With “recession“ dominating economic headlines these days, many have forgotten the K-shaped versus V-shaped recovery debate of late 2020. 

Still riding the high of stimulus checks and PPP loans, nearly all market pundits concurred that we were largely out of the woods of financial turmoil. Their disagreement lied in whether the rebound would take place in the real economy (V-shaped) or solely in asset prices (K-shaped), leaving Main Street behind.

In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state. 

Our main text for the Rothbard Graduate Seminar this week is Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy, which contains a systematic treatment of one area of economic theory, interventionism. This represents a departure from past seminars in an important respect. Earlier seminars focused on texts by Mises or Rothbard that addressed a much broader scope of their thought. Previous seminar texts such as Man, Economy, and State and Human Action cover the entirety of economic theory.

There is scattered evidence that home prices are finally starting to slow down. But, if the phenomenon is system-wide, we’re still waiting to see the evidence in numbers. Last week, the most recent Case-Shiller national data, for example, showed that home prices in March rose an eye-popping 20 percent year over year.