Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Why Market Exchanges Are Not Acts of Measuring Value

Hoisted from the comments of my last post: This is in response to Tel, but I’m doing it stand-alone so it doesn’t get lost in the indentation: Shoot, Tel, I meant to hit this point but I forgot. When Jim trades 10 pizzas to Sally in exchange for a painting, we can say that the […]

Do Individuals Measure Value? Mises vs. David Friedman

You guys may remember that a a week or so ago, I asked for help in sourcing a David Friedman quote, that Bryan Caplan had put at the top of his blog post. That led to… My latest blog post at the Independent Institute. An excerpt: As the quotation above indicates, Mises agrees with Friedman […]

Potpourri

==> In the latest Lara-Murphy Show, Carlos and I respond to a research note from a brokerage firm that had wondered whether passive investing were worse than Marxism. (We said no.) ==> Brittany Hunter explains that “private prisons” in today’s America are not the same thing as Rothbardian privatization of judicial and police services. ==> […]

Two Things From Tom and Me

First, hear us tackle Krugman’s excuses for ObamaCare. (He says it’s the fault of obstinate Republicans and health insurers with ulterior motives. You know, Aetna is losing hundreds of millions of dollars on purpose because they don’t like Obama.) Second, doesn’t the below look fun? Well guess what, that’s the ship hosting the Contra Cruise! […]

Scorecard of Gary Johnson’s Interview With Chris Wallace

[UPDATE below.] I’m upset with Gary Johnson because he is running as a Libertarian, so I hold him to a higher standard than other candidates. But I realize I’m possibly being too hard on the guy, so when David R. Henderson recently singled out Johnson’s August 28 interview with Chris Wallace as his best performance yet, […]

Cass Sunstein on Social Cost of Carbon

My latest at IER. How do you guys feel about my demonstration below? I think it’s pretty decisive, but then again, I’m presumably biased to like my own argument. To avoid confusion, I’m not going to use indenting etc. The italicized block quote below is from Cass Sunstein, and then the rest is my reaction. […]

Ice Cube on Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders

This interview was posted back in April, but I just saw a clip on Twitter yesterday. Look at Ice Cube–writer and performer on such songs as “F*** tha Police”–discussing Trump and Clinton: (In case you don’t get the reference, Hillary Clinton in 1996 referred to “superpredators” whom the authorities had to “bring to heel.”) What’s […]

Misguided Charity and Standard Free-Market Arguments

When I was at an Austrian economics conference in Rosario (Argentina) last week, they showed us a long segment from the Acton Institute’s film, “Poverty, Inc.” Here’s the trailer: You can see some quick allusions to it in the trailer, but one of the themes is that sending free stuff actually makes the recipient countries poorer, […]