Bob Murphy

Author Archive

The Fed and Falling Oil Prices

This seems like an obvious point, but I haven’t seen anyone else make this connection? Anyway at IER I talk about falling oil prices. An excerpt (not having to do with the Fed angle): Whenever oil prices shoot up sharply, causing gas prices at the pump to rise as well, people “in the know” talk […]

Stephen Williamson Needs an Occam’s Razor for Christmas

Williamson discusses the recent paper talking about the hierarchy in the economics profession (HT2 MR): Ultimately, Fourcade et al. think that our biggest problem is our self-regard. Of course, people with high self-regard are very visible, by definition, so outsiders are bound to get a distorted picture. We’re not all Larry Summers clones. But if […]

I Read Aloud a Review of The Three Lads and the Lizard King

Just play this in the background and try not to order my book. Go on, I dare you. To order, click here.

Self-Serve Registers

In a fit of self-loathing, I decided to walk to the Hardee’s near my office for dinner. I had heard some fast food restaurants were installing self-service registers, but this was my first time seeing them: The really ingenious thing is that Hardee’s would knock 10% off the price if you used the screen. […]

Potpourri

==> Tom Woods has some great material (cribbed from Jeff Herbener) on the claim that the recovery from the 1920-21 depression was merely caused by loose monetary policy. Just to clarify, no Austrian is denying that the Fed inflated during the 1920s and that the “Roaring Twenties” was partially built on an unsustainable illusion. After […]

Two More Examples of Police-Inflicted Deaths With No Charges

I understand how people could think Michael Brown is not a martyr. But check out the video of the choke-hold takedown of Eric Garner (no indictment even though coroner ruled it a homicide), and to be absolutely stunned, look at how slowly this 19-year-old woman was driving past (not at) a cop who decided to […]

Understanding the Laffer Curve

In my latest FEE article, I clarify the legacy of Reaganomics and I correct a popular misconception about the Laffer Curve. An excerpt: Critics like to deride the Laffer curve as “voodoo economics” by pointing to counterexamples, say of tax rate reductions that didn’t increase total revenue, or by pointing to tax rate hikes that brought in more […]

The Rhetorical Significance of the 1920-1921 Depression

My favorite NY Times economist is none too happy that Jim Grant wrote a book on the topic. I’ll let others (like Tom Woods) speak for themselves, but as for me, I am completely unapologetic about what I’ve written. I explain the situation at Mises CA. An excerpt: What happened in my case is that […]