Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Random Thoughts on Faith and Reason

* If nothing else, people who go to church once a week are reminded 4 times a month that there exists Truth with a capital T. That fact alone gives otherwise “simple” people a tremendous advantageous over much more clever atheists who subscribe to modern doctrines that deny this. * The most important question about […]

Franklin Sanders, the "most dangerous man in the mid-South"

Betsy Hansen, a summer fellow at the Mises Institute, has a good article today at LRC describing the fate of a guy who fought the fiat money system: Mr. Sanders fought gallantly given the impossible circumstances in which he found himself. He ran a gold and silver bank for more than a decade, serving customers […]

Restitution versus Retribution

One of the areas where I am more advanced–or misguided, depending on your viewpoint–than most of my conventional libertarian colleagues regards prison. Simply put, I think the institution of prison itself is a barbaric, counterproductive relic of State involvement in law enforcement. The typical libertarian thinks that in a just society, only actual aggressors would […]

Roosevelt the Free Marketeer

In a Washington Post article Ezra Klein rips John Tamny for giving a (very dumbed down) Austrian spin on the social function of recessions (HT2PK). Klein concludes: At this moment, federal spending does not exist in competition with household spending. It’s one of the last forces sustaining it. Indeed, the idea that the economy will […]

Being Tough But Fair With My Buddy Krugman

During my three-year stint as a professor, I strove to be “tough but fair.” (I think I got that description from the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, which in retrospect may not have been the ideal model.) Anyway, since I have been waterboarding Krugman’s articles recently, I feel compelled to pass this one along […]

Yet More on Cost/Benefits of Waxman-Markey

This MasterResource blog post repeats much of what I’ve written elsewhere, but here’s a new point I made in response to Silas Barta’s criticism on my Mises Daily piece: In conclusion, the above arguments do not show that the government should “do nothing.” If one accepted the premises of manmade climate change, and the property […]

What Did Krugman Know About the Housing Bubble, and When Did He Know It?

The plot thickens. If you need to get up to speed regarding Krugman’s alleged advocacy of a housing bubble in 2002, see here. Now then, Bob Roddis (drawing from the Mises.org blog I believe) sent me a Krugman blog post from Oct. 2006. In the post, Krugman is responding to reader questions regarding his NYT […]

Krugman Digging Himself Deeper

Wow this is getting hilarious. A Krugman quote from 2002 has been flying around the Internet, in which he seemed to advocate that Greenspan replace the Nasdaq bubble with a housing bubble. Now Krugman outdoes himself and posts this (HT2 von Pepe): One of the funny aspects of being a somewhat, um, forceful writer is […]