The economist Alex Tabarrok in a post today criticizes what he calls ”identity economics”. Tabarrok says: “Identity economics is bad economics”. By “identity economics,” he means a theory that jumps from an accounting identity to a claim about causation. Keynesian economics is a prime example of this fallacy, as Tabarrok’s quotation from Nick Rowe illustrates:
1. Y = C + I + G + X – M. Therefore an increase in Government spending will increase GDP.
As I’ve noted in the past , when it comes to government spending on social welfare programs, the United States is hardly the free-market, libertarian “paradise” many social democrats suppose it to be. When we look at social spending as a percentage of GDP, the US is similar to Switzerland, and the US spends more on social benefits than Australia and Canada.
Mr. Quiggin’s recent book, Economics in Two Lessons, is the latest intellectual salvo fired by a member of the mainstream economics establishment towards the legendary unabashed defenders of capitalism like Ludwig von Mises, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A.
Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. By Anthony Flood. Independently published, 2019. I +93 pages.
Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show.
[Editor’s Note: In this selection from “Is the Virus of International Macroeconomic Interventionism Infectious? An ABCT Analysis“ in the newest issue of Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, the authors analyze how a commodity-money-based economy would be effected by neighboring economies still using fiat money.
Since the latest the crisis in 2008/2009, central banks around the world have been doing their best to expel risks from financial markets. By lowering interest rates, fixing them at extremely low levels, or issuing more credit and money, monetary policymakers make sure that ailing borrowers are kept afloat. In fact, central banks have put a “safety net” under the economies and the financial markets in particular. As it seems, this measure has been working quite effectively over the last ten years or so.
