Daily Archives: October 8, 2012

The Best Way to Rob a Bank is still to Own One: a Postscript

By William K. Black

The central questions for a theorist are whether his theory showed strong explanatory power and to what extent it proved useful in diverse settings.  A distinguished economist, Dr. Jayati Ghosh, has addressed those questions in an article in which she was explaining to Indian readers that a large fraud, Satyam, was not the product of unique defects in Indian regulation.

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American weirdness seeks to intervene in Honduras

By William K. Black

Michael Strong is an American businessman who is a devotee of  the Austrian school of economics.  Austrians view democratic governance as so inherently illegitimate that they claim that virtually any governmental program irretrievably consigns us to the “Road to Serfdom.”   Strong has decided to save Hondurans from their government.  He wants his corporation to buy a Honduran city named Puerto Castilla and turn it into his first global “model city.”  The Honduran government holds power through a coup that removed that forced out Manuel Zelaya, the democratically-elected President.  The coup occurred during the Obama administration and returned the oligarchs to power.  The administration criticized the coup but recognized the (eventual) newly elected President Profirio Lobo.  The constitutional chamber of Honduras’ Supreme Court (which provided a fig leaf of respectability for the coup) rule 4-to-1 that it was unconstitutional to create privately run cities.  (The decision is expected to be appealed to the full Supreme Court.)

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Ideology trumps science and blocks regulation

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzina.com)

This column was prompted by a story that ran Friday entitled “Congressman Calls Evolution Lie from ‘Pit of Hell.’”  Yes, unintentional self-parody continues to reign supreme.

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