Not The Onion
Paul Krugman on “epistemic closure”.
The Alleged Absence of Depressions under Totalitarianism
If the dictator invests more and thus curtails the means available for current consumption, the people must eat less and hold their tongues. No crisis emerges, because the subjects have no opportunity to utter their dissatisfaction.
Do Capitalists Produce Nothing?
Should government increase regulation of all financial markets to get back at the most successful hedge-fund investors? Given the assumption that these investors make literally nothing, the correct measure would be to expropriate their unearned income.
The Politics of Political Economists
[This article originally appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1960, pp. 659–665. Reprinted in The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School. Glos., UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1997, pp. 217–225.]
Political Money
Our management of money is advocated as a way to save us from the rigors of the natural law, but it would appear that enormous inequality, indeed injustice, may result from these strange modern conceptions of the proper functions of a national treasury.
Mercantilism as the Economic Side of Absolutism
Should Polygamy Be Illegal?
When the Winter Olympics came to Salt Lake City last year, some of the dirt that visiting journalists dug up to soil Utah’s good name was the issue of polygamy. Polygamy, the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time, especially wives, is against the law. But, should it be?
King on Punishment: A Comment
One thing I learned from Professor King’s paper is that he and I are far less in agreement on punishment theory than I had anticipated. It is fortunate for the author that I do not hold with an expectations theory of contract.
Are the Excess Reserves Finally Leaking Out?
For a while I have been warning that one way the (price) inflation genie will get out of the bottle, is that banks will take some of their incredible excess reserves and buy Treasury debt (as opposed to granting new loans to customers). The trillion+ that Bernanke has injected into the banking sector would then start trickling out into the “real economy” via federal government spending.
So you can imagine my alarm when I read this story from CNBC:
Obama — Back to Cooper Union
Only the President knows why, but Obama seems most comfortable speaking about how he’s going to run the commanding heights of the economy at the place he knew well from his annual participation in the Socialist Scholars Conference.
