Bob Murphy

Author Archive

How (Falsely) Low Interest Rates Screw Up the Economy

I just made a fairly long and technical post, which I’m sure half of my readers will skip. Let me say it in plainer English: Loosely speaking, the market interest rate allocates the available financial capital among various possible investment projects. The equilibrium interest rate is j-u-u-s-t right so that people save exactly the amount […]

How (Falsely!) Low Interest Rates Contributed to the Housing Boom

In my battles with Greenspan defenders, things often come down to examination of what the Federal Reserve did with the money supply (however defined) after the dot-com crash. The idea is that interest rates per se are irrelevant, since the (typical) way the Fed moves interest rates is by shrinking or enlarging the total amount […]

Bob Murphy, Neo-Confederate?

Steve Landsburg has the distinction of (possibly) being a more narcissistic economics blogger than me. (As Vader would say, “Impressive.”) Not only did Steve decide his readers should see his personal list of heroes, but he broke it up over three posts, making them guess at the identity of the people who were pictured. Anyway, […]

Ludwig von Mises On the Health Insurance Bill

[UPDATE below.] Ever since I finished the Study Guide to Mises’ magnus opus, he has been communicating with me from beyond the grave. I asked him what he thought of the pending health insurance legislation, and he reminded me of his general principles of the dynamics of interventionism. Once the government interferes with one aspect […]

For Road Trips of Moderate Length…

…why not listen to a guy with a sweet English accent read my Chaos Theory? Intro here, audio recording here.

The Connection Between Drug Prohibition and Violence

If you read a standard economic treatment of drug prohibition, it will probably say that drug dealers become more violent since they can’t use the police and courts to protect their property. At first that sounds fine, but if you are suspicious of government “services” then you start to wonder. In fact, I think the […]

Glenn Greenwald Explains: "Why Do They Hate Us?"

Sometimes I just have to marvel at how succinctly Glenn Greenwald crystallizes things that have been bothering me. He has the extra benefit of actually being knowledgeable on issues of terrorism and the law, which is nice. Here’s a great passage from today, but you should read the whole post: [I]t’s impossible to grow accustomed […]

Economic Blogger Ranking, By Scholarly Impact

Check out this article (HT2 Greg Mankiw). It has a table ranking econ bloggers by scholarly impact. I don’t mind being beaten by Paul Samuelson, or Nouriel Roubini, or even Tyler Cowen or Bryan Caplan for that matter. But Stephan Kinsella?! What the heck?! (Incidentally we have surpassed our weekly quota of I-hate-GMU / no-I-hate-Auburn […]