First, there was “Fear the Boom and Bust,” the excellent Hayek v. Keynes rap video, and Nina Paley’s catchy “Copying is not Theft” and her creative “All Creative Work Is Derivative”–now there’s the anti-IP inspired “Death of ACTA” by Dan Bull, which opposes IP and ACTA. Video below (warning: some profanity).
I am very happy that Stephan Kinsella is finally teaching a class on intellectual property, which is surely one of the most important issues of our time. We need desperately to spread education about this topic, which is a difficult one. It is not one of the “armchair” issues that you can solve without much thought or serious study.
Let me try to give a flavor of what we are dealing with here.
When my book on the Great Depression came out — shortly after Obama’s inauguration — I told radio interviewers that our current economic crisis was the start of the Second Great Depression. The Federal Reserve and the government implemented the same types of policies after the housing crash as they did in the 1930s after the stock-market crash.
Quarterly GDP increased by 2% at an annual rate which means it increased by ½ of 1% for the quarter. Almost ¾ of that growth was the result of building inventories so we are left with about 1/2 % at an annual rate or .14% for the quarter. If the buildup in inventories represents correct entrepreneurial insight regarding better business in the future, it is a good thing.
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
A German company, Nordex, is expanding—in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The company plans to hire up to 700 Americans at above-average wages. I haven’t heard any conservatives denounce the action of Nordex.
In the foreground is the Keynesian fiction, in which consumption plus investment (plus government spending) equals output. In the background is the Austrian reality, in which a heterogeneous capital stock responds to changes in the interest rate by shifts in the time structure of production. Intervention in credit markets thus creates distortions that generate the business cycle. See Roger Garrison, Austrian Macroeconomics: A Diagrammatical Exposition (Mises Institute, 2010 forthcoming)
