Gregory Bresiger tells the tale of how he was officially terminated: "How was I killed off at a relatively young age—well, 50 really doesn't seem that old today—and then miraculously raised from the dead by these mail carrying ghouls? Well, how does anything work in the federal government? It's difficult to explain. I'll give it my best shot."
Any upturn whether in economic statistics or in the stock market is almost certain to follow the patterns not of economic recovery but rather a mini-boom. There is no way that this particular boom, as pathetic as it is, can be sustained for a long time, unlike the boom of the late 1990s. In fact, the Fed's recent actions can only force more malinvestments which themselves will have to be liquidated in the future.
A broader understanding of "Say's Law" would assist those who continued to be puzzled by macroeconomic questions, but even better would be to understand the context in which this Law was formulated. Say not only built a case for the essential stability of a free market (in contrast to the instability of the present mixed economy) but also made the case for the free society against every alternative.
Böhm-Bawerk's critique of the naïve productivity theory of interest was a brilliant leap forward for subjectivist economics, and remains the dominant Austrian view. Unfortunately, its lessons are as little understood yet just as relevant today as they were in the 1880s. Robert Murphy explains why.
Sustained long-term economic growth, of course, is good for human health and life expectancy. But what about the business cycle when government generates periods of overly speculative investing and even stock market hysteria followed by unemployment and bankruptcy? What are the health consequences of an economic frenzy fueled by money creation?
In Portland, the restaurant chain Pizza Schmizza offered to pay homeless people a slice of pizza, soda and a few dollars in exchange for holding a sign for 40 minutes on downtown sidewalks that read: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money." Ralph Nader didn't like it one bit.
This year marks the 70th Anniversary of the National Industrial Recovery Act, FDR's planning legislation that created the National Recovery Administration, the NRA. Henry Hazlitt saw precisely what the NRA would lead to, and after a dispute with the The Nation that resulted in his losing his position as literary editor, he wrote the following brilliant attack for the American Mercury.
The phrase "exporting jobs" is a misnomer. A job is not a good, nor is it a service, so it cannot be imported or exported. Only goods can fit that terminology, and one can neither purchase nor sell a job, so to say that U.S. corporations are "exporting jobs" is at best to be using economic language in a sloppy and inaccurate way.
Entrepreneurs are widely considered to be important parts of economic activity. Why would they not be studied carefully by those who are supposed to know so much about this activity? Yet actual policies in actual economies affecting actual human beings have been crafted by economists who have, for the most part, largely ignored entrepreneurial activity.
The guild system possesses a superficial plausibility, which gives it what attractiveness it may have among market critics left and right. But consider how a guild system must work in practice. The logic of the guild is such that certain people who wish to enter a particular trade are denied entry.
