Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Scientific consensus

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

A false choice on the Fed and inflation

Economists publicly press the point that an independent Fed has a better track record in controlling inflation than a politicized Fed but Robert Higgs draws attention to

the undeniable fact that for more than a century before the Fed’s establishment, the purchasing power of the dollar fluctuated around an approximately horizontal trend line—that is, despite inflations [...]

Puzzled by Robert Lucas

Some people are puzzled by Robert Lucas’ recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he advocates monetary growth policies as a form of economic stimulus. On the positive side, Lucas concludes that:

There is no other way that so much cash could have been put into the system as fast as this $600 [...]

Taking Paul Krugman seriously

Robert Higgs on Paul Krugman

Krugman obviously subscribes to the belief, immensely popular inside the beltway, that all the money rightfully belongs to the government, whether it is being considered for involuntary transfer from its private holders to the government or being considered for retention by the people who earned it in the first place. He [...]

The New Deal disaster

The conventional wisdom is that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal got the United States out of the Great Depression. The most obvious objection to this view would be epistemological in nature. How do we know what would have happened without the New Deal? Strictly speaking, we cannot know this through empirical means. This feature of evaluating [...]

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

On the Cato@Liberty blog David Boaz observes how opinion makers and politicians prepare to exploit the current financial crisis to implement regulatory policies and entitlements programs that would not get broad support in calmer times:

So . . . Emanuel. Krugman. Huffington. They’re all rallying around the theme that, well, that a left-liberal government should use [...]