Murphy Twin Spin
In BMS ep. 57 I have a really fun discussion with Robert Anthony Peters.
In BMS ep. 58 I use excerpts from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History to make my point that State militaries are incompetent.
Murphy Triple Play
==> I get pedantic with John Cochrane, but I think the episode is instructive.
==> I defend David R. Henderson against his critics.
==> I’ll be debating again at the Soho Forum in April 2020.
Austrian Business Cycle Theory, the Inverted Yield Curve, and the Upcoming Recession
I explain in the latest episode of The Bob Murphy Show.
Potpourri
==> My radio interview with Danielle Smith was a good one concerning climate change and tree planting.
==> This is old but someone sent me an article explaining why the international mortality stats can be misleading.
==> I haven’t read it yet, but apparently this article at Jacobin takes Phil Magness’ side on the issue of US capitalism and slavery.
Triple Play
==> My latest episode on the Bob Murphy Show goes after the Left and the Right.
==> Someone asked me if there were a good article explaining the economics of remittances (when migrant workers send money back home), and I couldn’t find one. So I was the change I wanted to see in the Internet.
==> Tom is auditioning to have me replaced. 🙁
“Why?”
In economics a lot of what I do–especially when writing for the general public–is to flesh out a thought experiment where the government does something that I consider to be a bad policy. Though it violates some abstract moral principle, it may seem to yield beneficial results. But then, as time passes in the thought experiment, it becomes clear that the harms outweigh the benefits. Turns out violating the abstract moral principle leads to disaster in the long run, when you consider all of the ramifications.
Now suppose before the creation of the material universe, the Devil says to God, “Why be good? Why should I obey you? Is ‘good’ really stronger than ‘evil’?”
And God says, “Yes it is. Here, I’ll show you.”
And then the Devil objects, “Wait! No cheating! We’re not testing whether You are stronger than me. I want a test of whether good per se is stronger than evil.”
And God says, “Yes, I’ll show you.”
Ironic Juxtaposition
I’m not reading too much into this, just saying I noticed that in back-to-back posts (though one was a re-run) on EconLog this was funny:
==> Bryan Caplan has a post (which was front and center on my phone, but they actually re-ran from June 3) wondering why immigration is even a contentious issue among classical liberals. There is a big cartoon of Milton Friedman with his Nobel Prize and his famous quote, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” Bryan runs through some of the ways otherwise pro-freedom intellectuals try to justify controls on immigration, but finds them wanting and in any event says “The plot thickens when you notice that pro-freedom immigration skeptics routinely use arguments that almost never use in any other context…”
==> Scott Sumner has a post on how the Trump Administration is rolling back capital requirements on banks and he comments:
After the banking crisis, Congress passed the massive Dodd-Frank bill, which somehow “forgot” to address most of the actual causes of the crisis. One concrete step in Dodd-Frank that its supporters often point to was the higher capital requirements. But now that’s also being chipped away.
In a perfect world, there would be no capital requirements at all, but also no FDIC, no t00-big-to-fail, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no FHA, etc. Given all the moral hazard in the system, there needs to be some way of discouraging excessive risk-taking.
Deregulation doesn’t always reduce the footprint of the government, in this case it makes the government even more involved in the financial system.
Murphy Stuff
==> Ep. 51 of the Bob Murphy Show features Hannah Cox explaining why conservatives should oppose the death penalty.
==> I take on Joe Weisenthal on negative interest rates.
==> I argue that, contrary to some leftist progressives, slavery was nota boon for American capitalism. Excerpts:
There is no doubt that a healthy adult slave in a region with adequate natural resources can produce more than a subsistence amount of output, allowing for the owner to keep the slave alive and keep the surplus for himself, living up to the Marxist vision of how labor markets work in general. So if the question is, “Was US output higher with millions of productive slaves working, than it would be if those slaves suddenly disappeared?” then the answer is, “Yes, of course, slavery was ‘productive’ in this sense.”
But that’s not really the question. The question is, if all of the plantation owners in (say) the year 1850 had suddenly freed all of their slaves and turned them into free laborers, what would that have done to the course of US economic development? Is it really true that this change would have made the country as a whole poorer?
and:
Slavery was a monstrously unfair and immoral institution, but it was also inefficient, compared to a system based on free labor. Although I understand the rhetorical context of these arguments in regards to reparations and pride in U.S. history, it’s very dangerous to be making the case that enslaving others is the path to national greatness.
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