Once the overseers of the Department of Agriculture got control of the farmers and the lands of America, there was no way of returning to the regime of private ownership; there was no inclination to, for the farmers were quite content to swap the hazards of their trade for the subsistence doled out to them by the bureaucrats.
It is not often that Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman are indicted for lack of fidelity to Keynes, but this is exactly Paul Davidson's complaint against them.
Arriving at those goals is not exactly doable unless government robs Peter to pay Paul and/or starts up the printing press.
Keynes has bamboozled us and it is very difficult to de-bamboozle ourselves.
Rothbard has succeeded in sustaining what remains of the postmeltdown high-tech and information sectors, albeit in India and China.
The appropriate policy is not to strengthen labor standards but to open borders and allow people to cross them freely.
"The Paul Krugman of 2009 completely disagrees with the Paul Krugman of 2003."
Contrary to popular thinking, the threat posed to the major economies is not the liquidity trap, but the government and central bank stimulus policies aimed at countering it.
The private sector can't do this, which is precisely why all the stuff that makes life worth living is produced privately, and all that the government does is slow down the progress of civilization and bring destruction and disaster wherever it goes.
Murray Rothbard's two volumes are a monument of 20th-century scholarship.
