Bob Murphy

Author Archive

My Interview With Q1 Publishing on…the Great Depression

This interview was taped over the phone, and then they typed it up. So that’s why my answers are so conversational…

Murphy vs. Madrick: A One-Night Pay Per View Extravaganza

The issue is the New Deal. We go two rounds. I haven’t even read Jeff Madrick’s final response yet; for all I know he wins by KO. I’ll let you guess the sides of the debate. (Here’s a hint: Madrick has a book titled, The Case for Big Government.) If you want to grab a […]

Fed Already Monetizing the Debt

Chris Brunner sends along this sobering report (via Karl Denninger via ZeroHedge). Chris Martenson did some sleuthing with CUSIPs and (apparently) discovered that the Fed just bought 47% of the fresh Treasury debt that was issued the week before! Good grief! Just last week, when the auction results were announced it was trumpeted to great […]

Peter Schiff Gets Hugs & Kisses on The Ed Show

People had been complaining about this interview at LRC, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. If you watch, say, the first three minutes, that’s a good sample of the whole thing. I think that interview will actually help Schiff a lot. It will first of all toughen him up for if/when he debates […]

Attacking Anarchy

My former star pupil Gennady Stolyarov II repays my kindness by criticizing Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism (what I call “market anarchy” [.pdf]). In the below article, guest blogger Edward Gonzalez also takes me to task. I would be nervous, if I weren’t right.–RPM ================ Questioning Market Anarchyby Edward Gonzalez After a seven month tour in Iraq fighting […]

P.J. O’Rourke (and Me) on Government Motors

I think I got this link from Chris Brunner… In any event PJO has some pretty good lines in here. E.g. in referring to the politicians taking over the financial sector, he says (paraphrasing) “That’s like when the father burns dinner, and then putting the dog in charge of the cooking. In other words, the […]

Amongst Other Gifts, God Gives Us Objective Truth

Perhaps seeing that I do not restrict my self-important ramblings to merely economic matters, lately Scott Sumner (the Little Professor Who Could, who is now receiving NYT coverage) has branched off into philosophy. In a recent post he wrote: What we are doing in physics is constructing models that can predict, and that therefore are […]

My Lucas Critique

Over at the Mises blog–and note that the Mises blog is different from the Mises Daily article–I have a short post about Robert Lucas’ defense of mainstream economics. Lucas basically argued that nobody could have predicted the housing crash, because if they had predicted it by the day before, then it would have happened the […]