Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Bible Contradiction?

In reference to my post on David vs. Goliath, Gary emailed to ask a riddle: What killed Goliath? Gary thinks it’s obvious, but I don’t. Here’s the link to the chapter again.

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves: David versus Goliath

This is one of those Bible stories that has spilled over into secular lore, but the original tale is pretty cool. So here it is, with some parts in bold that I will come back to at the end. Keep in mind that at this point, David is just a punk kid who plays the […]

Potpourri

OK my Firefox browser has accumulated far too many tabs. Time to clean house: * Bill R. found another neat item in the WSJ from 1930. It seems that back then, they were comparing their slump to the 1920-1921 depression. But they recognized the important difference: “While the 1920-21 depression and stock market pattern has […]

Anarchy, the Mafia, and Somalia: Clearing Up the Confusion

In an earlier entry I posted the concerns of a skeptical reader of my pamphlet Chaos Theory [.pdf]. The event turned into a proverbial town hall meeting, with 47 heated comments as of this writing, not to mention an old guy with a swastika declaring that God would judge me and my anarchist cronies in […]

Arnold Kling Find His Inner Austrian

Arnold Kling has a great post on the importance of heterogeneity in macroeconomic theory: I think it is misleading to speak of the output gap. It is part of what I call “hydraulic macro,” which thinks of the economy as producing a single good with a single type of labor and a single type of […]

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves: More on Krugman vs. Murphy

Now it’s official: Krugman has definitively said we are in a recovery. (In his previous writing, he technically didn’t say we were, just that it seemed as if we were, and if we were it was because of Big Government.) Now what’s ironic in all this is that even if unemployment is in double digits […]

Reader Contest! Who Can Predict Krugman’s Response?

This is pretty exciting, as far as these things go. Usually the Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow an op ed writer to respond to somebody else’s op ed, except in the most indirect ways. But Alan Reynolds’ piece today opens as if it’s one of my Mises.org Daily Articles: ‘So it seems that we aren’t […]

Limited Government In Post-Invasion Iraq

In his last guest essay, Edward Gonzalez explained why post-invasion Iraq made him question the feasibility of Rothbardian free-market anarchy. In this post, Gonzalez describes a case where limited government–as opposed to brutal strongman rule–emerged out of the chaos after Saddam’s regime fell.–RPM ================ Limited Government in the al Anbar Province of Iraqby Edward Gonzalez […]