All Posts Tagged With: "depression"

Private Investment and Public “Investment”

Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]

22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | Continued

The Newspeak of Paul Krugman

No critic of free-market economics can ever again accuse us of being irrational and immoral when it is Paul Krugman who says destruction creates wealth, and war is an acceptable second-best path to economic growth.

30Sep2010 | Steven Horwitz | 39 comments | Continued

The Medicalization of Suicide

Everyone now knows that suicide is a medical problem. Not long ago everyone knew that it was a religious and criminal problem. Bereft of the power of critical thinking and lacking historical knowledge, the human mind is a sponge for absorbing and magnifying error. The great American humorist Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818–1885) said [...]

22Sep2010 | Thomas Szasz | 3 comments | Continued

Cause, Effect, and the Current Depression

All too often people confuse cause and effect.

11Aug2010 | William L. Anderson | 10 comments | Continued

The Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921

When it comes to diagnosing the causes of the Great Depression and prescribing cures for our present recession, the pundits and economists from the biggest schools typically argue about two different types of intervention. Big-government Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, argue for massive fiscal stimulus—that is, huge budget deficits—to fill the gap in aggregate demand. [...]

18Nov2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 73 comments | Continued

The Great Depression and World War II

What about World War II? Did it end the Great Depression? More generally, is war good for the economy? I answer both in the negative and borrow here from Ludwig von Mises: “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.” As Higgs points out, because of the array of interventions in the wartime economy, war materiel was valued incorrectly and therefore the GDP data overstate economic conditions. Moreover, conscription and arms production gave a misleading employment picture

21May2009 | Art Carden | 8 comments | Continued

Bottom Line

[T]here is no way for government macroeconomic policy to correct an incorrect perception of how [savings/consumption] plans have changed. There is no way for government to acquire the knowledge necessary to be able to coordinate individual plans. Such information simply does not exist. If it is going to ever exist it will be generated by [...]

24Jan2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Ludwig von Mises: Political Realist

Here’s Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action (4th rev. ed., 793), writing about what governments–and individuals–can and cannot do during economic crises: We may admit that for the British and American governments in the ‘thirties no way was left other than that of currency devaluation, inflation and credit expansion, unbalanced budgets, and deficit spending. Governments [...]

21Jan2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Great Austrian Inflation

Wars always bring great destruction in their
wake. Human lives are lost or left crippled;
wealth is consumed to cover the costs of
combat; battles and bombs leave accumulated capital in
ruins; real and imagined injustices turn men against the
existing order of things; and demagogues emerge to play
on the frustrations and fears in peoples minds.

1Apr2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Straight Talk about Suicide

Suicide–like accident, illness, death, poverty, persecution, and war–has always been with us and has always been regarded as a part of life. Believing that a person’s life belongs to God, not himself, the Jews declared it to be a grievous sin, and Christians and Muslims followed suit. Enlightenment thought did not overtly repudiate this view. [...]

1Sep2002 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | Continued

Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America

This review was commissioned over a year ago. I was looking forward to writing it. But then the depression began. Stress. A new job. A major move. A new marriage. I felt unfocused, obviously not in a condition to write a review of an important new book. Many psychiatrists would have no problem diagnosing my [...]

1Aug2002 | Ross Levatter | 0 comments | Continued

Risk and Business Cycles: New and Old Austrian Perspectives

Leland B. Yeager is Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Auburn University. The Austrian theory of the business cycle describes how expansion of money and credit can cause recession or depression. Perhaps under political pressure to cut interest rates, the monetary authorities expand bank reserves. Business firms find credit cheaper and more [...]

1Sep1998 | Leland B. Yeager | 1 comment | Continued

How Much Do You Know About Liberty? (a quiz)

Try your hand at answering the following questions: 1. What method of resolving disputes did trial by jury replace? 2. Which great American patriot was called the “Prince of Smugglers”? 3. What bulwark of American liberty do we owe to the Antifederalists? 4. How many slaves were liberated by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation? 5. After the [...]

1Jun1996 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

Letters

Unquestionably, one of the most effective forms of communication is a thoughtful letter written to a person in answer to his own question. The staff members of the Foundation for Economic Education write thousands of such letters each year. Some of these are, in effect, short articles on “general interest” subjects not fully covered in [...]

1May1955 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 1 comment | Continued

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    63 queries. 1.775 seconds