Amity Shlaes in today’s Wall Street Journal provides “The Coolidge Lesson on Taxes and Spending” makes the argument that those, as has been done at Mises Daily here, and here who want to “make government smaller” and “to lower taxes” as a means to “yield prosperity” should look not to Ronald Reagan but to “Silent Cal” C
Arline Alchian Hoel reports that her father, Armen Alchian, “passed away peacefully in his sleep early this morning at his home in Los Angeles.” He was 98 years old.
My introduction to Austrian economics began over 30 years ago when my mentor Fred R. Glahe handed me a couple of pages of handwritten notes on the Hayek-Keynes debate which he had prepared for commentary at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting sometime in the late 1970s and suggested I turn the notes into a dissertation.
Hayek famously argued that prices embody information and that economic actors, responding to price changes, act as if they knew the underlying circumstances generating these changes.
France’s state auditing bureau, Cour des Comptes, informed the French government that it was “dreaming” in forecasting that the French economy would grow this year by 0.8 percent, which would enable it to meet its budget deficit target of 3 percent of GDP. The bureau told French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault that a growth rate of 0.3 percent was more like it, which would not be sufficient to meet the deficit reduction target.
Ronald Dworkin, (1931-2013) who died yesterday, was widely regarded as America’s leading legal philosopher. He was decidedly not a libertarian, but libertarians will find much of interest and value in his work. His defense of moral objectivity in his Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) is especially impressive. He argues that views about the nature of morality are themselves moral positions.
As if any more evidence were needed (see my CB post earlier this week) that the Fed has succeeded, either through ignorance or design, in igniting new asset bubbles throughout the economy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City just released a survey of bankers that confirms a continuing rise in U.S. farmland prices.
From time to time I have been critical of Professor Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laurette from Princeton University and the New York Times. Recently I criticized his use of the babysitter model of the economy. However, Robert Blumen brought to my attention that I had unfairly criticized Krugman in my paper on the deflation phobia, Apoplithorismosphobia.
