Wind or Nuclear?

Boone Pickens is calling for massive subsidization of the wind-power industry. As with ethanol and recycling and a host of other issues, you must ask yourself again, if these things are so efficient, why do they need to be subsidized? Answer: they’re not so efficient. Energies that require massive subsidization benefit absolutely no one.

When Stimulus Does Not Stimulate

Obama’s stimulus plan is equivalent to a giant welfare scheme. Instead of the money going to lower income Americans, however, it is meant to go to municipal bureaucrats of various stripes. Instead of productive American citizens determining what to do with their own scarce resources, the state is stepping in and dictating how they will be used. Consequently, such spending is essentially government consumption, which is what vulgar Keynesians think we need now more than ever.

Auditing the Fed Will Audit the State

The Fed is a racket at heart, a con game writ large — what else can you call an organization with the exclusive privilege of printing money in the trillions and handing it over to friends? But if this is true, what does that say about the state, the organization that created and sanctions it? Is the Fed an honest mistake in the state’s otherwise undying efforts to preserve our liberty, or might it be a key component of a bigger racket?

In Comes the State

The trustees and bureaucrats plan the future based on the science of the day. They act as if they were the intended recipients of a letter written by Claude-Henri Saint-Simon some 200 years ago. In that letter, Saint-Simon envisioned a paradise governed by “men of genius.” That was his utopia. Of course, history reveals a different reality.

They Ignore Mises at their Peril

With the great bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008 the federal government is reforming and expanding its regulatory oversight in hopes of legislating away booms and busts. Recent decades have featured a series of speculative manias, followed by harrowing financial busts, with central banks applying the same tonic — a flood of monetary stimulus — to salve the nation’s financial wounds. The repeated stimulus has only served to create new bubbles, continued malinvestment and more financial pain.

Edward Prescott’s Wrongheaded Analysis

The kings and queens of graduate economics classrooms -- real business cycle sophists, have been surprisingly mute on causes and consequences of the Second Great Depression. The silence is probably best explained by the feelings of shame for the utter failure of their models and predictions. But, alas, no need to wait any longer! Edward Prescott, Nobel Laureate of 2004, has finally chosen to creep out of the woods and enlighten us here.

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