Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Great Klein Post on the "Free Market" Bush Administration

I am still in the Dark Ages (an anti-Church misnomer) when it comes to reading blogs. My wife once tried to set up a Bloglines thingie for the sites I like, but it didn’t take. So that means I only read a limited number of blogs during a normal session. Consequently, I only read Peter […]

Brad DeLong: Budgets Deficits Are Awful Unless They’re Obama’s

Readers know that lately I’ve come to doubt the evenhandedness of Brad DeLong. (This makes it difficult for him to “grasp reality with both hands,” the professed goal of his blog.) My suspicions were further aroused when I saw him make this statement at TPMCafe (HT2 Arnold Kling): What is going to be the new […]

CARB Takes Criticism Well

Here is my Townhall column explaining how the California Air Resources Board (CARB) ignored scathing peer reviews of its economic analysis, and voted unanimously to go forward with the statewide cap-and-trade program (and other goodies) contained in AB 32, aka “The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.” (So now we can stop worrying about global […]

Why Aren’t the Fed Injections Leading to Massive Price Inflation?

As longtime Free Advice readers know, my favorite graph lately has been of the monetary base, which consists of currency plus bank reserves on deposit with the Fed. (Note that a broader definition of money, M1, includes total demand deposits, i.e. checking accounts, whereas the monetary base doesn’t.) In contrast to the broader measures of […]

The Policeman Is Not Your Friend

I realize I get cynical a lot here, but check out this story from Galveston. (HT2LRC) I’m not even going to comment. It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked […]

Bryan Caplan Gets Pre-Emptively Attacked by Hawks

Over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan made a surprisingly courageous post about disarmament. Now granted, Caplan’s argument wasn’t airtight, but give the guy a break; you’re not going to get world peace with a few paragraphs. Anyway, the majority of commentators lecture Bryan about human nature, A is A, therefore we need nukes, etc., but this […]

Robert Wenzel Gives Me Props on Paulson

Robert Wenzel and I have formed a mutual fan club, which means I don’t have to toot my own horn on my Paulson call. The entirety of Wenzel’s post (and note my convention here, that I don’t italicize my own words to avoid confusion): Bob Murphy Is Going to Flip On Wednesday, Bob Murphy wrote […]

Great (and Depressing) TV Show About the New Deal

Bryan Caplan and David Henderson have been raving about this half-hour Canadian show on the New Deal, and boy they were right. Like David, I intended to just watch a few minutes, and finally around 20 minutes into it I decided to stop agonizing, and just resolve to watch the whole thing. What’s really amazing […]