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My great colleague Walter Williams reviews Universal Economics – a new edition of the greatest economics textbook ever written. A slice:

The authors give a long list of erroneous beliefs that people hold. Here’s a tiny sample: Employers pay for employer-provided insurance; larger incomes for some people require smaller incomes for others; minimum wage legislation helps the unskilled and minorities; foreign imports reduce the number of domestic jobs; “equal pay for equal work” laws aid women, minorities, and the young; labor unions protect the natural brotherhood and collective well-being of workers against their natural enemies, employers; and we cannot compete in a world in which most foreign wages are lower than wages paid to domestic workers.

Deirdre McCloskey asks “what’s still right with the Austrian school of economics?” A slice:

Austrian price theory, Peter [Boettke] notes, was “especially in the hands of Mises and Hayek, institutional in nature: they placed a priority on the framework within which economic life takes place.” But also on ethics. “An institutional framework of property, contract and consent, is a fundamental pre-requisite for the operation of prices and profit-and-loss. Prices guide, profits lure, and losses discipline within the competitive entrepreneurial market process.”

Vanessa Brown Calder issues an important warning about government paid-leave benefits.

Alexander C.R. Hammond celebrates Edward Jenner.

Scott Sumner wisely counsels humility in matters of foreign policy.

Bill Shughart and Arthur Wardle aren’t impressed by Trump’s ethanol plans.

Richard Salsman warns of fallout from trade wars.

Jim Bacchus argues for saving the WTO’s appeals process – a process now being inexcusably and dangerously undermined by the Trump administration.

Those of you who will be in or near Babson Park, Florida, on Monday (Oct. 15th), I encourage you to consider going to see Steve Landsburg speak there (specifically, at Webber International University).

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