The average taxpayer and parents who foot the bill know little about the rot on many college campuses. “Indoctrinate U” is a recently released documentary, written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, that captures the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The trailer for “Indoctrinate U” can be seen at www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html.

The major news media no longer have the monopoly they once enjoyed. The way millions of Americans get their news and news analysis is through talk radio. The Rush Limbaugh Show stands at the very top of talk radio, carried on more than 650 radio stations and listened to by an estimated 20 million people each week. As an occasional fill-in for Rush, and being a professor, I see the show as being my big classroom, but I learn a lot as well.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest adviser and architect of the New Deal, Harry Hopkins, advised, “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect, because the people are too damn dumb to know the difference.” Professor Bryan Caplan, my colleague at George Mason University, sheds some light on Hopkins’ observation in his new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.”

“I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don’t believe He brought me this far,” drawled presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, mimicking black voice to a black audience, at the First Baptist Church of Selma, Alabama.

Economic theory does not operate in a vacuum. Institutions, such as the property rights structure, determine how the theory manifests itself. Similarly, the law of gravity isn’t repealed when a parachutist floats gently down to earth. The parachute simply affects how the law of gravity manifests itself.

London’s Times Online recently reported that, according to Vatican sources, Pope Benedict XVI is working on his second encyclical, a doctrinal pronouncement that will condemn tax evasion as “socially unjust.” (See www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2237625.ece.)

Last year, among the nation’s 10 largest cities, Philadelphia had the highest murder rate with 406 victims. This year could easily top last year’s with 240 murders so far.

Historical costs, sometimes called sunk costs, are irrelevant to decision-making because they are costs that have already been incurred. That’s something that’s not intuitively obvious, even for some trained economists. On a couple of occasions, I’ve recommended to a graduate student, having difficulty with his Ph.D. dissertation, that it might be wise to start all over again with a different topic. The response:

Global warming has become a big-ticket item in the eyes of its supporters. At stake are research funds, jobs and the ability to control lives all over the globe. Most climatologists agree that over the last century, the Earth’s average temperature has risen about one degree Celsius.

Sometimes the advocates of socialized medicine claim that health care is too important to be left to the market. That's why some politicians are calling for us to adopt health care systems such as those in Canada, the United Kingdom and other European nations. But the suggestion that we'd be better served with more government control doesn't even pass a simple smell test.

On July 11, New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen wrote an article titled, “In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions.”

Back in the late 1960s, during graduate study at UCLA, I had a casual conversation with Professor Armen Alchian, one of my tenacious mentors. Professor Alchian is among the top 20th-century contributors to economic knowledge. During our graduate student/faculty coffee hour conversation, I was trying to impress Professor Alchian with my knowledge of type I and type II statistical errors.

Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative.

The law versus orders

Suppose a person is raped and we arrest the rapist. Should his status, whether he’s a senator, professor or an ordinary man, play a role in the adjudication of the crime and subsequent punishment?