Bob Murphy

Author Archive

$1000 Gold: "Was[n’t] the Spring, Then Spring Became the Summer / Who’d a Believed You’d Come Aloooong?"

Gold broke $1000 this morning. I had previously confidently predicted (in the comments here) it would happen “by summer.” OK I was wrong about that, and the reason is that I foolishly thought the politicians would pressure the banks to lend out all those new reserves. (That was the whole justification for the bailouts, you […]

Van Jones Must Be Fuming

He was brought down by this guy?! (Just watch the first 50 seconds; you’ll see.)

Van Jones Had to Resign Because He Was Black

I can’t believe I am so naive that I didn’t see this coming. I guess that shows how deep-seated my bigotry is. Anyway Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, has now explained: Thursday evening I got worried. Friday I put in a call to ask Van Jones how to help. Saturday I started […]

Potpourri

* My interviews (part I and part II) on Freedom & Prosperity Radio, where we talk about cap and trade etc. These are actually fairly in-depth interviews; we get into a lot of issues that a standard interview doesn’t allow for. * Bob Higgs reports that real wages are rising during the recession, which helps […]

Irony in Van Jones Resignation

I think we can safely say that were it not for Glenn Beck’s constant attention, Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones would not have resigned over the weekend. Yet what’s amazing is that the primary “sins” which made him a political liability are: (a) Calling Republicans a-holes, and (b) Signing a petition calling for an […]

Hard Cases Test God’s Laws

In the comments of my post on the Jaycee Dugard abduction (a post that my mom hated by the way), a wiseguy anonymous commenter said: It’s God’s Will. After all, if it happened, God arranged the world just so for it to happen. It’s for the greater good. Presumably the comment is referring to my […]

Progressive Thought: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

So Bob Roddis got me into the bad habit of checking Matt Yglesias’ blog every few days. In this post he follows the all-too-easy pattern–and right-wing pundits do this too–of disposing of an argument by pointing out that the federal politicians making it are (surprise surprise) a bunch of hypocrites: [A]ll the Republicans plus Senators […]

They hate you for your freedoms, Paul.

Krugman can’t understand why some people get so upset: …I get spitting, incoherent rage over articles on, um, health care economics or macro modeling. What enrages people so much about these pieces? Usually, it’s impossible to tell — in fact, I often have the sense that the enraged correspondents haven’t read the things at all. […]