Bob Murphy

Author Archive

European Budget Bask

For my class on the sovereign debt crisis, I’d like to look at the budgets (absolute money units of both expenditures and receipts, not just deficits as % of GDP) over the last few years from the PIIGS. Any ideas on where I can get this stuff, besides wading through the websites of the various […]

Daniel Kuehn: We Keynesians Have Always Been at Peace With Bastiat

I realize I should be more selective in my blogging. I shouldn’t keep focusing on some guy’s blog who just started in a PhD program three days ago. A man of my prominence… heh a little Friday humor for you all. I’m not going to take the time to bring everyone up to speed on […]

Obama Voter Now Supports Ron Paul

This guy’s enhanced clarity resonates with me. I didn’t vote for him (I’m pretty sure I had decided by that point in my life that I was done with voting), but I remember really really hoping late on election night, 2000 that George W. Bush would beat Gore. You know why? I didn’t know (or […]

Talk About Chutzpah

So Steve Landsburg totally busted Paul Krugman’s bogus critique of Eric Cantor. Specifically, in order to show that Cantor’s insistence that any disaster spending be offset by other cuts violated “basic economics,” Krugman had to initially assume that government fiscal policy was optimal. Neither Krugman nor Cantor thinks that. It is a bit like saying, […]

Have Anthropologists Overturned Menger?

My sources say no. And one of my sources is Radford’s classic article on the economic organization of a POW camp. Even if you’ve read it before, I encourage you to skim it again. His description of how cigarettes quickly became money in his camp fits exactly the standard Mengerian account. Anyway here’s an excerpt […]

The Early Blogger Gets the Worm

In this case, the blogger being Steve Landsburg (and the worm being…). Recently Krugman wrote a post ripping Eric Cantor, which purported to show that standard economic reasoning rejected Cantor’s calls to pay for disaster spending with budget cuts elsewhere. What jumped out at me right away was that Krugman’s blog post relied on an […]

Quotable Quotes

“If money is redirected because of damage, it sure as hell results in less money somewhere else, regardless of the unemployment situation. [The Broken Window Fallacy] holds. (Even if the loner was hoarding the money as part of his cash balance, it means the loner now has a lower cash balance, which presumably would mean […]

Uh Oh, I’d Better Go to Bed Early on Thursday

Yikes! I knew this guy was no punk, but I didn’t realize he had this in him: I’m debating Bob Murphy on Friday at 6pm. This is a web debate and its pay-per-view. Which means, of course, that both Bob and I will be in the Octagon, battling to submission. This is the econ web […]