The always-vital-and-vibrant Institute for Justice hits another home-run.

My former GMU student Alex Nowrasteh writes wisely on immigration in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Here’s a key ‘graf:

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, Francisco Sanchez, applauds U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk for “negotiating tough bargains, ensuring that when America gives other countries the privilege of free and fair access to our market, U.S. businesses will get the same treatment in theirs” (Letters, July 23).

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues against government subsidies to journalists and the news media.  (My two cents: anyone who believes that a government-subsidized press would not be a politically beholdened press – a press leashed like a lap dog to its paymaster’s fist – is hopelessly out of touch with reality.)

Our dear friends at Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquin have assembled these video-taped interviews of Hayek – interviews conducted by Armen Alchian, Jim Buchanan, Tom Hazlett and others.  They’re fascinating.

Here’s a letter to the Financial Times:

Several questions popped to mind after reading Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence’s essay in your pages today (“America needs a growth strategy“).  Here are a few:

Steve Landsburg rightly celebrates David Friedman’s great – truly great – book, The Machinery of Freedom.

Bob Higgs instructs us on one of the keystones of economics as well as of reality: trade-offs.

Clay Broga offers yet another effective short video – this one on government debt, economic growth, and job creation.

Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley has this superb essay at Your Olive Branch. This essay is especially highly recommended to those persons who worry about income inequality in capitalist societies.

209 years ago today, in southwestern France, a man who Joseph Schumpeter was later to call “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived” was born: Frederic Bastiat.  Sadly, this gifted writer and unmatched communicator of economics died of tuberculosis only 49 years later.

Ms. Marlan S. Maralit
Organizing Department
American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees

Dear Ms. Maralit:

Thanks for your mass e-mail this morning inviting me to recommend students for AFSCME’s Alternative Union Break: Summer Session.  I understand that students who attend this four-day program are taught how to “fight for a better country,” and to promote “social and economic justice,” by becoming union organizers.