Interesting blog bits

1. Brad Taylor on How Not to Take Rights Seriously. If you're going to talk about rights, knowing some philosophy would help.
2. Eric Crampton on Alcohol taxes and effects on producers. Big producers are effected more by regulations that increase per-unit costs regardless of output level but small firms are effected more by changes in fixed costs.
3. Eric's recent op-ed piece from the Christchurch Press on Costs and Benefits of alcohol.
4. Gavin Kennedy on Noam Chomsky’s view of Adam Smith, here, here and here.
5. Tom M on Why Banks Should Offshore Jobs. If they want to.
6. On Hayek's birthday (born May 8, 1899) several writers have posted personal reminisces of F. A. Hayek. Here are two by David Gordon and Mario Rizzo.
7. Greg Mankiw says he has No Need to Worry about his textbook writing business. After all his initials are GM.
8. William Easterly on Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research. Laboratory experiments show that rats outperform humans in interpreting data.