Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Animal spirits in public policy

In the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review, Arnold Kling reviews George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller’s new book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Reading his review, one wonders how it is still possible for a serious scholar to make a case for [...]

Unfalsifiable achievements

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion [...]

Macroeconomics in politics

Steve Chapman writes: If the economy improves and unemployment drops, Obama can take credit. If it fails to improve and unemployment rises, though, he can say he averted an even worse showing. Republicans will take the opposite tack — attributing any improvement to the natural resilience of the economy and blaming the administration if things [...]

The destruction of self-help by state intervention

The Independent Institute’s quarterly Independent  Review is a worthy publication. The journal produces well researched and innovative scholarly articles in the classical liberal tradition, avoiding excessive emphasis on “public policy libertarianism” on the one hand, and avoiding an exclusive emphasis on a single school of economic thought (such as Austrian Economics) on the other. The [...]

The war against savers

In the Middle Ages, they threw people who failed to repay their debts into debtors’ prisons. Today debtors are rewarded with all kinds of government perks. Look how far we’ve come! Caroline Baum – Inflation ‘Cure’ Exposed When In-Laws Move In

Undercover at Wal-Mart

The New York Post recently posted an interesting personal account of writer and cryonics activist Charles Platt about working conditions and company policies at Wal-Mart. In Platt’s own words: Some people, usually community activists, loath Wal-Mart. Others, like the family of four struggling to make ends meet, are in love with the chain. I, meanwhile, [...]

Politicized money

Monetary policy is governed by the rule of men, rather than the rule of law. The results are what public choice theory would predict and monetary history has documented: booms, busts, and panics. writes Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. in Money and the Present Crisis (PDF). In the same issue of the Cato Journal about lessons [...]

The positive external effects of stimulus

Some politicians have expressed great frustration over the fact that not all countries are doing their part in engaging in deficit spending and/or manipulating the money supply to stimulate “the economy.” It is not difficult to imagine how such a perspective will invariably culminate in complaints that countries that have not done enough to stimulate [...]

Four prosperity killers

Whether you believe that the Federal Reserve’s recent monetary decisions represent the smartest response to the current financial meltdown or puts us on the road to third world hyperinflation, there seems to be little disagreement about the risk of high inflation (or even stagflation). To Larry Kudlow this means that all the elements are in [...]

A conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on economic models that we would be better off without: Every time I saw [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke [on television], I would have a fit of rage. He claimed that we were in a period of “great moderation.” He did not understand that Black Swans are preceded by low volatility and [...]

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