The Wall Street Journal‘s Mark Gongloff quotes Lehman economist Ethan Harris in this morning’s “Ahead of the Tape” column:

In the rush to enact a timely package, politicians may have stopped a 2008 recession, but they have ignored a risky letdown -- after the election. [The U.S.

According to the prevailing Keynesian dogma, consumption is the main form of spending in the economic system, while saving is mere nonspending and thus a “leakage” from the spending stream. This dogma underlies much of government economic policy in the United States, including the so-called economic stimulus package that has just been enacted. In this article, I prove, to the contrary, that consumption is not the main form of spending in the economic system and that the source of most spending is, in fact, saving. I prove my claims by starting with the very formulations of the expenditure aggregates presented by the Keynesian doctrine itself. Thus, the simplest, core accounting relationship of Keynesian economics is that national income, which is essentially the sum of profits plus wages, is equal to the sum of consumption expenditure plus net investment. It is only a small step from national income to gross domestic product (GDP). Essentially all one does is add business depreciation allowances to profits on the left-hand side of the equation and to net investment on the right-hand side. This last raises net investment to what contemporary economics calls gross investment. The sum of consumption plus gross investment is held to equal GDP.

The city of Los Angeles is considering an ordinance that would create a paparazzi-free bubble of safety around celebrities whereby the proceeds of the sale of photographs taken within the bubble would be confiscated. Situations such as this one exist due to a lack of property rights. Roads, parks and other areas are made available to everyone by the state, and in so doing, it has to try to accommodate as many groups as possible, even when each group wishes that the other would disappear.

From Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty (Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter 3; p. 56): “That the seas were to be open to all and free from government control was an idea that Grotius, the founder of international law, derived from Spanish philosophical thought, especially from the work of Francisco Suarez.

Here: If you’re going to write a biography of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), you have your work cut out for you. You face a mountain of books, articles, speeches, and correspondence by and about the great libertarian economist and his forebears, contemporaries, disciples, and critics, much of it in German.

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