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Here’s The Economist‘s write-up on Cato’s annual Monetary Conference.  (HT Candace Smith)  It features a nice summary of Vernon Smith’s keynote address, as well as a mention of my colleague Larry White’s sound proposals for making financial institutions less fragile.  (Unfortunately, the Economist‘s reporter brings far too static an institutional analysis to Larry’s proposals.)

Matt Ridley reviews Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile in the Wall Street Journal.

In the month in which he will turn 102, the great Ronald Coase is still writing!

In my latest column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I discuss the lesson to be drawn from Plymouth Plantation’s switch, in the early 1620s, from primitive communism to a stronger private-property regime.

The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald is appropriately scathing of politicians and their enablers.

Here’s David Friedman on left-libertarianism.  (And here’s a recent Reason.tv interview, conducted by Paul Feine, of Friedman discussing the possibility of a stateless society.)

Finally, here’s Jonah Goldberg at his best (discussing, in this instance, politicians’ shenanigans, duplicities, and irresponsibility over the looming “fiscal cliff”).  Two quotations are especially noteworthy:

While there are some responsible politicians and policymakers in Washington, if you look at the whole place collectively, Uncle Sam starts to look like a junkie. The logic of addiction dictates that you make a deal that allows you to avoid all of your problems now and enjoy a quick high in exchange for a painful confrontation with reality down the road.

and,

The White House and the Democrats have been floating the idea that we can worry about entitlements later, if ever. The urgent thing is to raise taxes on the wealthy as soon as possible. When asked what he was prepared to cut, Senate majority leader Harry Reid said Wednesday, “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars worth of cuts. We’ve already done that. So we need to get some credit for that.”

Okay, here’s the credit: That is about .09 percent of the deficit. Take .09 percent of a bow, Harry.

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