[Editor’s note: Bernanke has further loosened the Fed’s monetary stance. As economist Frank Shostak explains, this action is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how wealth is created and can only make things worse.]
On Wednesday December 12, 2012 Fed policy makers announced that they will boost their main stimulus tool by adding $45 billion of monthly Treasury purchases to an existing program to buy $40 billion of mortgage debt a month.
For Hayek, ”Justice is an attribute of individual action. I can be just or unjust toward my fellow man.” But ”social justice” is a “meaningless conception.”
Robert Bork, who died yesterday, is remembered largely as a Constitutional scholar, but his most important contributions dealt with antitrust. He was sharply critical of the modern application of US antitrust law, while remaining wedded to the Knight-Friedman-Stigler idea of perfect competition as a welfare benchmark, leading to a number of confusions and contradictions. One of the best treatments of Bork’s approach to competition is Jack High’s 1984 article, “Bork’s Paradox: Static vs.
“There are other elements that enter into the determination of the time-preference schedules. Suppose, for example, that people were certain that the world would end on a definite date in the near future. What would happen to time preferences and to the rate of interest? Men would then stop providing for future needs and stop investing in all processes of production longer than the shortest.
