Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Jeffrey Tucker Launches Liberty.Me

It would be silly for me to paraphrase; you just have to listen to him explain it. I have contributed one of the “guides” so far, and hope to do more in 2014 as this thing evolves.

Some Sumner Shuffles

I often focus on Krugman Kontradictions, but here at Free Advice we have given examples of Sumner Shuffles. Now Scott is much more slippery than Krugman, so to get a true Sumner Shuffle is difficult. I’ve been checking his blog lately to see what he has to say about the Fed’s “taper” announcement–it was expansionary […]

Our Own Troll “Joe” Shows How to Pick Cherries

In my post about part-time versus full-time employment, frequent commenter and critic Joe wrote: It’s a lot of fun to play the Obamacare vs the Labor Force game. The best one is looking at private sector employment before and after Obamacare was signed into law on March 2010. Private Payroll Employment (thousands) March 1999 107938 […]

Full-Time vs. Part-Time Workers

Does anyone else find this chart shocking? Here’s the source. I was looking up the proportion of part-time versus full-time workers to see if the passage of ObamaCare had any noticeable impact. (Note: Be sure to look carefully at the left and right axes. It’s not that the whole composition of the workforce has flipped.) […]

Scott Sumner Wants to Take Income Away From All of Us

In a post titled, “Income is meaningless, example #388” Scott quotes from Matt Yglesias who wrote: One issue this poses is that analysis of political issues in terms of “income” quartiles can get pretty misleading. A married couple where dad earns $65,000 a year and mom works part time bringing home $15,000 a year is […]

More on Drug Cartels and Private Law

I realized from the reaction of some people here that I did not assure readers I had fully understood Gene Callahan’s point, when he claimed that drug cartels today offer a real-world glimpse into what Rothbardian defense agencies would look like. So I wrote a follow-up post to be sure I acknowledged Gene’s exact point, […]

Potpourri

==> David R. Henderson reports on media bias in the Denver school shooting (one and two). ==> Some of these kids’ test answers are literally “laugh out loud” funny. Be sure you get what’s going on with the Chinese immigrant one. ==> A classic Rothbard essay on dealing with water shortages. Yes, he lays out […]