Anticapitalists like to use examples of supposedly selfless gift exchanges in “primitive” societies to contrast with the greedy behavior of modern markets. But a closer look at one famous exotic gift exchange, the Trobriand Islanders’ Kula, actually reinforces libertarians’ claims about the universal power of the profit motive.

Over the years George Selgin has dished out quite a bit of abuse in various and sundry blog posts to Murray Rothbard and those who hold that fractional reserve banking is inherently unstable and cycle-generating. I must concede Selgin is enormously entertaining in his balls-out, over-the-top ferocity in defense of something that he lately has been calling “monetary freedom.” Danny Sanchez noted Selgin’s most recent rant in his blog yesterday.

“Animism ascribed to all things of the universe the faculty of action.  When experience moved people to drop this belief, it was still assumed that God or nature acts in a way not different from the ways of human action.  The emancipation from this anthropomorphism is one of the epistemological foundations of modern natural science.”

—Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method

Ron Paul recently showed how he is very open to debate, by having both Professor Joseph Salerno (a 100% reserves advocate) and Professor Larry White (a “free banker”) testify before his sub-committee on the subject of fractional reserve banking. (See my Misesians in Mordor posts here and here.)

Daniel Kuehn objects to my referring to Austrian economists testifying in Washington as “Misesians in Mordor.”

With every new leap of technology, we hear cries that the Age of Abundance is dawning and that we must reject the old economics of scarcity for the new economics of abundance. At the tail end of the technological boom of the the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes foretold that his contemporaries’ grandchildren would be living in an era of abundance as long as interest rates were driven down to zero to overcome the artificial scarcity of capital.

Krugman gets a bit snippy at 48:20. His objection is confused. He says Professor Schwartz tried to criticize his credentials. But Schwartz criticized Krugman for going beyond his capabilities, not for going beyond his credentials.

Schwartz makes a strong point about the “ratchet effect” in government policy at 1:09:00. He credits “ratchet effect” studies to the Public Choice school, although of course, it’s mainly an insight of Robert Higgs’, who isn’t usually classed as a Public Choice economist.