Secretary Geithner: Hayekian or Keynesian?
According to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve policy was “too loose for too long.” Some of us see Geithner’s remark as both a “mea culpa” on the part of the federal government and a confirmation of Austrian business-cycle theory. A more general examination of Geithner’s remarks on the subprime boom and bust, however, reveals the influence of Keynes, rather than Hayek.
The Hidden Costs of a Minimum Wage
A minimum wage breaks the hinges on the door of opportunity. The seen cost is unemployment. The unseen costs are more insidious.
Paid and Unpaid Labor
The prohibition on “child labor” (or low-wage labor more generally) should be understood not as a prohibition on child labor as such but as a prohibition on certain types of child labor.
Defining the Extent of the Market: the Whole Foods Case
Anyone is a monopolist if the market is defined narrowly enough. McDonald’s is a monopoly provider of Big Macs, and Burger King is a monopoly provider of Whoppers. Tiger Woods plays in fewer golf tournaments than he used to. Should he prosecuted as a monopolistic withholder of his services?
Windfall Profits and That Which Is Not Seen
Market prices turn incomprehensibly complex relationships into very simple ones. Government policy does the opposite. It turns the simple into the extraordinarily complex, and, as Ludwig von Mises has argued in various places, government intervention in one aspect of the economy will displace resources, change prices, and likely lead to calls for government intervention in other areas of the economy.
Revisiting Ludwig von Mises’s Interventionism
I turn your attention to one of the shortest of Mises’s works: Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. It can be read in an evening. Mises offers solid evaluations and critiques of different types of interventionism.
Economists and the “Zimbabwe Solution”
It seems that the madness among at least some economists is not abating. Harvard University apparently is vying with Princeton to see who can create the most outrageous policy prescriptions. While Paul Krugman has been leading the pack, it is disheartening to see Greg Mankiw (who at one time made sense once in a while and was George W. Bush’s chief economic advisor) and also Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
The Costs of Carbon Legislation
The real threat to humanity comes from governments growing ever more powerful in the name of fighting climate change. Whether you are a “denier” or whether you think carbon dioxide emissions need to be sharply reduced very quickly, you should be extremely skeptical of the process now unfolding in Washington. This isn’t about saving the planet; it’s about money and power.
White and Horwitz on Hoppe
The usually sensible Larry White recently blogged a silly and petty comment on Hans Hoppe’s Mises Daily Article “The Yield from Money Held’ Reconsidered.“
White quoted the following two (consecutive) paragraphs from Hoppe’s article:
