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Bank Bailout Blues

My column at Townhall today. I actually came up with a defense of golden parachutes that I hadn’t realized before: And so that type of candidate, who realizes he or she might get let go in a few years, is not going to relish a compensation package as CEO where the payout is $20 million […]

More Hilarious Job Numbers

One of the central points of IER’s critique of “green jobs” studies is that these studies would assume that jobs could be “created” without destroying other jobs. And it’s not just an issue of taxes or borrowing, but even of workers quitting their current jobs and going into the subsidized sector. To illustrate, suppose the […]

Banks Should Raise Prices in a Recession

In doing research for the book, I had an epiphany. And what is embarrassing is that this obvious truth has been sitting around for more than a century, but it was buried by Milton Friedman and others: During a financial panic, central banks should raise rates. An excerpt from my Mises Daily: If the owner […]

Murphy Interviewed on Roland and Diane Show

We conducted this interview (mp3) last Wednesday. It was a full hour, with (I believe) only one commercial break at the bottom of the hour, so lots of ground covered here. Also, their show wasn’t the standard right-wing shock jock stuff, so it was a different type of interview. The official topic was my book […]

"Great achievements in American socialism"

That is Salon’s title, not mine. Yes, they are adopting the term just to spite talk show hosts, but go ahead and check it out. It is a monument to “What Is Seen.” (HT2 my wife Rachael) Rather than publish another essay, though there have been some fine ones lately, about just what really happened […]

TIME Announces President’s New Policy to Confiscate Gold

Oh my apologies! It’s a TIME article from 1933, not today. Obama will wait at least 6 months, easy, before he pulls something like this (HT2 Tim Swanson): On March 9 Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act which empowered the President to call all gold into the Treasury, with heavy penalties for those who disobeyed […]

Employment Down, Inflation Fears Up

Well employers cut 598,000 jobs in January, “the deepest cut in payrolls in 34 years” though that is misleading because the population is bigger now. I need to start thinking of where Wenzel is buying me dinner. On the other hand, I am beginning to worry about my price inflation forecast. Now that CNBC is […]

DeLong Rips Hazlitt and Accuses Him (Surprise!) of Misrepresentation

I hadn’t seen this before, but Bryan Caplan today refers to Brad DeLong’s worries about the unwashed masses reading Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson. DeLong wrote back in 2005: We all know that the market system is an amazing decentralized social planning and allocation mechanism if externalities are small, if returns to scale are in […]