Interesting Articles

This is one of the "features" or "services" I hope to provide on the blog. Just a hodgepodge of different articles and blogposts I found around the web that I found interesting and informative:

Donald Luskin has this to say about an interesting looking book called "Liberal Fascism":

National Review's Jonah Goldberg has a new book out -- Liberal Fascism. Love the cover! Like Goldberg, I'm tired of liberals endlessly accusing conservatives of fascism, Nazism, Hilterism, and so on -- when the liberal agenda, is in fact, the very kind of state supremacy that quite literally defines fascism.

Take a look at the cover, a smiley face with a Hitler mustache. Luskin is on point, and no need to expound his comments which pretty much cover what I think. I enjoy Luskin's blog, he usually writes about Economics, so if you enjoy that, visit his site.

Amity Shlaes writes a piece on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal called "The New Deal Jobs Myth" about a favorite subject among the left vs. right, and many economists,: is a job in the public sector as good as one in the private. Shlaes revists the "New Deal" and touches on "emergencies" creating jobs. My view on this is rather simple. Known as "The Parable of the Broken Window", it comes from an essay by Frédéric Bastiat. If you have never read or heard it, you should check it out, but I will try to sum it up briefly. It deals with a shopkeeper who arrives at his store and finds some hoodlum threw a rock through his window. While it sucks that the keeper has to buy a new window, it does make business for the repair man. The repair man now has money to spend elsewhere, and the "invisible hand", in this case the hand that threw the rock through the window, keeps the economy chugging along. While on the surface this is true, it fails to recognize the fact that because the shopkeeper spent his money on the window, he did not spend it elsewhere, as he originally planned. It simply took money (taxes, anyone?) from one source and gave it to another (social programs?). I plan to revisit this whole topic at another time, so I will leave it at that, but the article is worth a read.

Finally, Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek calls our attention to an article by Joel Kotkin of The Washington Post, about how today's headlines foretell "doom and gloom" for the economy and the coming years, and how in the 70's, the headlines seemed the same. Oil prices high now, Oil prices high in the 70's. The dollar is struggling now, the dollar was taken off the gold peg in the 70's and some thought that when the toilet paper ran out you might as well use the notes as a substitute. They said a piece of the Amazon the size of Rhode Island disappears every day and our kids would never get to see it and guess what, it hasn't gone anywhere. Keep the alarmists in check. Not so long ago many thought the American economy would tank we would be buying groceries with the Yen. It's a cycle guys, it goes up, it goes down, it comes back round again.