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Correcting Quiggan on Austrian Business Cycle Theory

In today’s Mises Daily I defend Austria from the Australian. An excerpt: I am not here to tell you the Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle is a work of art that has no flaws. If I said that, then I would be living up to Quiggin’s caricature. What I will say is that the […]

The Smugness of a Liberal

Sometimes I really am just taken aback by Paul Krugman’s condescension. Look at this, from a post called “Gratuitous Ignorance”: The PEN/New York Review panel discussion on the economy is online. I’ll outsource the discussion of what went down to Brad DeLong. Just this to add: it’s bad enough to have people resurrecting 75-year old […]

An Amazing Chapter from Deuteronomy

In my (intended) nightly reading of a Bible chapter, I was paying extra special attention to the book Deuteronomy. When Jesus was tempted by Satan, His defense consisted of quoting scripture. And every single quotation came from Deuteronomy! (What’s really interesting is that the Devil uses scripture too, by quoting from Psalms.) So if (the […]

Rachel Maddow Actually Gets It Right On Obama’s Newly Claimed Powers

This is indeed spooky, and Maddow nails it. (HT2 Chris Brunner.) President Obama wants to lock people up indefinitely against whom we do not have enough evidence to prosecute, but whom we believe pose a threat to society. He doesn’t give too many details, but it sounds like he’s saying such people could be held […]

Winners and Losers in the Waxman-Markey Stealth Tax

I was the lead author in this IER blog post. The main thing in this one was to explain (to a first approximation) why handing free allowances to emitters will not lower energy prices, but instead represents a simple transfer of wealth from the general public to the emitters. Here’s the meat of it: It’s […]

Glenn Beck Whiffs

Folks, I really do like Glenn Beck, especially when he and Stu (sp?) get into an argument over something absurd and spend 20 minutes analyzing it from 18 vantage points. (“In fairness to General Zod, Glenn, Jor El did condemn him to the Phantom Zone, when Krypton wasn’t that far from extinction. That was just […]

Fed Official: "Don’t Monetize the Debt"

So argues Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher in today’s WSJ. Apparently the Chinese have been reading my blog (though from my traffic reports, presumably only 0.00001% of them), because the WSJ reports: [Fisher] has just returned from a trip to China, where “senior officials of the Chinese government grill[ed] me about whether or not we […]

Is the IPCC Saying What I Think It’s Saying?

(UPDATE below.) Ever since I tackled Joe Romm’s argument (in which he is just reproducing the IPCC’s own statement) of how “cheap” it will be to stabilize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at safe(r) levels, I have been trying to dig up the IPCC’s estimates of future GDP losses from climate change in the absence of […]