Keynes had much more in mind than a cure for depressions. He thought that boom conditions could be permanently maintained by lowering the rate of interest nearly to zero. In that way, the scarcity of capital could be ended.
Someone recently told me “I just ran across a few of your interviews and writings. I was particularly impressed with the point that IP creates scarcity where none existed before. Despite its obviousness, it is characteristic of IP that had not occurred to me before.”
So I thought I would elaborate a bit on this. The “artificial scarcity” insight is indeed a good one, but it is not mine. From pp. 33-34 of Against Intellectual Property:
This weekend, I had the pleasure of traveling to Grove City College in Grove City, PA to attend the Austrian Student Scholars Conference.
William H. Hutt’s outstanding accomplishment is his pathbreaking reconstruction of the macroeconomic analysis of price and resource allocation, the long-established core of neoclassical economics. He demonstrates its indisputable and abiding relevance to the macroeconomic problems of inflation, unemployment, and depression.
Criticizing the Fed chairman for a lack of prescience is like criticizing a dog for an inability to recite the alphabet. When something is physiologically and economically impossible, why bother?
Mainstream neoclassical economics developed as a copy of 19th-century mechanical physics: using the same formal method but replacing the concept of energy with that of utility.
In Killing Slaughterhouse (Reason Online), Brian Doherty provides a superb, concise overview of the legal and libertarian issues regarding an upcoming Supreme Court, McDonald v.
Over six decades ago, free market, Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate, Friedrich A. Hayek, warned about the kinds of misguided economic policies that can lead a country down a road to serfdom of government control and domination over the citizenry.
