Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Ezra Klein Apparently Doesn’t Think Immigrants Are Part of the Universe

I don’t know what the timelines are, so maybe he didn’t have access to this information when he wrote his short post. But here Ezra Klein points to how encouraging the fate of Massachusetts is for health care reform (HT2MR). Nowhere does Klein mention this: As lawmakers on Capitol Hill battle to create a nationwide […]

They Tried Easy Money Back in the 1930s

Bill R. sent me a link to this amazing site where they excerpt the news from WSJ from the corresponding day in 1930. For July 18, 1930: Editorial: Constantly increasing taxation is a burden on “every form of enterprise”. It diverts money from productive uses to government functions which “though mostly indispensable, do not always […]

Potpourri

* Here’s Bryan Caplan’s reply to Krugman and Drum. * An interesting analysis of a paper (on boundary layer clouds and the effect on global warming) that clearly went into the IPCC summary, and yet had key words changed to match with the spirit of the IPCC report. (HT2 Rob Bradley) * I have gotten […]

DeLong on the State of Macroeconomics

A rare post in which I agree wholeheartedly with Brad DeLong (HT2 Bob Roddis): The Economist gives us economists too much credit… I would like to draw a distinction between economics as a way of thinking–the way good economists think, at least–and academic economics as a profession. Economics as a way of thinking is, I […]

Hillary Clinton, Pod Person?

Once you start entertaining the notion that there are secret groups running world governments, you see evidence all over the place. What’s really funny is that, if you want to debate a conspiracy theorist, you can’t say, “You have no proof of that plan.” Because the conspiracy theorist will give you actual quotes from people […]

Last One: BLS’ SA CPI as of July 17, 2009

Another post for posterity: I want to take a snapshot of the BLS’ figures for actual and seasonally adjusted CPI for the first half of 2009, since I predict that they will revise those figures later on, in order to suppress the reported monthly inflation rates. Month….CPI….SA CPI=====================Dec08…210.228…211.577Jan…..211.143…212.174Feb…..212.193…213.007Mar…..212.709…212.714Apr…..213.240…212.671May…..213.856…212.876Jun…..215.693…214.459===================== And while we have the numbers in […]

Glenn Beck vs. Goldman Sachs

Glenn Beck does a surprisingly good job explaining all the shenanigans involving Goldman Sachs the last year. (HT2 Wenzel, who was on to Goldman a long time ago.) I’m glad to see that this stuff is finally going mainstream. Of course, it’s a bit like the Jedi Council finally realizing Palpatine is the Sith lord, […]

The Problems With Materialism

Hi my name’s Bob and I’m a recovering materialist. I’d like to thank my sponsor Gene, who talked me down from the ledge a few years ago… Over at Crash Landing, my frequent critic Tokyo Tom decided to throw caution to the winds and went head to head(s?) against Gene Callahan and me on materialism. […]