Hayek on Keynes: The decisive assumption on which Keynes’s original argument rested and which has since ruled policy is that it is impossible ever to reduce the money wages of a substantial group of workers without causing extensive unemployment. The conclusion which Lord Keynes drew from this, and which the whole of his theoretical system was
Murray Rothbard argued persuasively against the Whig theory of history ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), and of intellectual history, in which events or ideas are portrayed as steadily and consistently improving with little room for detours, controversy, and backtracking. Peter Temin, the distinguished MIT economic historian, also worries that modern economics has
From Peter Biskind’s hilarious and irreverent My Lunches with Orson , the edited transcripts of Orson Welles’s conversations with director Henry Jaglom in the mid-1980s: HJ: In the old days, all those big [movie] deals were made on a handshake. With no contract. And they were all honored. OW: In common with all Protestant and Jewish cultures,
A new NBER working paper by Ricardo Reis (unfortunately gated) tackles “Central Bank Design.” I’ve written a little on this myself , and gave a lecture Saturday at Mises University on “Microeconomics of Central Banking” elaborating on my ideas. I’ve been particularly critical of “independence,” the idea that central bank policies should be immune
In an unusually perceptive post , Krugman complains that “again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above.” He points out that one side of the macroeconomic debate “is, in essence, political,” driven by “hostility to any intellectual approach” that might cast
“The seeds of this moral defense of free markets were planted by John Locke, Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises,” writes Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post. He emphasizes the work of Ayn Rand in popularizing the moral case for the market, but could have also mentioned Hazlitt, Hayek, Baldy Harper, Edmund Opitz, Rothbard, and other Austrians and
Line of the day, from Michael Kinsley : “Krugman sometimes writes as if, right or wrong, his view is the courageous one, held by folks willing to stand up to the plutocrats and their lackies. But his message to all classes is: party on.” I also like the way Luigi Zingales put it in 2009: Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of
I spent a lovely morning at the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. These are uniformly horrible places with long waits, surly employees, and arcane rules and procedures, and it’s not unusual for “customers” to get angry as well as frustrated. I noticed this sign posted on the counter: “We reserve the right to refuse service to
Unlike clients of a government agency, customers of a commercial enterprise really are customers, representing potential profit, not cost. In contrast to the DMV sign I shared the other day, consider the sign below, spotted at a small restaurant (via Niels van der
Ronald Coase passed away yesterday at the age of 102. Coase is one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. Here is an official notice from the University of Chicago law school; here are comments from Lynne Kiesling , Mike Sykuta , Pete Boettke , Josh Gans , and me . Much will be written in the coming
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.