Bob Murphy

Author Archive

You Get What You Pay For?

Someone help me out here. Krugman discusses a CBO report on government job creation efforts. If you look at the chart he reproduces, you see that the single most effective program of job creation–where the unit of measurement is “Years of Full-Time Equivalent Employment per Million Dollars of Total Budgetary Cost”–is “Increasing Aid to the […]

Big Brother Running EconLog?

I don’t know if it’s because I just upgraded to the new version of Firefox or what, but I just noticed that the browser tabs for EconLog feature a spooky all-seeing eye. Is that like Total Economics Awareness or something?

PPI "Flat"–Producer Prices Only Rose 4.4% in 2009

Naturally the headlines all say that the latest reading from the Labor Department on producer prices was flat, by which they mean that if you strip out food and energy prices, the other ones didn’t rise from November to December. Overall, the Producer Price Index rose 4.4% during 2009. So at what point will the […]

Quick Thoughts on the Scott Brown Win

* I am trying not to get too excited about this, because I remember only too well how relieved I was back in 2000 when George Bush beat Al Gore in the nailbiter. (Note that I did NOT vote for Bush, I’m just saying as an observer I was hoping he would win.) What was […]

The People Have Spoken

OK that was a short-lived experiment… I am dropping the comment moderation feature except for posts that are more than 14 days old. What you people weren’t realizing is that my older posts are getting spammed too, so that if someone stumbled upon a “classic” Free Advice post in which I predicted the Dow Jones […]

Potpourri

* Tom Singleton sends along this troubling article about the way the feds might came after 401(k) assets. Incidentally, this is one of the “real world”-type reasons that made me more receptive to Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept. Nash argues that it’s silly to take the returns in your 401(k) at face value, because even […]

An Analogy for My Views on the Significance of the Monetary Base

I’m not going to name names, but there are some people out there whose views on the monetary base and inflation at first seem quite opposed to my own, but in reality we are focusing on different levels of causality. Specifically, it is true that the monetary base per se doesn’t make the price of […]

The Fight Against Anarchy

OK kids some of you have complained about all the spam in the comments lately, which has annoyed me too. (The spam, not your complaints.) So I am selflessly taking on the responsibility of moderating all the comments. We’ll try this for a while and see how it goes. On the negative side, it will […]