All Posts Tagged With: "Keynesianism"
Greece: The Canary in the U.S. Coal Mine?
With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other European countries, might well represent a [...]
29Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 13 comments | ContinuedDoes Malinvestment Matter?
With literally trillions of dollars having been spent for “stimulus,” the rate of unemployment hovers around 10 percent, many banks remain in a precarious state, and a meaningful economic recovery is as elusive as ever.
26May2010 | William L. Anderson | 9 comments | ContinuedThe Case for Big Government
Could it be that our already immense government is still too small? That’s what some people, including economic journalist Jeff Madrick, would have us believe. The first sentence of The Case for Big Government reads, “It is conventional wisdom in America today that high levels of taxes and government spending diminish America’s prosperity.” While this [...]
20May2010 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | ContinuedDemocracy, Deficit, and Debt
Democracy in Deficit is one of those books that can profoundly change the way people think about economics.
8Apr2010 | Steven Horwitz | 8 comments | ContinuedGovernment Must Stimulate to Avoid a 1937-Style Recession?
It is rather unfortunate that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Economics Prize Committee chose to award the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics to Paul Krugman. It is not that Krugman did not deserve the prize—his contributions to international trade theory were indeed substantive and valuable. The problem is that by 2008 Krugman had long [...]
24Mar2010 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedPrivate Capital Consumption: Another Downside of the Wartime “Miracle of Production”
Although the so-called miracle of production in the United States during World War II persuaded many economists and others to accept the validity of the basic Keynesian model, this interpretation rests on important errors of commission and omission to which I have called attention over the years. (See especially the studies brought together in my [...]
24Mar2010 | Robert Higgs | 3 comments | ContinuedWhy Did the “Stimulus” Fail to Help the Economy?
Attempts to “stimulate” the economy through massive government spending may put money into the pockets of politically connected people, but it does nothing to restore the economic factors to their proper balances.
20Jan2010 | William L. Anderson | 28 comments | ContinuedCongress Passes $1 Trillion Stimulus Spending Bill
“The Senate on Sunday sent President Obama another hot potato, passing a $1.1 trillion catchall spending bill that includes money needed to run dozens of government agencies but also is loaded with pork-barrel spending. “The bill, which funds most domestic federal agencies for the rest of this fiscal year, marks a 12 percent spending increase. [...]
14Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedObama: We Must Spend Our Way Out of This Recession
“President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to ‘spend our way out of this recession’ until more Americans are back at work. “Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small [...]
9Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 4 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | 5 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 | 3 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 [...]
2Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedBook 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 [...]
1Dec2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets?
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 [...]
1Jun2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | ContinuedThe 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. [...]
1Apr2008 | Joseph Packer | 2 comments | Continued-
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