Cheering NPR

I never thought I’d be cheering NPR, but Michelle Norris really makes Sen. Baucus squirm. Sure her economic theory is off, but some of her questions are spot on.
Norris: “Will this stimulus package in the end add to the nation’s deficit woes?” Baucus: “Well ... it’s ... um ... My thought is ... It probably will initially, but all economists say we should do this. All ... I’m not saying all, the vast majority of economists say we should do this.

A Creditors’ Protection Bill

The Fed and the rest of the government seem to think that their job is always to be sure that the stock market averages and the price of homes is never to be allowed to fall too far below their most recent peaks, and to flood the economy with as much new and additional money as may be required to accomplish this. Keeping up housing prices is an especially remarkable goal, inasmuch as only a year or two ago, all of the complaining was about how far housing prices had climbed relative to the ability of people to afford them.

Grant the Great

James Grant, Jeff Tucker’s favorite New York Timer, tries to understand “[h]ow...the supposedly “contained” subprime mortgage problem metastasize[d] into a global financial panic.” Given this article’s appearance on Mises.org, is it surprising that Grant places blame on the Federal Reserve? In a speech before he became Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke talked about a “Great Moderation” that

The Broken Window Fallacy Reapplied

It is not a good thing to destroy wealth. Bastiat puts it this way: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed.” It sounds like an unexceptional claim. But herein rests the core case against everything the government does. Perhaps, then, we can see why the allegory is not better known. If we took it seriously, we would dismantle the whole apparatus of American economic intervention. If you are with me to this point, perhaps you have a hard time believing that anyone really believes that wealth destruction is actually a good thing.

Last Knight Live Blog 24 - Kraus

It is said that no other book on economics has done more to advance sound economics than Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The book is a product of many years of scholarship and reflection on purely abstract aspects of science of economics and most pressing problems confronting practical economic affairs. It offers a grand system of thought; it integrates a great many ideas and major doctrines ranging from epistemology to business cycle theory into one unified whole to comprehend the forces that shape the contours of economic life in a modern division of labor society.

The Broken Window Fallacy Reapplied

It is not a good thing to destroy wealth. Bastiat puts it this way: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed.” It sounds like an unexceptional claim. But herein rests the core case against everything the government does. Perhaps, then, we can see why the allegory is not better known. If we took it seriously, we would dismantle the whole apparatus of American economic intervention. If you are with me to this point, perhaps you have a hard time believing that anyone really believes that wealth destruction is actually a good thing. Let me try to show that the fallacy is as pervasive as ever.
Subscribe to