A nice complement to this one on which I worked with friends:

I’m in Beijing….hoping to get some sleep before some morning meetings and then a trip to the airport for some long flights to the US and A. In the meantime, here are a few pics from some lectures I gave on this trip. (The last three pictures are from the Northeastern University in Shanyang, China.)

Meeting at Japanese for Tax Reform, Tokyo

Alumni Meeting of International Academy of Freedom in Manila

University of the Philippines

Introducing the Ideas of the Levellers at the University of the Philippines

France 24: France-Employment : GM Staff vote for pay freeze

Washington Post: “A government of the people’s every wish?”

If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

The Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, which is a real world leader in online education and media, has just released the full Hayek interviews organized by Armen Alchian of UCLA after Hayek’s Nobel Prize in 1974. The interviews are searchable and you can quickly and easily jump from place to place. Congratulations to UFM for this achievement. (And I’m pleased that I had recommended for an academic internship at UFM this last year one of the people who worked on it, Alex Weller of Penn State.)

The full text, translated from French into Arabic, of “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” is now available online: “ما يرى وما لا يرى”

The French text is available here (in full facsimile) and here (as html), and the English here.

Congratulations to my colleagues at Minbaralhurriyya.org (The Forum of Liberty), a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Bastiat is coming out in a lot of other languages, as well, as part of our “Bastiat Legacy” project: AtlasNetwork.org/BastiatLegacy, which includes short videos on themes dear to Bastiat (also translated into numerous languages), essay contest, seminars, summer schools, and more.

آلة الازدهار العظيم from Atlas Network on Vimeo.

Coming out soon in many other languages…..

My interview on Fox Business while here in Berlin. (It’s a part of a whole program on Milton Friedman’s legacy.)

I’m in Berlin (Potsdam, actually) for a conference on dealing with the problems involved in measuring freedom and coming up with some measurement system. Last night I did a television interview in Berlin for John Stossel’s show on Fox Business. It will air Thursday at 8 p.m. and 12 midnight, Saturday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., and Sunday at 10 p.m. (all times eastern).

The conference hall of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kabul for the presentation of the Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
Presentation by me on the foundations of prosperity and peaceful cooperation
Presentation by Prof Nasrullah Stanikzai on the relations between law and economics

Jeffrey A. Miron presented his book Libertarianism, from A to Z at a forum at the Cato Institute, and I presented the comments, including a little history of the term “libertarian” and my criticisms of Jeff’s appeal to “consequential libertarianism.”

The full video of the book forum is available here.

Johan Norberg on Book TV (from his Cato appearance)

Johan Norberg at Cato (full video of forum)

Explained by Experts Takis Michas and Patrick Welter

I’ve known both Takis and Patrick for years and it was great to have them both together in D.C. to talk about a subject on which both are experts, albeit from different directions.

George F. Will: “Greece and GM: Too weak to fail“

I’m at a seminar in Indianapolis on the economics of sound money; the discussants include very serious economists (and some others, as well!) and a set of readings largely focused on the writings of Ludwig von Mises, especially Human Action. I’d not read the book for many years and was struck by how original and intelligent it is (as well as occasionally repetitive and a wee bit harsh on his critics, but those are minor flaws in a serious book). It’s been a joy to read as I snatched time between meetings in Kyrgyzstan (and it helped me to fill the many flights and hours to get there and back — it’s a big book). It was in my satchel during my presentations on the model of economic reform in the Republic of Georgia at the Kyrgyz Ministry of Economic Development, at the invitation of acting minister Emil Umetaliev, a founding board member of the Central Asian Free Market Institute. I think that Mises might have been pleased.**

The conference on sound money is organized by the Liberty Fund, which is the publisher of Mises’s books. They are commemorating their fiftieth anniversary by “re-running” a number of their old seminars, including one that was held on these readings (plus or minus a few) in 1974. (At the University of Southern California in 1973-1974 we had a reading group that read Mises. I recall our meeting on October 10, 1973, at which the wonderful teacher and philosopher Prof. John Hospers was present, when we learned about the death that day of Mises; a great mind left the scene that day, but through his works he continues to be active and to enlighten and inspire us.)

**By the way, there’s an interesting, critical discussion of the reform process in Georgia, focusing on the contributions of fellow Mises fan Kakha Bendukidze, here; I organized some of the conferences in Tbilisi that are discussed in the papers.

And see if Lou Dobbs (that old charmer, who managed to call Don Boudreaux an “idiot” and June Arunga “stupid” within minutes of meeting them in the Green Room) convinces you that he is not an economic nationalist and trade obstructionist.

Stossel’s Announcement: “Everyone Prospers With Free Trade”

Stossel’s Column

Emil Umetaliev

My friend Emil Umetaliev was just named acting Minister of Economic Development in the interim government of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Emil is the founder and owner of Kyrgyz Concept, a pioneering private business (founded in 1990, before the USSR was abolished), and a member of the board of directors of the Central Asian Free Market Institute. He is a principled and honest businessman, an outspoken free trader and advocate of constitutionally limited democratically accountable government, and a teacher of the principles of liberty.

CAFMI’s Announcement