In the absence of prices, could a central planner efficiently run an economy? Before you answer, I’ll drop the Hayekian proviso that the planner be vile. Instead, I’ll only ask you to consider a planner who is a soccer mom wanting to maximize happiness among all. Would you still answer in the negative?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, President Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy was, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” At the beginning of the twenty-first, President Obama’s policy appears to the the opposite: “Speak loudly and carry a small stick.”
Paul Krugman owes much of his considerable reputation as an economic theorist to “new trade theory.”
Here is a forecast of Gross Domestic Product based on the Austrian notion of the money supply and its growth rate. Jeffrey Peshut shows that Real GDP peaks with a variable lag to the growth rate of the True Money Supply. In other words we should expect Real GDP growth to peak from 1 to 3 years after the True Money Supply growth rate peaks. He writes:
By Murray Rothbard [Editor’s Note: This is a Selection from “Nations by Consent:Decomposing the Nation-State”]
by Laurence Vance
The latest ruse of some conservatives to garner the sympathy, support, and votes of libertarians is to declare that they are “constitutionalists.” Although they are sometimes referred to as “libertarians” in the media, sometimes even portray themselves as “libertarian-leaning,” and get ecstatic when real libertarians describe them as “liberty-minded,” these conservative “constitutionalists” are not only not libertarian, they are not even constitutional.
Behavioral economics and its close cousin, neuroeconomics, have been all the rage in the last few decades. Behavioral economists claim to go beyond the naive assumptions of neoclassical economics by taking psychology (and neurophysiology) seriously, using laboratory experiments, brain scans, and other techniques to study how economic actors “really” behave under various circumstances.
Bernanke is absolutely savaged in the comments to this CNBC video detailing his $250K speaking fee (now that he has joined the “private” sector). This is a family blog, so we won’t reprint any of them here. But the comments show how laughably out of touch with reality our political/banking class really is. NOBODY believes the official story anymore. Central bankers are seen as deeply harmful, if not criminal.
Presented at the 6th Austrian Scholars Conferece, Auburn, March 24–26, 2000.
