkar. Vajpayee joined the organization towards the end of the decade. Under Hedgewar’s successor, M. S. Gowalkar, the RSS made a tactical choice to stay aloof from the mass movement for independence. Vajpayee had other ideas. In 1942, he jumped into…

On August 15^th a report headlined “Israel reopens Gaza cargo crossing after calm” appeared on the BBC News website’s Middle East page.

“Israel has fully reopened its cargo crossing with Gaza, saying it is in response to a period of relative calm.

Lorries carrying fuel and commercial goods passed through Kerem Shalom on Wednesday after weeks of restrictions.

The fishing zone off Gaza’s coast was also restored to 17km (nine nautical miles), having been reduced to 6km.

Kerem Shalom was closed for all but humanitarian deliveries in retaliation for cross-border incendiary kite and balloon attacks by Palestinians.”

After that reasonable account of events, the report continued with promotion of an anonymous allegation:

“Human rights groups said the move amounted to illegal collective punishment.”

Those who read previous BBC reports concerning the Kerem Shalom crossing may recall that the same allegation has been promoted twice by the BBC…

‘Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom.’ Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings at the Free Soil convention in 1848 (quoted page 61)

This massive volume (900 pages) is just part of the Penguin History of America.

The civil war is far the most written-about event in American history, not least because more Americans died in it than in all other wars America has fought put together.

The civil war tore the young Republic apart, and the schism between north and southern states is in some ways still evident to this day. Certainly the bitterly divisive issue of race in America shows no signs of going away, ever.

Social background

McPherson gives a good run-up to the war with a fascinating profile of economic and social progress in America in the half century from 1800.

I was particularly struck by his interpretation of the movement of women from…

In mid-19th century America there was a caste of people who were professional slave hunters. Hold that thought… People whose job it was to reclaim the lost ‘property’ of a southern slave owner.

1854 advert for a runaway slave

In 1850 the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers (a short-lived political party which took part in the 1848 and 1852 presidential races with the sole aim of preventing slavery being expanded into the new western states).

The law required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate. Many northern states opposed the law and passed personal liberty laws which, in different ways, tried to block the act – by insisting that captured suspects get a fair trial, or by forbidding state authorities…