Mankiw’s Baseless Arguments
Greg Mankiw’s recent blog post carries a rather risky title: “The Monetary Base Is Exploding.
What Price a Planned Economy?
We are witnessing a great tragedy: more and more people being driven by indignation about the suppression of political and intellectual freedom joining the forces which make its ultimate suppression inevitable.
Gold and Guns
Government’s current ham-handedness — with its bailouts, money printing, and rights violations — has alerted more than a few individuals to do what comes naturally: defend themselves and prepare for the worst.
The Planning States of the 1940s
Harry Hopkins of “tax-tax, spend-spend, elect-elect” fame; argued in the early 1940s that in order to defeat the Nazis, the United States had to become like them.
It happens every 50 years or so
Most people under 40 years old spent their holidays fixing their parents and grandparents computers and trying to teach them things about new devices – facing down the inevitable resistance of the older generation to change. They say that they like the old ways better and do not want new things, all while depending on younger people to actually make possible various labor-saving devices that enable ever better communication. (This is not a universal of course, just a tendency.)
“Entrepreneurs are accustomed to a manic-depressive economy”
Huerta: ‘El empresario está acostumbrado a una economía maniaco-depresiva’
Interview with Jesús Huerta de Soto, Professor of Political Economy
‘We must allow the market to detect and rectify its own errors.’ Professor Huerta de Soto holds that ‘governments attack the symptoms, and not the causes, of recessions.’
D. Gracia / C. Cuesta (Madrid) Expansión
Place Blame Where It Belongs
The 1935 Social Security Act was a marvel of Ponzi-scheme legerdemain that surpasses anything Madoff could conjure. Everyone reading this polemic resides far down the pyramid — exactly where you don’t want to be.
Reactionary Liberals
“Liberalism” in the historic sense is the struggle of man to assert his liberty against authority. In the political field, this struggle is against the authority of the state.
A Lesson in Mortality
A death in the family is always hard, but three in three weeks is especially difficult for children, even though it only involved pets.
First it was the green tree frog discovered at the local car repair shop and taken home to be cared for. “Sticky” lived two months, long enough for the kids to become very attached. One day we found him dead in his cage.
Then it was the two chickens brought home soon after being hatched at a friend’s chicken coop. They lived only two days, and died so innocent, so young and vulnerable.
Do Innovations Cause Business Cycles?
If one considers the relatively poor tools available for astronomical research in those days, Ptolemy’s fallacy is excusable. But modern economic science is not free from this kind of error either.
