Bob Murphy

Author Archive

What If Obama Is Sincerely Wrong?

To those readers who want to nurse their hatred of politicians, I want to raise the possibility that Barack Obama actually believes his stimulus plan is a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, he knows full well all the political back deals and payoffs it contains. But I am entertaining the possibility that he actually […]

Bob Higgs No Fan of the Government

Straight-shootin Bob Higgs learns us all a lesson about fiscal responsibility at LRC today. But before I give you Higgs’ funny conclusion, you need to know what he is responding to. At first I was going to just paraphrase, but folks, you really have to read this New York Times article describing the government’s latest […]

Toward an Understanding of the Old Testament God

I try to make a religiously themed post every Sunday, but my other work took over my weekend. (I shudder to think what that says about my priorities, I know.) For today’s post I want to move toward an understanding–i.e., I am not claiming I actually have it yet–of how the God of the Old […]

"Pre-Privatization": You Have to Be Kidding Me

Have you heard the new term for bank nationalization? All the cool kids are calling it “pre-privatization.” Oooh, you’re so scared of bank nationalization, what a chicken. Is it because your mommy and daddy warned you about it? I bet they told you to stay away from dope and rock ‘n roll, too.

How the Government Dealt With Previous Recessions

This is a really neat idea by the New York Times. They got a few big guns to discuss the government’s moves during previous recessions. Unfortunately, the three economists all cling to the Keynesian/monetarist view that government spending and money printing boost the economy, with the only downside being rising prices. (Somebody else, who claims […]

Fleshing Out the Broken Window Fallacy

A colleague recently forwarded me an email he had received asking about the broken window fallacy. (If you have never heard this spelled out before, you absolutely must read Hazlitt’s discussion–it’s very short.) Anyway, the correspondent was puzzled, because if the “flaw” in the broken window fallacy is that the baker would have spent money […]

DeLong and Krugman Surrounded by Friggin Idiots, #283

Ah, poor Brad DeLong. In a post entitled, “Against Stupidity the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain,” he echoes Paul Krugman’s exasperation with moronic Republicans. Here’s Krugman full post: The most valuable lesson I learned from the year I spent in Washington (1982-1983, on the staff of the Council of Economic advisers — I was the […]

The Stock Market in 1929 Was Undervalued??

So argue McGrattan and Prescott in this 2003 Fed paper (pdf). Here’s the abstract: Many stock market analysts think that in 1929, at the time of the crash, stocks were overvalued. Irving Fisher argued just before the crash that fundamentals were strong and the stock market was undervalued. In this paper, we use growth theory […]