Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Smallville, er, Hillsdale Adventures: Tales of Murphy When He Had Hair

Aristos (not his Christian name) starts out trying to pay tribute to Alexander Shtromas, a really cool political science professor we both had in Hillsdale College, but his jealousy of me overtakes the post. It’s OK Aristos, let it go. (BTW, if you are in a closet and the feds are searching your house, don’t […]

Army Gets Ready for Civil Unrest–in the US of A

Naturally they aren’t billing it the way I have done above, but really, there isn’t much left to the imagination in this article at the Army Times from September 8. The article starts out pleasantly enough: The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling […]

Funny Joel Stein Article on Bailout

Joel Stein is the kind of smarmy writer who is annoying when you happen to like whatever he’s mocking, but who is hilarious when you agree with him. On the bailout he and I are of one mind: Even though I understand so little about economics that much of my long-term investments are tied up […]

Phew! Don’t Worry Folks, the Politicians Stayed Up Past Midnight to Rob Us Blind

The swagger of these people is astounding. The public is against this 9-to-1 by some measures, such that they pass it literally in the middle of the night on a weekend, and then they have the audacity to pretend that we were worried they couldn’t agree on how to split up $700 billion amongst themselves? […]

Bruce Bartlett: Another Fair-Weather Friend of the Free Market, & Commentary on Capital Consumption

Well shoot, just when I thought we had this all locked up from a disinterested academic viewpoint, Bruce Bartlett comes along and endorses the Paulson Plan. He starts out by explaining the fractional reserve system. It doesn’t appear that Bartlett has even considered whether fractional reserve banking is a good idea; he just takes it […]

"That’s MY King. I Wonder…Do You Know Him?"

So asks S.M. Lockridge:

The Nonsense "Free Market" House Republican Alternative

The House Republicans valiantly stood up and delayed the Paulson Plan, but their suggested alternatives make no sense. First, they want to lower the capital gains tax. That is good in general, but as some have pointed out, it doesn’t really help firms unload their MBS–they obviously will be selling them at a loss, and […]

Is Bernanke Going to Inflate or Not?

That has been the question in my mind for the last year. As I will explain in more detail in a future post, Bernanke has been “sterilizing” his liquidity injections to Wall Street as best he could, thus far. Briefly, what Bernanke injects as reserves by lending to a bank, he takes out of the […]