Concerning the new Cato Policy Report and its essay “How FDR Prolonged the Great Depression,” Jim Powell has much to say about M. Friedman but never mentions Rothbard’s great 1963 treatise America’s Great Depression. Ron Neff of The Last Ditch comments:
It’s also worth pointing out that Mises and Hayek explained the great Depression before it occurred. Part of the reason for Austrian Business Cycle Theory’s brief popularity during the 1930s was that they were recognised as having predicted what would happen. And of course Mises wrote his “Causes of the Economic Crisis” in 1931.
A few points regarding Richard Posner’s NY Times review of the awful book, “Lincoln’s Constitution”: First, this is yet another in a long, long line of books that read like a defense brief in “The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln.” Question: Why, 138 years after his death, are left-wing and neocon legal scholars STILL writing long, torturous “defenses” of Lincoln’s trashing of the Constitution, suspension of habeas corpus, mass arrest of ten
Greenspan the Loser in Central Bankers’ Pay League (Faisal Islam, Observer)
The Birth of the GOP (Robert B. Ekelund and Mark Thornton, Milken Review, 3rd Quarter, 2003, p. 5-6):
Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust argues that Greenspan has the second best record on inflation of any postwar Fed governor, not because he intended it but because he benefited from a number of outside trends that have kept price inflation low. Kasriel predicts, however, that: “Greenspan is more likely to leave his successor a hand similar to that which Miller inherited from Burns. Government spending is on the rise for as far as the eye can see. The U.S.
Barron’s ($) economics writer Gene Epstein explains how the Fed destructively expands credit beyond available savings, and why we don’t need it at all.
California and other states restrict the ability of wineries to sell to individual consumers, and wineries object. Conservatives are split over what to do about it, reports the New York Times. Kenneth Starr and Clint Bolick want the federal government to overrule state laws using the commerce clause and the Supreme Court. Robert Bork and C. Boyden Gray argue for state-level restrictions on grounds of states rights.
Blumen is right about Epstein’s good column in Barron’s. Here is most of it:
