Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Physical Intervention

My pastor today gave a sermon on trusting God, and he relayed some personal stories of times when he “should have” gotten really hurt and didn’t. (The most interesting was when he was 10 or 11, he somehow set a golf ball on fire, and then dumped a 5-gallon tank of gasoline on it.) For […]

Man Jailed for Neglecting Child Support…But the Child Wasn’t His

My wife alerted me to this story: A Philadelphia man was forced to pay more than $12,000 in child support for another man’s daughter and spent two years in jail for falling behind on payments. And of course: He served four six-month jail terms for not keeping up with support payments between 2001 and 2005, […]

One Last Late-Night YouTube from the 1980s

This is the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron from the Transformers movie. Is it just me, or did Prime barely touch Megatron? I get why Prime is on the verge of death, but what happened to Megatron? He took a big fall was all I saw…

"…and I’ll form the head [of the ad campaign]!"

Ah, the Internet is so great for marketing. How much do you think the following YouTube allowed this artist to bump up the price on this Voltron? And for those waxing nostalgic, here ya go–and be sure to note how fast and loose they play with the different astronomical units. It goes from Voltron being […]

Can You Tell Marxists from Misesians?

Here is an interesting quiz on which I did barely better than randomly guessing. In my defense, I think I tried to be too clever, i.e. if something seemed “obviously” written by a Marxist, I guessed it was the Austrian. Oh well.

My Favorite Goldbug Conspiracy Theory

(Note that the title is mostly for fun; I don’t think these guys are crazy or anything.) I have been on the gold bandwagon for a while now. Some of us (perhaps after a period of being oblivious) were alert to the dangers and thus recommended to people, “You want to own gold. Once everyone […]

Roissy’s Non Sequitur

“Roissy in DC” gives us his answer to the meaning of life: hedonism. Roissy starts out by assuming there is no afterlife or supreme being, and then concludes (HT2MR): My answer to the philosophical question I posed above is hedonism. It is the only rational conclusion one can draw faced with the premises I presented. […]