Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Wisdom From Seinfeld on Crimea Showdown

It Begins: Tyler Cowen Pepper Sprayed in Class

This is on Reason so I’m guessing it’s legit? I see no mention at MarginalRevolution but presumably that’s because Tyler Cowen is too suave to seek sympathy. Anyway, according to Reason: Economist, author, and George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen was pepper sprayed in his classroom today by a man trying to place him under […]

How Government Wrecks the Economy

My next class at Mises Academy. Full infomercial here. An excerpt: The fall of the Soviet Union should have spelled the demise of central planning, yet the socialist mentality thrives — albeit in a diluted form — in all governments in the so-called “free world.” No one explained the failures of pure socialism and of […]

HL Mencken on Lincoln

I dug this up for something I wrote about Judge Napolitano, and wanted to make sure all of you knew about it. The following is HL Mencken reflecting on the Gettysburg Address: The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of […]

In Defense of Permabears

In his never-ending campaign to discredit those who warned of financial bubbles before the 2008 crash, Scott Sumner recently quoted with approval the following from Alan Reynolds’ 2010 analysis of Shiller’s thoughts on investing: On the March 9 anniversary of the stock market implosion a year ago, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal […]

Every Breath Bernanke Took

I dug this up for somebody on Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised at how (unwittingly) prescient it was (particularly if we define inflation as an increase in the quantity of money). (The backstory is that the dean of Columbia Business School [CBS], Glenn Hubbard, had been in the running to replace Greenspan, but obviously […]

Potpourri

==> A funny Twitter response to the Obama Administration’s attempts to build intelligent military machines. ==> Nikolay Gertchev offers a different type of objection to Bitcoin. ==> Interesting Mankiw post on the temptations of the policy economist. ==> A very funny Jim Grant lecture on Hazlitt at the recent Mises Institute academic conference. ==> Powerline […]

Do What Jesus Says, Not What I Do

Every once in a while I like to make sure nobody thinks I am arguing, “Look at how moral I am, therefore Christianity is true.” The worst part about my inflation bet wasn’t that I was out $500, or even that my personal forecasting reputation was cast into doubt, but rather that I hadn’t bent […]