Bob Murphy

Author Archive

More Evidence on That Class Act, Brad DeLong

UPDATE Below Readers may recall my brush with greatness when Brad DeLong decided to delete my comment calling him out for saying Mises’ work was “bats— insane.” Well, Mario Rizzo has been similarly blessed. In a recent post with the neutral title, “Stupidest Party Alive,” DeLong named Steve Horwitz (as well as others) an “ethics-free […]

Great Mankiw Article on the Problems With Gov’t "Stimulus"

Wow, I am really taken aback. Reading his blog over the last year or so, my opinion of Mankiw had gone way down (compared to my opinion from reading his textbook). But he is on fire in this NYT op ed (HT2EE). Don’t get me wrong, he is still staying firmly within the mainstream worldview, […]

Sneak Peak for My Upcoming Book on the Great Depression

If I were really creative I would do trailers showing me reading and typing, etc. Fortunately, I have no competence with video or graphic editing. So for those dying for the release of my forthcoming book on the Great Depression, you will have to be satisfied when I respond in the comments at Marginal Revolution […]

The Nigerian Miracle?

In a passage in my upcoming book I made an offhand remark about Nigeria, and I went to Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t saying something dumb. (For one thing, I wanted to make sure “Nigeria” was an official place back in the 1940s.) I came across this rather startling passage: According to the Economist […]

A Less Immodest Proposal

In a previous post I explained that President-elect Obama could do a lot more good (given his publicly stated objectives) by identifying, say, the 10 million households most in jeopardy and then cutting them checks. That would make a heck of a lot more sense than what they’re going to do instead, where even Obama […]

Peter Schiff Warns of the Bubble in Treasurys

Note that I am not simply heeding him, since he was was right about the the housing bubble. If I had briefed him before this interview, I couldn’t have been happier with Schiff’s responses (HT2LRC): Unfortunately, I think what’s going to happen to a lot of regular Americans is this: They got spanked in their […]

Coining a New Term for the Coming Economic Disaster

OK kids, I think we are in store for a very severe recession (i.e. depression) and very big price increases. It will be stagflation but worse. So we need a catchy term. The two contenders I’ve come up with are infression and depflation, but the first is hard to pronounce and the latter is very […]

Obama Nominates a Socialist

President-elect Obama has tapped former EPA head Carol Browner to take “on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama’s ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change.” Guess what? She’s a socialist. Really. I grant you, she’s no longer listed at the Socialist International website, but she used to be. “Oh, back in […]