Bob Murphy

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JUSTUS Promo

[UPDATE below.] We were all in Chile, they were serving some sort of alcoholic drink, and well, this happened… Here’s the website. UPDATE: In all seriousness, I should clarify that those of us promoting “JUSTUS” (or some of them spell it “JUST US”) are not telling people to mislead attorneys when they ask you questions, […]

Blog-Steal: Krugman’s Kollapsing Klaims about Healthcare.gov

[UPDATE below.] I don’t normally like to just copy and paste somebody else’s blog post, but Chris Rossini at EPJ penned a work of brilliance. I had read all of these Krugman posts, but didn’t think to lay them out this way: I’m proud to announce that Truth and Paul Krugman have crashed into one […]

A Perspective In Which Carbon Emissions Are Not a “Bad”

In his presentation at IER’s Carbon Tax conference earlier this year, Ken Green argued that it was a misnomer to refer to “taxing bads” in this context, because (given our current technology and infrastructure) carbon emissions are an unavoidable feature of our economy. Here at Free Advice, we got into an argument over this rhetorical […]

Summers and Krugman: The Liquidity Trap Is Forever

It now looks like the War on Savings will be as eternal as the War on Terror. Previously, Paul Krugman et al. had confined their upside-down prescriptions to this apparently temporary abnormality, but once things returned to normal they would go back (we were assured) to worrying about budget deficits and the stability of the […]

Fellow Rothbardians: The Jig Is Up

I told you guys not to push it, or else our whole plan would blow up in our faces. Now seriously, who went and typed in two sentences on the Wikipedia entry for “liquidity preference,” explaining that Murray Rothbard disagrees that it is the proper way to explain interest? Who was it? It’s better if […]

Is a Bank Robbery Merely a Negative Externality?

In another post, we are getting bogged down in the comments over whether there is a meaningful sense in which an alleged negative externality–such as emitting CO2–isn’t really a “bad,” even though it has negative implications. The standard claim in the climate policy debates is that taxing CO2 is penalizing a “bad,” while taxing work […]

Two Kitten Torturing Models of Wage Differentials

Suppose you read a blog post that started like this: It is well known that if you run a regression analysis of wages, you will find that if a person tortured kittens as a teenager, then he or she will have significantly lower earnings in the marketplace. Now there are two schools of thought when […]