Potpourri
My Firefox browser is littered with tabs, so it’s time to clean house…
* For those in the area, note that I will be back in Oregon later this week, in a multi-pronged educational effort with Richard Ebeling. Details here.
* In preparation for my debate with Krugman, I have been accumulating mainstream critiques of his worldview, the better to smell him with. Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner have some good thoughts. I have also switched out of pizza and into low-fat cottage cheese. Mmmmm, cottage cheese.
* The econ profs at Hillsdale College have started a blog.
* I am to the right, not only of Hitler, but Hoppe. Who knew? (If you want the context of that graph, here.)
* Once you go Neo-Confederate, you never hear the end of it.
* David R. Henderson is doing some great work on austerity and the U.S. experience in World War II. I will definitely have to bone up on this material before the Krugman standoff. This is truly very important, because World War II is the one example that Krugman and the other Keynesians have pointed to, as an example of an economy allegedly taking off because of massive deficits. (They have also pointed to cases in the 1930s, but c’mon, is the U.S. in the years 1934-1936 really a “success story”?)
* Bryan Caplan has found a good discussion of paternalism and slippery slopes. He’s totally right. I am old enough to remember–back when they were banning cigarettes in restaurants–that right-wingers would say, “What next? Banning fatty foods? A Twinkie tax?” And I clearly remember that the response was, “Stop being absurd! Cigarettes can kill you. Get real, nobody is talking about banning Big Macs.”
* In this post, Krugman uses his FRED jujitsu to explain away surging commodity prices. He concludes, “There’s really nothing here to shake my view that deflation, not inflation, is the threat.”
Well two can play that game. Check out this FRED graph, showing year-over-year changes in the PPI versus the CPI. Look at how closely they follow each other over the decades. And now that the PPI is surging up, Krugman thinks the CPI is going to fall?
* Speaking of price inflation, Robert Wenzel explains that your toilet paper is shrinking. Wenzel–who for some reason likes to post pictures of pretty girls whenever possible on his blog–missed an obvious chance to link to a photo of Sheryl Crow.
From the chart:
“- The right anarcho-capitalist is more likely to consider “big business” a natural phenomenon of the market, and to predict that it — and possibly even in bigger form — would continue to exist in the absence of the state. The left market anarchist is more likely to consider “big business” an artificial distortion — produced or at least enabled by state privilege — and that in the absence of the state business would be smaller and/or less hierarchal in terms of ownership and control.
– The right anarcho-capitalist is also more likely to consider certain existing property relations — the two that come to mind are “intellectual property” and tenure in land — to be natural phenomena that would continue to exist in a stateless society in pretty much the same form they do now. The left market anarchist is more likely to consider these property relations to be artifacts of statism which either should be smashed, or would wither away, with the state.”
Am I right in reacting to the above as “?!”?
Bob,
In response to “Check out this FRED graph, showing year-over-year changes in the PPI versus the CPI. Look at how closely they follow each other over the decades. And now that the PPI is surging up, Krugman thinks the CPI is going to fall?”, I have no idea what you’re looking at.
I see an extreme gap in volatility in the %change PPI versus CPI, especially over the last 10-15 years. The recent PPI spike comes after what is by far the largest drop in over this period.
“I am to the right, not only of Hitler, but Hoppe. Who knew?”
Was being further right than Hoppe more startling than Hitler?
“showing year-over-year changes in the PPI versus the CPI. Look at how closely they follow each other over the decades. And now that the PPI is surging up, Krugman thinks the CPI is going to fall?”
Just because input costs are rising, does not mean consumer prices will rise. It’s called a margin squeeze, and this is what happens when higer input prices can not be passed along to an over levered, unemployed consumer.
The disinflation continues.
Can someone (preferably Bob) please comment/clarify on what this man “The Modern Mystic” is speaking about when he refers to QE 2 as not printing money? I am really confused now as I assumed this would automatically lead to monetary and price inflation not too far into the future.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheModernMystic#p/u/4/kLTDdbGMy5c
Wenzel was apparently holding out for today’s photo of “Angelina”
I can’t begin to understand why anyone would take a left-to-right scale of politics seriously.
This was debunked a long time ago, so should we not attempt to illustrate politics using more meaningful metaphors, like Hayek did?
On the too many tabs problem, you might consider Google Reader at:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlereader/tour.html