Four completely unrelated things in reverse order of what you should read. ONE: Libertarianism

The road to Serfdom…

Oddly enough some modern right-wing libertarians, inheritors of the Hayekian tradition are holding out Feudalism as a positive and desirable society. In “Democracy: The God That Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a libertarian and professor of economics in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the author ‘debunks’ such myths as the idea that the move from monarchism is parliamentary democracy was a progressive one. Little could Hayek have known that his disciples would be one day be arguing not only against the road to serfdom but also against the road from serfdom.

TWO: Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke, chair of the Fed,  doesn’t really seem to care all that much about the unemployed. From the Washington post:

“if the pace of recovery is moderate, as I expect, a significant amount of time will be required to restore the 8 1/2 million jobs that were lost during the past two years.”

THREE: JK Rowling

This has been doing the rounds on facebook and elsewhere but in case any read hasn’t seen it. This article by JK Rowling in The Times is brilliant. It’s on being a single mother under the Tories and why she won’t be voting Tory in the upcoming election.

FOUR:  Economic Geography

Paul Krugman delivered a talk for the Association of American Geographers this week which is up online here. It’s pretty interesting and includes some interesting comments on economics as a social science and responding to critiques of New Economic Geography.