Oh, how are things going in Venezuela these days? At Caracas’s middle-class Sambil shopping mall, lines at cashiers reached 50-deep. Carmen Blanco, a 28-year-old accountant, waited to buy a 42-inch flat-screen television she doesn’t need because she already has one at home. “It doesn’t make any sense to keep my savings,” Ms. Blanco said Saturday. [...]

Brad just asked what people are reading today.  President Obama just provided some interesting reading material indeed. Here’s the opening text from an Executive Order dated January 11, 2010: EXECUTIVE ORDER ESTABLISHMENT OF THE COUNCIL OF GOVERNORS By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States [...]

Hey, folks. Slow day here at TLP, so it’s probably a good a time as any to open the floor. What’s currently on the reading shelves for all of you? For me: Just finished: The American Story, by Garet Garrett. — Available from the Mises Store. I plan on a review of this once I [...]

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason: What chart, what graph could you possibly still need to see to understand what a complete and utter buffoon Ben Bernanke is? The evidence echoes in every boarded-up storefront, every vacant mall, every soup line in every town in every state. Yep… About sums it up.

This has been making the rounds, and I’d be remiss not to post it here considering how much time I spend in the air.

I’ll blockquote Peter Suderman over at Reason blockquoting the CAP’s “wonk room” blog on this one: The short version of the argument is that C-SPAN’s coverage would put pressure on legislators to perform for the cameras and thus make the bill worse: C-SPAN is grounded in the belief that transparency produces superior legislation. And maybe [...]

Bruce @ QandO, responding to this story about Obama pushing a “surge” of air marshals: Mr. Obama – the idea is to get them before they get on the freakin’ airplane. As he goes on to point out, passengers (due to human self-preservation instincts) have proven remarkably able to take down terrorists in-flight. Perhaps Obama [...]

Homeowner associations [HOAs] are a bit of a prickly issue for libertarians. On one hand, they are voluntary, so you don’t have to choose to move into an area that has one. On the other hand, they are common enough (and arbitrarily nasty enough in many situations) that it is a significant limit to purchasing [...]

Ezra Klein links an interesting story by econoblogger Ryan Avent about declining cities. His post is a fairly interesting read about how (or whether to) try to save dying manufacturing cities. But one of his passages discusses a greatly different topic. As a California resident, I’m stuck with a very high-tax, heavy-regulating, dysfunctional state government [...]

From Ezra Klein, remarking on the major cost-control move found at the end of Bush’s term: People don’t bring this up very much, but one of the best ways to control costs in health care — or any private sector, really — is to have a huge recession. High taxes, high government deficits, dollar devaluation, [...]

From Jonah Goldberg, re: airline security: Anyone who flies regularly will tell you, the hellishness of airline travel is not primarily derived from the outrage of lost privacy, it’s derived from the outrage of inefficient, time-consuming idiocy. I would gladly trade the privacy invasion that would come with those body scanners in Total Recall in [...]

One of the most pernicious effects of the Bismarkian Welfare State is the infantilization of society, the destruction of adulthood. This infantilization renders people incapable of caring for themselves. It places them in a state of permanent dependence. Unable to live without the state, people are put in a position where resistance to the rulers, [...]