All Posts Tagged With: "Milton Friedman"
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 | 1 comment | ContinuedFinancial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl
Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened.
To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and exacerbated [...]
Transforming America: The Bush-Obama Stimulus Programs
George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s “stimulus” programs will permanently transform the American economy. The market-based system that has produced unprecedented prosperity relies on profit and loss, which rewards individuals and firms that add value to the economy and penalizes those that detract value. The various stimulus programs undermine that system.
My discussion will focus on [...]
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 [...]
Inflation 101: Cause Versus Transmission
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
It’s always a pleasure for a teacher to receive a note from a former student showing that he or she has taken key lessons to heart. I had such a pleasure last winter when Joey, who had taken Money and Banking with me last fall, [...]
Equality, Markets, and Morality
Burton Folsom, Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?, to be published by Simon & Schuster this year.
The subject of “equality” is the source of much political debate. Ever since the founding era, free-market thinkers have argued for equality of opportunity in the economic order. [...]
Capital Letters
Thanks to Milton Friedman’s brilliance, charisma, and diplomacy he became an ardent spokesman for many free-market reforms in this country. And now Ivan Pongracic, Jr. (“The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman,” September 2007) gives him credit for accomplishing what seems miraculous—convincing Fed officials that the Fed itself was responsible for precipitating the crash and [...]
1Dec2007 | agardner | 0 comments | ContinuedWartime Origins of Modern Income-Tax Withholding
Wars have always been the most important occasions for the introduction of new forms of taxation. At the outset of a war the state suddenly needs greatly increased revenues to pay for personnel and matériel to prosecute the war. Although governments typically increase the rates of existing explicit taxes and raise the rate of the [...]
1Nov2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Were Missionaries Like Psychiatrists?
To the Editor:
People have misunderstood and maligned Christians for two millennia, but goodness, must Dr. Szasz compare us to coercive quacks? He writes in The Freeman’s July/August 2007 issue: “Consider this parallel between psychiatry and missionary Christianity. The heathen savage does not suffer from lack of insight into the divinity of Jesus, [...]
The Pursuit of Happiness: The Intellectual Defense of Liberty
All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as [...]
1Oct2007 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedMilton Friedman Is to Blame for Unsafe Food? It Just Ain’t So!
There is a “food safety crisis” in America and Milton Friedman is to blame, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman wrote on the New York Times op-ed page May 21. Friedman is responsible, Krugman wrote, because he legitimized a “sickening ideology” that rejects “even the most compelling” cases for government regulation of business.
Krugman’s “crisis” stems from [...]
The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman
Ivan Pongracic, Jr. teaches economics at Hillsdale College. He extends special thanks to Lawrence H. White and Ivan Pongracic, Sr. for their helpful comments.
Few events in U.S. history can rival the Great Depression for its impact. The period from 1929 to 1941 saw fundamental changes in the landscape of American politics and economics, including such [...]
Something Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation? It Just Ain’t So!
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by natural [...]
The Great Duration, 1929-41
Economists, following the usage of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their classic Monetary History of the United States, call the economic collapse between 1929 and 1933 the Great Contraction. In my own writings, I have added two similar terms to refer to other aspects of the Great Depression—the Great Duration and the Great Escape. [...]
1Jul2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedReason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America
By Robert Reich Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Mar2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed’s Potent Power
The Federal Reserve holds the fate of the U.S. economy in its hands. Or that’s the conclusion many observers draw when they watch investors react wildly to the most minute details of the Fed’s policy statements.
This conclusion is at once exaggerated and accurate.
It’s exaggerated because, at bottom, the Fed controls only the supply of dollars. [...]
John Kenneth Galbraith: A Criticism and an Appreciation
Last April John Kenneth Galbraith died at the age of 97. Galbraith was one of America ’s most famous economists and a self-proclaimed liberal (in the American sense of “statist” rather than in the European sense of “believer in freedom”). His fame came not from his technical accomplishments in academic economics but from his awesome [...]
1Dec2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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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
