Want to affect public policy at one of many non-profit organizations across the country? Liberty@Work is a full-time job and professional development program for individuals who want to be advocates for freedom at the state level.

Through the program, participants will work full time as employees at one of many public policy organizations located in cities across the nation. In addition to having a substantive job, participants will engage in half a day of training each week. Through interactive video technology, employees of various organizations will come together to participate in group projects, workshops, reading discussions, and more, all aimed at making participants more effective advocates of liberty.

Possible jobs include: policy research, non-profit operations, marketing and communications, leadership and talent development, fundraising, legal work, and grassroots education.

For more information or to apply for Liberty@Work, please visit: libertyatwork.org

Have questions? Contact recruiting@cgkfoundation.org

Liberty@Work is a full-time program and participants receive a competitive wage and benefits package commensurate with experience and education from participating partner organizations.

Incredible Hulk and Bruce Banner aside, union leaders have been exercising a new right won by court case called "bannering". In these cases, businesses that don't have union labor can be the subject of protest, even if the employees in the business itself have no dispute.  Kathy Hoekstra of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports:

If you have already registered, pass this on to your friends! If not, what are you waiting for?

Think more, sleep less.

The Institute for Humane Studies and Students for a Free Economy will host a weekend seminar at Northwood University in Midland, MI titled, “Exploring Liberty”. This seminar brings together students and faculty to discuss topics in Political Philosophy, History, Law, and Economics to discover what makes some societies prosper while others struggle.

If you ever longed for an opportunity to sit around with intelligent people and discuss big ideas in depth, this is your chance.

We'll provide all the meals and lectures free of charge! The seminar will begin at 3:00 pm on Friday, April 1 and run through 4:00 pm on Sunday, April 3. There is no charge for the seminar, but spaces are limited, so please only sign up if you are committed to attending. If you are coming from outside Midland, we may be able to provide lodging for you on a first-come first-served basis.

Topics include:

What causes economic crises, and how to resolve them?

Where does law come from?

What is the proper governmental response to environmental disasters like the BP oil spill?

More information and registration:

http://www.theihs.org/wknd-seminar/northwood

I admit this freely: I like drinking things just above freezing.  I like my water to numb the nerves in my mouth and make talking all but impossible.  I don’t know why this is, or what possible long term side effects it will have, but I do know that it requires a simple but often overlooked household staple: ice cubes.  Yes, the simple ice cube. It’s a simple variation of one of the most abundant substances in the world: water. And yet from this, we can garner some fundamental economic truths: stages of production, the value of savings, the act of consumption, demand, supply, and others. Here, I will focus primarily on the merits of savings and the act of consumption, but will touch briefly on the idea behind ice cube production.

For those of you always blessed with having automatic icemakers, don’t fret.  I will explain the process to manually create ice cubes with gripping detail.  It will be enough for you to understand the process, even if you can’t appreciate it. For the rest of us, we understand that in order to have ice cubes, when you want them, requires foresight. One cannot simply believe that ice cubes will replicate in the freezer, into perpetuity, without some sort of initiative of the demander.

So what do we do? We dutifully fill those plastic trays under the faucet, and as steadily as possible march them to the freezer and set them inside.  We close the door, open it immediately and poof! Ice is created, right? Of course not.  Ice takes time.  It’s not something we create instantly using household appliances.  The lesson: every act of production requires a period of time. You must know what you’re going to make, and then plan accordingly. Production requires foresight and time. (It requires other things as well, but the sake of this argument, we’ll leave those alone).

Now, you wait the appropriate amount of time, open the freezer, and voila, ice is waiting for your use.  You may do with it what you will.  Chock that glass full of it. Make your brain freeze.

Read More...

Liya Palagashvili with Students for Liberty offers a great overview of the basic tenets of Austrian economics. Even cats can understand it! :

On the first day of class, my High School Political Economy teacher wrote on the board – “Praxeology: The study of human action.”. He then drew two branches from Praxeology – one of them read “History: What Happened,” while the other read “Economics: Why It Happened.”

Austrian Economics is a specific lens to view and study the world—the ‘why things happen,’ so to speak. As Economist Steve Horwitz notes in his post What Austrian Economics Is and What Austrian Economics is NOT, “[Austrian Economics is] an approach to the study of human action and the social world.” Austrian Economics provides us with certain tools to analyze human action—whether it be understanding historical, current, or future human behavior. 

The Austrian School of Economics was founded by Carl Menger in 1871 at the brink of the Marginal Revolution and continued on by his followers Eugen Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich Wieser. Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, and Wieser all held faculty positions at the University of Vienna in Austria—and thus formulating the name, ‘Austrian Economics.’ Since its founding, the Austrian School moved to Great Britain and the United States and in the 20th century, economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek became the leading scholars in Austrian Economics. While the School contains a wide variety of influences and is integrated with a number of thinkers, there are ten main propositions of Austrian Economics. I adopted these from Economist Peter Boettke’s post on Austrian Economics from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. For a more detailed analysis of Austrian Economics, please read Peter Boettke’s post.

To see more, along with the original post please go here.