Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Ben Bernanke Blogging

Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has a new blog hosted at the Brookings Institution. What interests me is the reverence with which we are to hold the former Fed officials. Here’s how Bernanke describes why he’s happy about this opportunity: The ability to shape market expectations of future policy through public statements is one […]

Hot Button Phrase: “FEMA Camp”

Second perhaps only to “chemtrails,” when the responsible, sober libertarians on Facebook want to mock the paranoid ones, they bring up “FEMA camps.” A relative sent me the following video, which apparently shows footage from Florida of a drill in which U.S. military pretend to march U.S. citizens into a detention camp. Then the anchor […]

Sean Hannity vs. Pat Buchanan

The realpolitik-ish von Pepe sends me this awesome exchange: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Make sure you watch to the end when Hannity plays the Hitler card.

Ed Schultz Does Not Respect Argumentation Norms

Stephan Kinsella Discusses Argumentation Ethics With Tom Woods

Here. Let me emphasize that I really do think I get what Hoppe is trying to do here, and I appreciate how awesome a project it is. It’s like Aquinas’ arguments for God; they are really hardcore and so much more fundamental than the usual thing you hear in a debate. I just think Hoppe’s […]

DeLong Gives Me Whiplash

[Two UPDATEs below, one embedded and one at the end.] I have to be brief, so if you’re a newcomer to this blog, you won’t get much from this. But back in early 2009, Brad DeLong was very skeptical about the ability of the Federal Reserve to rescue the world economy from the ravages of the […]

Tom Woods and I Talk About Krugman and Keynesianism

It’s all here… BTW in the interview I implied that the tradition of explaining business cycles as due to purely real factors (as opposed to monetary) is centered in Chicago, but actually I think it’s more nuanced than that. (In contrast, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is definitely associated with Chicago.)

A Critique of Jerry Taylor’s “Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax”

My latest at IER, though the team helped me a lot with this one. An excerpt, and keep in mind that Taylor is the president of the new Niskanen Center: Although he doesn’t come out and say it, Taylor’s argument here rests on the belief that the hodge-podge of energy interventions currently exist because the […]