Quoth the ever provocative Brian Micklethwait:

Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.

Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.

Russ Nelson is, if memory serves, a Quaker and an anarchist. He used to be on my favorite mailing list; I wonder why he dropped. Well, I just noticed that he has a blog; he calls it The Angry Economist.

Cato: How FDR’s New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People. (Yet another link from Rational Review News Digest)

Leonard Dickenson (Unruled) on Lockean claims in cleared parking spaces. Cited by Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle).

Rasmusen on the value of liberty

What is wrong with government regulations? Well, first, of course, they are likely to be the result of special interests, and inefficient. But even good regulations have a cost that I don’t see mentioned: the cost of having to act carefully so as to avoid breaking the rules. In a society with numerous regulations, people spend a lot of time learning about the regulations.
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What I think the model might illustrate is that when lots of things are arbitrarily illegal, there are big transaction costs.

Kevin Marks, whom I had not read before, cites Jerome K Jerome (author of Three Men in a Boat) on economics:

What a wonderful piece of Socialism modern civilisation has become! – not the Socialism of the so-called Socialists — a system modelled apparently upon the methods of the convict prison – a system under which each miserable sinner is to be compelled to labour, like a beast of burden, for no personal benefit to himself, but only for the good of the community – a world where there are to be no men, but only numbers – where there is to be no ambition and no hope and no fear, — but the Socialism of free men, working side by side in the common workshop, each one for the wage to which his skill and energy entitle him; the Socialism of responsible, thinking individuals, not of State-directed automata. . . .

David Bernstein, of the Volokh Empire, reports on an appalling funeral in Israël mechanically presided over by a mandatory Ortho rabbi. (Title borrowed from Rasmusen.)