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Anarchy, the Mafia, and Somalia: Clearing Up the Confusion

In an earlier entry I posted the concerns of a skeptical reader of my pamphlet Chaos Theory [.pdf]. The event turned into a proverbial town hall meeting, with 47 heated comments as of this writing, not to mention an old guy with a swastika declaring that God would judge me and my anarchist cronies in […]

Arnold Kling Find His Inner Austrian

Arnold Kling has a great post on the importance of heterogeneity in macroeconomic theory: I think it is misleading to speak of the output gap. It is part of what I call “hydraulic macro,” which thinks of the economy as producing a single good with a single type of labor and a single type of […]

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves: More on Krugman vs. Murphy

Now it’s official: Krugman has definitively said we are in a recovery. (In his previous writing, he technically didn’t say we were, just that it seemed as if we were, and if we were it was because of Big Government.) Now what’s ironic in all this is that even if unemployment is in double digits […]

Reader Contest! Who Can Predict Krugman’s Response?

This is pretty exciting, as far as these things go. Usually the Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow an op ed writer to respond to somebody else’s op ed, except in the most indirect ways. But Alan Reynolds’ piece today opens as if it’s one of my Mises.org Daily Articles: ‘So it seems that we aren’t […]

Limited Government In Post-Invasion Iraq

In his last guest essay, Edward Gonzalez explained why post-invasion Iraq made him question the feasibility of Rothbardian free-market anarchy. In this post, Gonzalez describes a case where limited government–as opposed to brutal strongman rule–emerged out of the chaos after Saddam’s regime fell.–RPM ================ Limited Government in the al Anbar Province of Iraqby Edward Gonzalez […]

I Finally Understand Matt Yglesias

Tyler Cowen brings to our attention this revealing passage from Yglesias: At the same time, I’ve come to be increasingly baffled by the high degree cynicism and immorality displayed in big-time politics. For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of […]

Assessing the State of the Golden State

Pacific Research Institute (PRI) has released part one of a new series called, California Prosperity Project. This particular study is, “Assessing the State of the Golden State.” In this one, we are just trying to get California citizens and policymakers to admit there is a problem.

Best Evidence Yet That Recession Hasn’t Bottomed Out

This is a two-part argument. First: U.S. Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke on Friday said prospects for a return to global economic growth looked good “in the near term,” the clearest signal yet the world’s most powerful central banker thinks a recovery is at hand. “After contracting sharply over the past year, economic activity appears […]