All Posts Tagged With: "Keynesianism"
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 [...]
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 | 6 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 | ContinuedAn 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 [...]
1Mar2008 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedMilton 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 | 8 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 [...]
1Dec2006 | Paul Cwik | 2 comments | ContinuedMilton 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 | 4 comments | 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
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 realm of the government and politics. Politicians and [...]
1May2006 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Banking
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This paper was delivered at a conference on “One Hundred Years of Dollarization, or a Century without a Central Bank: The Case of Panama,” sponsored by Fundación Libertad in Panama City, Panama, on November 12, 2004. There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout [...]
1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedHenry Hazlitt and the Failure of Keynesian Economics
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 fiscal policy. So dominant was this [...]
1Nov2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 40 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – September 2004
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright Princeton University Press • 2004 • 304 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling One of the most profound insights of economics is that the activities of billions of people can be coordinated without central direction and without most of these [...]
1Sep2004 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedAustrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom
The revival of the modern Austrian school of economics may be said to have begun 30 years ago, during the week of June 15–22, 1974, when the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored a conference on Austrian economics for about 40 participants in the small town of South Royalton, Vermont. In 1974 the Austrian school had [...]
1Jun2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued-
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