Jeff Peshut has posted a nice article indicating the full dimensions of the stagnating recovery in labor markets.  Peshut focuses on the absolute level of employment and the rate of growth of employment rather than looking solely at the far rosier unemployment rate.  He shows that the employment growth rate was far lower during the Greenspan inflationary bubble years of   2003-2007  than  it was in the periods 1983 to mid-1990 and mid-1991 to 2000.

On the Tom Woods Show:

George Selgin responded to my earlier post. The substance of his response is captured in the following passage

The philosophical and legal foundation of the U.S. government (and some other governments) is that government officials are the agents of the citizens—in the familiar phrase, those who govern have the “consent of the governed.” An agent, of course, is someone I authorize to act on my behalf. For a host of reasons, this doctrine has always been more or less absurd, but its absurdity has been placed in stark relief recently by the government’s mass spying, which violates the Constitution, various statutes, and many official declarations and promises.

While E.J. Dionne was certainly wrong about many things in his article from February 9, I wouldn’t go so far to call it a smear job or a screed. Indeed, Dionne, in his book Why Americans Hate Politics, mentions the tactics and thought of Murray Rothbard on more than one occasion, and gives him a somewhat evenhanded treatment.

In his post a few days ago entitled “Don’t Ask George to Dance,” Bob Murphy referred to George Selgin’s “pugnacity” in denying that he is an Austrian. Now neither George’s pugnacity, nor his quintillionth public profession of his non-Austrianism, is sufficiently interesting to warrant comment. What does deserve comment, however, is George’s less than ingenuous explanation of why he is not an Austrian. George writes:

Mark Thornton refutes the recent ‘Washington Post’ attack on Austrian Economics. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute

Dr. Mark Thornton, John O’Donnell and Merlin Rothfeld take a look at the current market situation (January 24th) and offer suggestions as to where we may be headed going forward. The trio also take a look at the gloomy unemployment scene in the US, and solutions to getting jobs back in America.

President Obama described his fellow Democrat, who just announced his retirement after four decades in Congress, as “one of the most accomplished legislators of his or any era.” The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson calls him a ” legislative genius” who “decisively consigned the Republican right’s favored ideology—libertarianism—to history’s dustbin.” He did so, Meyerson went on, by proposing “common sense” laws. “Who could be against “ Waxman?