What's new

NEW 12/19/2013: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

Wilkinson and Pickett make an eloquent case that the income gap between a nation's richest and poorest is the most powerful indicator of a functioning and healthy society. -- Publishers Weekly [more...]

NEW 12/19/2013: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. [more...]

NEW 12/19/2013: Right Hook: The Tactics of Conservative Criticism [More...]

"Over the past few years, there have been some big hitting books from the left criticising inequality, capitalism and 'free market' economics or neoliberalism. Naturally, these books have received a lot of criticism from the right. However, sometimes it seems that this criticism is overzealous: an attempt not merely to question the book, but discredit it entirely, and accuse the authors of various misrepresentations of facts and people along the way." Examples from The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone' by Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson, 'Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class' by Owen Jones, and 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' by Naomi Klein. [more...]

NEW 12/19/2013: Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire [More...]

"BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind.... Which is fine if you're a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density...." [more...]

NEW 12/12/2013: Bitcoin Proves The Libertarian Idea Of Paradise Would Be Hell On Earth [More...]

The bit coin experience is characterized by radical instability, chaos, the rise of a boss-class of criminals who assassinate people they don't like, and a mass handover of wealth to a minority even smaller than the 1% that currently lauds it in the United States. [more...]

NEW 12/10/2013: Force and Fraud

Not normal definitions: redefined to be anything libertarians dislike. See: Coercion. [more...]

NEW 12/09/2013: The Founding Fathers Of The USA

Libertarians frequently claim the founding fathers were libertarians based on cherry-picked quotations, mostly from slave owners. Does that show that libertarians endorse slavery? [more...]

NEW 12/09/2013: Were the Founders Libertarians? [More...]

Of course not. David Frum condemns this revisionism and points out that the mental outlook of the founders was wholly different based on religious belief, material scarcity, and slaveholding. [more...]

NEW 12/08/2013: Murphy on US and Canadian Unemployment during the 1930s: A Critique [More...]

Robert Murphy's claims that Canada had a much better recovery without government intervention during the Great Depression are based on comparing apples to oranges.[more...]

NEW 12/07/2013: Schuller’s Challenge to Misesian Apriorists has never been answered [More...]

George Schuller provided a devastating epistemological critique of Human Action's praexology in 1951, that has never been answered. Easy to understand. [more...]

NEW 12/06/2013: Bitcoinmania at FT Alphaville [More...]

The Financial Times blog on Bitcoin shenannigans. Properly skeptical. [more...]

NEW 12/01/2013: The Minimum We Can Do [More...]

Raising the minimum wage reduces poverty, has next to zero effect on employment, complements Earned-Income Tax Credit, benefits labor markets by reducing turnover, and has widespread support for its fairness. [more...]

NEW 12/01/2013: Sorry, Folks, Rich People Actually Don't 'Create The Jobs' [More...]

"So, if rich people do not create the jobs, what does? A healthy economic ecosystem -- one in which most participants (especially the middle class) have plenty of money to spend." [more...]

NEW 12/01/2013: Entrepreneurs (or investors) create jobs.

A half-truth: they also discard jobs just as readily. Sustainability of jobs is created by consumers and other social factors that enable a profit from jobs. [more...]

Plutocracy

Most of the world, including the USA, is a plutocracy: ruled by and for the rich, the .01%. Libertarians with their obsession with property tend to favor this status quo. Also known as plutonomy and plutarchy, closely related to oligarchy. [more...]

Private Charity

Private charity is the libertarian's magical alternative to government redistribution. All of history shows that private charity has never and never will be up to the task of alleviating problems of poverty and other injustice. [more...]

Libertarianism Is Not Liberalism

The overriding role of property and capitalism in libertarianism prevents it from fulfilling liberal objectives and contradicts basic liberal ideas. [more...]

John Galt

The magical libertarian of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, even more implausible than her other characters. A Prester John figure presiding over a fictional libertarian utopia.[more...]

Microfoundations would be nice if we had them [More...]

"Once again, let me reiterate that the big problem with 'microfounded' macro, as I see it, is that the 'microfoundations' are bad: not credible, and generally not consistent with anything microeconomists have actually found. Bad microfoundations are worse than none at all." [more...]