This column, An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State by capital-O Objectivist Robert Tracinski makes some insightful points, if you can get past the giggle-inducing Objectivist stock-phrases like “sense of life”. E.g.:
Last night, the military burst into the offices of our friends in New Orleans.
A very nice piece by Declan McCullagh, especially strong on documenting how government completely failed at crisis management—after all the untold hundreds of billions spent after 9-11 for homeland preparedness blah blah.
One quibble here, which is endemic to literature that speaks only of Hayeken spontaneous order vs. intentionality, not the more precise formulation of markets intentions vs. government intentions. Murray Rothbard addressed this question:
Disruption, high prices, and dislocations of all sorts have led to call for a new “energy policy.” Let us consider the case of Indonesia, which has an energy policy of an unusual sort. As the Sunday Times of Singapore reported on September 4, 2005: “Jakarta subsidizes heavily the cost of fuel for ordinary Indonesians and faces a subsidy bill of as much as 138.6 trillion rupiah this year because of high crude oil prices.”
US Labor Secretary Elaine Chao apparently skipped Bastiat in her studies, and has declared that “what will happen — and I have seen this in previous catastrophes and hurricanes — there is a bright spot in that new jobs do get created.”
Read the article at Yahoo!News here.
Study of business cycles must be based upon a satisfactory cycle theory. Gazing at sheaves of statistics without “pre-judgment” is futile. A cycle takes place in the economic world, and therefore a usable cycle theory must be integrated with general economic theory. And yet, remarkably, such integration, even attempted integration, is the exception, not the rule. Economics, in the last two decades, has fissured badly into a host of airtight compartments—each sphere hardly related to the others.
The May 2005 issue of the National Geographic has an interesting article on the Nobel committee and Albert Einstein. Apparently, the Nobel committee was really determined to deny Albert Einstein a Nobel Prize, even if the entire world demanded it. So much for the honesty and integrity of the Nobel committee. Quoting from the article:
The implicit goal of mainstream methodology is to measure and determine the relations between economic variables. Such a goal presupposes the existence of at least some constant variables making measurement and calculation possible. The implicit goal of Austrian methodology is the derivation of exact or universal laws of human action independent of time and place. Measurability and the existence of constant variables are denied. This paper describes how the content of the objects of reality is shaped or unpacked and used in very different ways by the two methodologies.
