Murphy Demolished?
I actually don’t have a problem with this lengthy review of New Deal revisionism (thanks to reader teqzilla for the tip), because the writer quotes me more than I think any other reviewer has done. I’m reading his stuff thinking, “Yep, yep, this guy Murphy makes a lot of sense.” I don’t recall “sniff”ing and being disgusted with things, the way the reviewer describes my book, but perhaps I need outside eyes to be objective.
I will probably write a response to this at some point, but it will have to wait for now…In the meantime, here’s a good excerpt:
But since the mobilization effort mandated such measures as price controls, the draft, and rationing of scarce materials such as rubber and steel for war production purposes, the whole thing was the foulest of economic abominations. “So the carefully constructed measures of ‘inflation-adjusted gross domestic output’ during the 1940s are about as meaningful as the economic statistics reported by the Soviet Union,” Murphy notes in disgust. “The government effectively made it illegal for market prices to signal how much inflation the Fed was pumping into the system.”
And so it is with all the economic measures of the grotesquely defiled Forties. Sure, the poor saps drafted into the Army or the female workers who thronged into war production factories might have thought things were turning around. But they were blind to how the pure model of laissez-faire was being molested! After all, Murphy explains, “there are other goods and services that those scarce resources could have produced, but which humans will now never enjoy because they were devoted to government projects.” Think of all the miniature golf facilities, nylon stockings and radios senselessly sacrificed just for the liberal vanity project of defeating fascism!
Likewise with the erstwhile layabouts now caught up by the draft—how could anyone count this as a legitimate form of employment? Suppose, for example, “that FDR announced in 1940 that in an effort to fight the Depression, all able-bodied unemployed men would be shipped to African jungles (where they faced lions and disease). That policy would have brought down the official unemployment rate,” Murphy sniffs, “yet it obviously would not have promoted actual economic recovery. Had FDR suggested something this monstrous as a ‘cure’ for mass unemployment, citizens would have rightfully recoiled in horror.”
Indeed, one can almost picture Murphy himself, after typing up such infamies, smiting his breast, slumping alongside his laptop, lifting his head heavenward only to convulsively shout, “Unclean! Unclean!” After all, had the market approved of the war, it could by itself have instructed wartime production facilities where to allocate resources, by the magic of the price mechanism. “Precisely because World War II was an unprecedented event, there were no ‘experts’ on transforming civilian production to military production on this scale. When it comes to motivating millions of people to brainstorm and quickly come up with better ways to make a mousetrap (or tank), nothing beats the profit-driven market economy.”
Back in consensual reality, however, the Second World War doesn’t actually reduce to a perverse safari outing. There was a Japanese attack on a U.S. naval base, and a massive German effort to conquer the West and spread racial genocide. Oh, and the “pecuniary” stakes were far from negligible, as well, with a war-driven Nazi command economy curiously indifferent to the domestic production needs of Poland, France, Belgium, the Balkan states, and so on. A laissez-faire outlook among the Allied powers, in other words, would almost certainly have resulted in a fascist triumph. (Even more inconveniently, the killing blow to Nazi imperialism was delivered by the most hatefully statist command economy of them all, Stalinist Russia.)
Trade Deficits and Fiat Currencies
Wow, you know I must be super busy if I forgot to blog my Mises Daily on Monday. It was “Trade Deficits and Fiat Currencies,” showing the connection between the two. I both praise and critique the author of The Creature From Jekyll Island.
This morning I gave my talk at the Denver Petroleum Club. One of my opening slides talked about the IER D.C. office and how I didn’t have a picture of it because we had recently moved, so instead I said this shot represented our efforts. I didn’t get as big a laugh as I was hoping–perhaps because it was an older crowd–but other than that things went well.
Then I hopped on a plane to Atlanta, retrieved my car from the Economy lot, and drove down to Auburn. I’m about to crash and then tomorrow morning I give the Hayek lecture at the Austrian Scholar’s Conference.
I think I actually get to sleep Friday night. I can’t wait.
I Write Six Days a Week, and Rest on the Sabbath
Lately I have tried to do a better job of “observing the Sabbath,” meaning that I try not to work on Sundays. As a consultant, I never have a vacation. At any given time, there is always something I could be doing (or at least get the wheels moving) to bring in more revenue.
Currently my compromise is that I allow myself to read “worky” things, and I allow myself to work on the household budget, but I don’t produce anything that someone else is paying me for. Eventually I will get to the point where I truly “don’t work on Sundays.”
Similar to the rule about tithing, the same holds for observing the Sabbath. Paradoxically, I have found that I get more done in a seven-day period, when I know during the week that I am not going to allow myself to do “real work” on Sunday. Presumably this has to do with the fact that you really can’t go nonstop for a week without taking mini-breaks, and you use your time more effectively from Monday through Saturday if you know you are going to really take Sunday off.
Update
Hey kids, just to let you know, I am swamped with “real work” for the foreseeable future. (I’m even busier than this guy.) Also, if it works out, I will be migrating the blog to WordPress during my hiatus.
For anyone in the area, I am giving a talk at the Denver Petroleum Club on Thursday morning (will they be expecting a troll?), and then it’s off to Auburn for the Austrian Scholars Conference [.pdf]. My intelligence sources indicate that there is a new karaoke bar in Auburn, which features karaoke every night of the week.
Boosting Productivity By Ditching the Boob Tube
Lately people have been asking me how I get “so much” done. This always strikes me as funny since, at any given time, I’m usually behind on several projects.
One obvious thing is that we have not had a TV in our house since we left Hillsdale. (And even then, we didn’t have cable and were on a lake so we had bad reception.) That literally gives you an extra two hours a day at least to get work done. Even if you’re not watching it, someone else probably is. Imagine if one class of comparable students taking a test had a TV on in the background, while another had peace and quiet. Which group would score better?
When I had a TV in grad school, I used to wind down by watching Seinfeld and other reruns late at night after the long train ride from NYU to my apartment in New Jersey. Asking me at the time to give that up would have been like making me become a vegetarian.
But once you go through withdrawal, you will be amazed at how ridiculous TV is. If you have had one all along, you probably haven’t noticed just how ludicrous it has become. I only see it now when I visit someone’s house or stay in a hotel, so I see it in short samples spread out over weeks.
I’m not saying this as a prude, just making an observation: Modern American cable television is literally pornographic. If you flip through the channels, you will see cleavage or a sexually suggestive scenario (like a crime show where the victim is a stripper or a prostitute or something) on about every 5th channel, depending on the time of day. Fueled by FOX, every news show has to have a really attractive person on the camera at all times if possible.
And don’t get me started on what’s happened to wrestling since my younger brother used to watch Macho Man Savage and the Undertaker.
Potpourri
* This blew me away: Joe Salerno discusses Murray Rothbard’s call for anti-statists to pull their money out of the commercial banking system. OK, so let’s suppose Austro-libertarians agree that they should stop the inflating Fed in its tracks by boycotting the commercial banks. But what is the free market alternative? (Don’t think tax-qualified retirement plans.) It would be nice if it already existed, in a time-tested financial product that Austro-libertarians already have an affinity for. Well we can dream.
* Sometimes even Joe Romm has to backpedal. Debate! Debate!
* Why I read EPJ: The real explanation for the fate of Charlie Rangel.
* Here’s the audio of my talk at Jekyll Island, titled, “Only the Austrians Can Explain Depressions.” Some jokes in the beginning, and then Scott Sumner bashing in the middle.
* I don’t believe in Profile updates and all that jazz, but Vijay Boyapati had a cool Gandhi quote the other day: “The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.”
Onion Reports: Obama Caught Lip-Synching Speech
This made me chuckle three separate times, and that’s good enough for government-bashing work. (HT2 Viresh Amin)
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