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One of the most influential books that IHS introduced me to when I was in college was Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law (available in pdf here). So I was delighted to have been invited to participate in a program celebrating Leoni’s 100th birthday today at the Cato Institute. Alas, we have been snowed out. […]

Readers who may have RSVP-ed for today’s Heritage Foundation event on our coauthored book A Conspiracy Against Obamacare should be aware that it has been cancelled because of the snowstorm in the DC area. However, we and Heritage intend to reschedule. When we have a new date for the event, one of us will post […]

Google news searches: Chinese+hackers+spied+on+g20 :  3 results NSA+spied+on+g20:                  2,330 results UPDATE: china+hackers+spy+g20 -nsa:  4 results NSA+spy+G20 – china:         1,280 results

Want!

It is the holiday season! And if you happen to be looking for gifts for the VC readers in your life, books by VC bloggers might be a good choice. Among my favorite books by VC authors are Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution (now available in a new edition), David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner, Dale […]

There’s a new poll by Harris Interactive taken on behalf of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), a payday lenders trade association.  Some interesting results: 84% of those surveyed said it was easy to repay the loan (52% said “very easy”) 95% said the understood “well” or “very well” how long it would take […]

For future sessions of my First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, as well as for various impromptu joint student-professor brief-writing projects I might set up, I was toying with the idea of selecting students chiefly by giving them a simple editing exercise. What I had in mind was giving them sample passages (likely Summaries of Arguments […]

My co-authors Geoff Manne and Julian Morris have a column today in Canada’s National Post “Why Canada’s debit card system doesn’t need any more controls.”  It is based on our recent study issued through the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

From Max Boot (Commentary): [T]he largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nations — why, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption, and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighbors — is the character of Nelson Mandela. Had […]

The Khayelitsha United Mambazo Choir performs Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.  

Joe Asch has an interesting analysis of returns on university endowments over time (focusing on Dartmouth but comparing Dartmouth to over Ivy League institutions), comparing the returns of actively-managed endowments with those with a simple 60/40 equity-bond split. He notes that while actively-managed endowments beat the benchmark for the past year over the past five years […]

The old Cold War export control alliance, now known as the Wassenaar Arrangement, hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of new controls since Russia joined the club.  But according to the Financial Times, the 41-nation group is preparing a broad new set of controls on complex surveillance and hacking software and cryptography.  I suspect that the […]

I’d like to get some good nonfiction audiobooks, preferably about history — any suggestions? I’d be particularly interested in history of science, technology, or medicine, but I’m flexible. Good science audiobooks might work, too. This would be for my 10-year-old and me to listen to in the car; he’s fine with audiobooks aimed at adults, […]

My friend Alex Chaufen has an interesting column on Forbes.com about the intellectual influence of economists on the Vatican.  I am told that he will have a second piece tomorrow as well.