yazadjal.com

Anya gets the answer right. The theoretical way to do it is to export. That way 60% of our population can work on agriculture, but we consume only 30% worth of it and export the rest. It is not feasible in practice because most rich countries subsidise their farmers to produce enough […]

David J. Heinrich at the Mises blog writes about Richard Stallman (RMS) and the free software movement.
This is a very interesting example of how one individual — without even the incentive of great profit, but only of moral correctness — can make an enormous difference, and create alternatives, which individuals on a free market can […]

I have often heard the lament that though 60% of our population depends on agriculture for its livelihood, agriculture contributes only 30% to our GDP. The person doing the lamenting usually wants to increase agriculture’s contribution to the GDP, not reduce the percentage of people depending on farming for their income. But if we […]

Surjit Bhalla calls a bluff. Globalisation is more frightening for the middle class in the first world who have seen their incomes plateau.
He takes a look at growth rates of per capita income both pre and post globalisation and makes a simple hypothesis pitting the first world’s Mary with a third world Sita.
The leaders […]

When I was in school, the pre-eminent news program was Prannoy Roy’s The World This Week (TWTW). Friday nights were sacrosanct. Like all good things on Doordarshan, India’s only TV channel then, it was shelved after a good run.
After the launch of his NDTV 24/7, Roy restarted TWTW last September. I watched it for […]

(I am taking this back. See here)
This is Bash-a-Mallu-whose-views-you-otherwise-agree-with Week on Anarcaplib. Today’s victim is Rajeev Srinivasan (via JK)
Now, Rajeev graduated from IIT Madras, where presumably he picked up powers of analysis, and with a Marketing MBA from Stanford, where I suppose he learnt spin to argue persuasively. Unfortunately these tendencies seem to have come […]

Madhu Kishwar on Anti-Globalisation Brigades (AGBs) and India doing better under the WTO.
She talks about the origin of the anti-globalisation movement with the rise of economic power in the second and third worlds. Western AGBs are more worried about their job losses to India caused by globalisation and Indian “activists” are happy to serve as […]

David Marsten at Catallarchy shows how regulation creates a big busines - big government nexus which feeds each other and creates more regulation. Consumers and small businesses are the losers in this game.

Over the last few days Jaswant Singh has been doling out sops and tariff rationalisation in an effort to augment the feel good factor in anticipation of the elections. Though it is time to rejoice on account of the tax reductions, what I’d really like to see is a reduction in expenditure, which ofcourse won’t […]

Anchit Sathi, a friend, who lives, studies and works in France, started an email discussion about the French Scarves Scandal. A couple of people including myself responded, this is the email transcript…

Some of you might have heard of the head scarf scandal in france that s been going on for quite a while now. for […]

I rarely like a blog post so much that I cut paste the entire post here. But Alex Singleton’s piece on Voices and Exits in the Adam Smith Blog is superb.
Collectivists like ‘voice’ as the system for improving society. We get a say. We should all be forced to go to state schools, but we […]

JK is 5 votes ahead of me in the blog mela and this is a disgrace to all you readers of Anarcaplib. If you haven’t voted for me today, go right away and do so now. Remember that you can vote once a day. You can, and should, vote from both your office […]

Madhu Kishwar exposes the hypocrisy of the Anti-Globalisation Brigade (AGB) currently parading in Bombay under diferent guises — World Social Forum, Mumbai Resistance, etc. Her focus is on NGOs who happily accept foreign aid and grants, while trying to prevent the ordinary Indian from trading and participating in the world economy.
She also brings to […]

High on my “to-blog-about” list is this article on Friedrich Hayek by Virginia Postrel. It’s a wonderful introduction to an economist who won the Nobel for his work on monetary theory, and had a varied repetoire that included several works on political science, philosopy, law and psychology!
Beginning with “The Sensory Order,” he began to differentiate […]

Germany looks to abolish the military draft. And the main concern in this article seems to be that
[this may] pose a serious problem for the social system, which depends on those men that opt for the alternative — community service. …
Around 90,000 young German men are registered yearly for community service, and approximately 80 percent […]

One of my favourite van Goghs.

In a very readable article published in the American Economic Review (way back in 1998), Ronald Coase outlines the problems with the way that Economists do Economics.

He seems too fall back on Marshall’s old self-critique:

“the Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology rather than in economic dynamics.”

But what amused me about Coase’ piece, […]

I’ve nominated my post The death of a Law to the blog mela being hosted by Shanti. This time you can vote for the best entry and Shanti will give the winner an Amazon gift voucher for 10 dollars. So please vote for me and make me rich beyond my wildest dreams!
Psst. Don’t tell […]

Thomas Sowell hits home with a strong defense of the power of wealth to do good.
Within a week of each other, two earthquakes struck on opposite sides of the world — an earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale in California and a 6.6 earthquake in Iran. But, however similar the earthquakes, the human costs […]

In the previous post about John Itty, Yazad talks about pontification. Another John, Ioannes Paulus PP. II, Karol Wojtyla, the real pontiff, is quoted by Encarta as saying something really strange when he was elected Pope in 1978

“God will forgive you for what you have done to me.”

I wonder what that is supposed to […]