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Hugo Chávez, socialist president of Venezuela and the defining figure of Latin American politics in the last decade, has died. While his authoritarian populism didn’t differ much from other Latin American leaders, his influence on regional politics has been unparalleled. Comments Cato scholar Juan Carlos Hidalgo, “Hugo Chavez’s legacy of economic nationalism and authoritarian rule will haunt Venezuela and its neighbors for years to come. …The faster Venezuela and Latin America turn the page, the better.”

• “Chávez’s Grim Legacy,” by Juan Carlos Hidalgo
• “The Chávez Record,” by Ian Vásquez
• “Venezuela after Chávez,” Podcast with Juan Carlos Hidalgo
• “Hugo Chávez’s Last Days,” by Juan Carlos Hidalgo

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Source: CATO HEADLINES

By Peter G. Klein

Henry Manne is a brilliant and original scholar who made important contributions to the literatures on takeovers, insider trading, higher education, and other fields and is a key figure in the modern law-and-economics movement. His contributions were featured in a session of the 2010 Austrian Scholars Conference. Henry has given an interview to the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society as part of its oral history project. There is an audio file and an edited transcript. He mentions in particular the influence of Mises and Hayek on his thinking:

Because of my dissatisfaction with what developed as my program at Yale, I began doing considerable reading in areas mainly I’d learned from Aaron Director, works of Hayek, whom I had met at Chicago, and Mises. I always used to joke that I was one of the few people in the world who probably sat down and read the whole of Human Action, Mises’ great work on philosophy and economics, which later on, you’ll see, played a role in my intellectual development.

And:

Just before the ’62 article ["The 'Higher Criticism' of the Modern Corporation," Columbia Law Review], probably the seminal intellectual event in my life occurred. I was invited to a small conference for young professors at Claremont College, in which three very distinguished people held seminars for these young professors. One was John Jukes from Oxford, who had taken a very strong position against British socialism, then the Labour government. Another was Felix Morley, who was a political opponent of Roosevelt during the New Deal, a distinguished journalist and political theorist. The third was a then somewhat young economist from UCLA by the name of Armen Alchian. I mentioned before that the Mises I read at Yale in 1952 or 1953 came back in the early sixties, because Alchian began his seminar by reading a paragraph. It was a paragraph about property, and he asked if anyone in the group could identify it. I was the
only one; I recognized immediately that that was from Mises’ Human Action. As he developed that first lecture – which became I think one of the most important economic articles of the twentieth century, “Economics of Property Rights” – it was like a light bulb went off in my head, it was incredible. All of a sudden, everything that I had done intellectually for thirteen years came together, with this one …read more
Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Joseph Salerno

The tasty little lunch pictured above conforms to newly proposed federal regulations aimed at foods and drinks served in the nations’s public schools. Among other mandates, these regulations would cap serving sizes and calorie counts. Ironically, these proposals are part of the second round of regulations deriving from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, a laughable bureaucratic misnomer if ever there were one. (It makes one long for the bygone days of the 1960s-era welfare state when liberals actually thought that children performed better when they were well fed rather than starved.)

The proposed regulations will also place a hefty fiscal burden on school districts and their long-suffering taxpayers. It is estimated that they will cost $127 million and require 926 thousand hours of paperwork to comply with, thus leaving tax-burdened parents with even less money in this stagnant economy to buy the foods that they choose to serve their children as meals and snacks at home.

And, of course, the regulations will not work. For example, schools are already struggling to comply with the existing mandate that every student take a serving of a fruit or vegetable for his lunch. But even when the students take the healthy fare, there is no guarantee at all that they will eat it, which after all is the whole point of the regulations. In one West Philadelphia high school the food is disposed of creatively as part of the new sport of “food basketball.” As one student explained the game:

Like, if you have an orange or an apple, you take it, and you have a trash can, shoot it in the trash can and see if you can make it.

As the great rock band The Who sang in the 1960s, “The kids are alright.”

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE