Bob Murphy

Author Archive

A Reader Email Re: Gaming ObamaCare

I am not endorsing the following, but a reader sent it and I thought I should at least pass it along to all of you (he gave me permission to reprint): Here’s a thought for you or an Austrian colleague I’ve never seen printed that you may consider. “ACA will cause more startup companies and […]

(Edited) Murphy Remarks to TN-NORML Meeting

We were crammed into a side room at a restaurant (because the normal venue apparently double-booked) but I gave a 15-minute talk to the TN chapter of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).

ObamaCare Going to Crash the System Sooner Than Most Think

Naturally in my circle of colleagues and acquaintances, there are a lot of critics of ObamaCare who object to it not just on principled grounds, but also predict that it will “wreck” U.S. health care delivery. However, what I realized just the other day is that when I consider the people who actually work in […]

IER Comment on the “Social Cost of Carbon”

If you are a true nerd about the global warming stuff, you should definitely get a cup of coffee some morning and spend a half hour carefully reading the Institute for Energy Research (IER) formal “comment” (submitted to the government) on the Social Cost of Carbon. However, if you have a shorter attention span, in two […]

More on Slavery and the Free Market

Since I got the sense that not many of you appreciated the full brilliance of my original post, I have returned to my claim that slavery could not exist in an otherwise free market. An excerpt: First, let’s switch contexts away from the emotional one of slavery. Instead, think about tools. Suppose in the middle […]

A Question for the Hard-Money Bitcoin Skeptics

“Guest” in the comments of my last Bitcoin post perfectly summed up the hard-money angst over Bitcoin. He (?) wrote: This misses the point. There is a distinction to be made between inherent value (nothing has inherent value) and arbitrary value, where people make claims about the utility of some thing even if that thing […]

Krugman on Levels vs. Growth

I am a cheeky little imp and lecture the Nobel laureate on first derivatives. Excerpt: So to sum up: Before posting the actual data, Krugman made his hypothetical opponent argue in terms of actual wages, with Krugman then responding in terms of actual wages. But when he posted the data–which show that wages have been […]

On Bitcoin and Ludwig von Mises’ Regression Theorem

My talk at the Texas Bitcoin conference revolved around the Austrian approach to money, and why some Austrians (quite understandably) were uncomfortable with Bitcoin. (Apparently you have to pay $50 if you want access to all of the videos, which is worth doing if you want to learn a lot about Bitcoin. But the content […]