All Posts Tagged With: "Keynesianism"
The Return of Keynesianism
Keynesian economics is an account of economywide employment that rather too simply alleges that economic health and growth—and, hence, the number of jobs—declines with decreases in “aggregate demand” and improves with increases in “aggregate demand.” No need to bother with questions about how well individual markets are working; no need to worry that the money supply might be growing too fast and causing individual prices to be out of whack—no! The economy is really much simpler, said Keynes, than those silly classical economists, such as Adam Smith, made it out to be.
21May2009 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 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 | ContinuedNews Flash: FDR Didn’t Restore Prosperity!
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to Freeman readers, but it will to the many people who have never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it—in newspaper columns and news-talk shows.
Why, after years of being taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s economic intervention saved the country [...]
Book Reviews – December 2008
Is the Welfare State Justified?
by Daniel Shapiro
Cambridge University Press • 2007 • 309 pages • $80.00 hardcover; $27.99 paperback
Reviewed by George C. Leef
Americans have lived with the welfare state for so long—more than 70 years—that for most, it is simply a fact of life. Asking whether it is justified would seem about as pointless as [...]
The Great Escape from the Great Depression
Questions about the Great Depression may be usefully framed as pertaining to three distinct issues: the Great Contraction, the extraordinarily severe economic decline from 1929 to 1933; the Great Duration, the persistence of subpar economic performance for more than a decade; and the Great Escape, the ultimate recovery from this uniquely deep and long depression. [...]
1Oct2008 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets? It Just Aint So!
Start with two assumptions. No. 1: banking and financial markets are inherently unstable. No. 2: government intervention into banking and financial markets can only stabilize (never destabilize). You’ll find it easy to conclude that any period of market instability we experience, like the recent subprime-lending problem, is the market’s fault and that it could have [...]
1Oct2008 | Lawrence H. White | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Current Economic Crisis and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
Richard Ebeling is completing his tenure as the president of FEE. This fall he will teach economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
The current financial crisis emerged out of an economic boom that began in 2003 and saw rising stock values, increasing home prices, and high levels of employment and production. The upturn followed a [...]
The Free Market’s Invisibility Problem
Joseph Packer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Communication.
Advocates of liberty face an invisibility problem, first identified by nineteenth-century French libertarian Frédéric Bastiat in the appropriately titled essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Through a simple story, Bastiat exposed the fallacy that later underlay Keynesian economics.
A young [...]
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 [...]
Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics
Milton Friedman, who passed away on November 16 at age 94, once commented that there is no such thing as different schools of economics; there is only good economics and bad economics. While he may have sincerely believed this, Friedman was nonetheless the twentieth century’s most outstanding contributor to what has become known as the [...]
1Dec2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedA Government Program for All
My economics students often ask why, if the economic theory I present is correct, there is so much intervention in the economy. It reminds me of an observation made by Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson:
It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good [...]
Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
Milton Friedman, who died last month at age 94, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. The 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and an early associate of FEE, Friedman did more than any single person in our time to teach the public the merits [...]
1Dec2006 | Richard M. Ebeling and Sheldon | 1 comment | ContinuedKeynesian Economics and Constitutional Government
Last month 650 economists called for an increase in the federal minimum wage, saying it was the responsibility of the government to “improve the well-being of low-wage workers” by mandating the terms under which people may be employed. Among these economists were five recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics. One of them was Lawrence [...]
1Nov2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedLudwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part II
Mises’s defense of classical liberalism against the various forms of collectivism was not limited “merely” to the economic benefits of private property.
1Jun2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Jewel of Consistency
The acid test is that a man live by the principles he professes to believe.
1Jun2006 | Fred DeArmond | 0 comments | ContinuedOn Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory
Joseph Stromberg (jrstromberg@charter.net) is a historian and freelance writer.
The following piece will not be as abstruse as its title suggests. Rather, it results from the simple observation that, time and time again, some harmful outcome or process commonly attributed to the everyday workings of the market economy actually does exist, but it exists in the [...]
Henry Hazlitt and the Failure of Keynesian Economics
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.
For four decades, from the mid-1930s to the 1970s, Keynesian economics almost monopolized economic policy in the United States and around the world. The “new economics,” as it was called, was going to assure mankind economic stability, full employment, and material prosperity—all through wise government management of monetary and [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
