All Posts Tagged With: "consumption"
Saving Is Killing the Economy?
In the midst of the current recession, many of the oldest fallacies in economics are making a comeback. In a column titled “Why Saving is Killing the Economy,” senior writer Chris Isidore repeats one of the oldest: that the key to economic recovery or growth is consumption and that saving retards that process. Isidore states [...]
19Aug2009 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedKeynes’s Ghost
The multiplier argument is founded on two key assumptions that turn out to be false. First is the notion that savings are not spent but rather are withdrawn from the expenditure stream. The multiplier’s second incorrect premise is that government expenditures are “autonomous”; that is, government spending does not depend on current income.
9Jun2009 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Trouble with Keynes
Keynesian theory implies an inherent instability in market economies. Thus the theory cannot possibly explain how a healthy market economy functions—how the market process allows one kind of activity to be traded off against the other.
1Apr2009 | Roger W. Garrison | 2 comments | ContinuedPresidents Can’t Manage the Economy
The presidential candidates have been repeatedly asked how they would “manage the economy.” With the exception of Ron Paul, every candidate has accepted the premise that this is something the president of the United States should do. Or can do.
Nonsense.
Democrats act like the president is national economic manager. Republicans pay lip service to free markets, [...]
Consumption Must Be Curtailed to Sustain the Human Race? It Just Aint So!
Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People and Puck: A Novel.
Jared Diamond, in a January 2 op-ed in the New York Times, argues for a political solution to what he sees as a looming “consumption crisis” facing humanity. He notes that the current consumption of many resources, such as oil and metals, [...]
Perspective ~ An Unstimulating Idea
“It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”
That’s how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic—rather, illogic—of the economic “stimulus” proposals that everyone and his uncle have been proposing.
If we needed further demonstration of the folly that is the American [...]
Free Trade’s Never-Ending Battle
Arthur Foulkes is a freelance writer living in Indiana.
Bastiat, did you live in vain?
I can think of few people who did more for the cause of free trade in his lifetime than Frédéric Bastiat. A nineteenth-century French lawmaker, pamphleteer, economist, and philosopher, Bastiat is well known to free-trade advocates even today. His classic satirical essay [...]




