The first six months of 2011 are now in the books. Heat waves are currently in the headlines, but how does the national average temperature compare to other years and ‘normal’? And what does the first half of the year portend for the year as a whole?
The indication is that 2011 will mark the continued return of U.S. national temperatures to conditions much closer to the 20th century mean, down from the unusually elevated temperatures that characterized the 1998–2010 period.
If this proves to be the case, it strongly suggests that the unusually warm decade from 1998–2007, was just that–unusual–and does not best represent the expected trend or the climate state of the U.S. for the next several decades to come.
Background
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center has compiled a data set representing the annual average temperature for the contiguous United States which dates back to 1895.…
Continue ReadingLudwig von Mises’s Human Action: A Treatise on Economics might stand as the single greatest social science book of the 20th century. Written in 1949, with slight revisions in 1961 and 1966, Human Action has been described as economics as it might have been and should be. No economists jokes here! This book is all about using sound assumptions and logically deriving the qualitative truths, the science, of economics.
I spent the summer of my sophomore year in college (1975) teaching tennis and studying Human Action. It was slow reading, and I worked up my own index to help me. I underlined profusely and wrote margin notes.
It was exhilarating. I had just changed my major from business to economics and wanted a solid foundation, a worldview, to understand the business and economic world.…
Continue Reading… Continue Reading“The interventionist in advocating additional public expenditure is not aware of the fact that the funds available are limited. He does not realize that increasing expenditure in one department enjoins restricting it in other departments. In his opinion there is plenty of money available. The income and wealth of the rich can be freely tapped…. It never occurs to him [think Obama] that grave arguments could be advanced in favor of restricting public spending and lowering the burden of taxation. The champions of cuts in the budget are in his eyes merely the defenders of the manifestly unfair class interests of the rich.”
– Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), 1966, pp. 856–57.
“This is where we stand in our current debt ceiling debate. Government is too big, too bloated.