The key to avoiding "busts" is to avoid the credit expansion and "booms" that cause them. Booms are not periods of prosperity but of the squandering of wealth. The longer they last, the worse is the devastation that follows.
The worst of Bernanke's statements came in 2006, near the zenith of the housing bubble. This was the era of the subprime mortgage, the interest-only mortgage, the no-documentation loan, and the heyday of mortgage-backed securities.
We've only had 294 failures this cycle, but it is a big deal: adjusted to current dollars, the Depression banking crisis was $100 billion, the S&L crisis was $923 billion, and the current crisis is nearly $8 trillion.
Blinder is arguing that of course the Obama stimulus worked, because spending money creates jobs, period. To see just how naive this view is, consider that there is nothing in Blinder's argument restricting it to cases of severe recession.
Pictures of the Socialistic Future tells an engrossing story about a socialist paradise that swiftly degenerates into a societal dungeon. It was originally published in an English translation in 1893—which adds immeasurably to its resonance.
Los bienes no escasos son un gran regalo cortesía de la estructura del mundo, una bendición para la humanidad, un vasto tesoro de recursos—herramientas para hacer del mundo un lugar implacablemente mejor.
Hoppe has lifted the American libertarian movement out of decades of sterile debate and deadlock, and provided us a route for future development of the libertarian discipline.
So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.
