Free Republic

Those familiar with the history of twentieth 20th-century economic thought know of the dominance of "Keynesian economics" following the Second World War. While John Maynard Keynes typically receives credit for transforming economics, much postwar Keynesian economics was actually developed by his interpreters and followers. Perhaps the single most important one of these followers was the Romanian born economist Abba P Lerner. Keynes's book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money popularized the notion that market economies were prone to persistent unemployment. Keynes often receives credit for promoting government deficit spending as a means of combating unemployment. However, Abba Lerner...

Had he stuck around Mr. Milton Friedman would have turned 108 years old yesterday. This week's episode of The Resistance Library podcast focuses squarely on the great libertarian economist and firece critic of Keynesian economics. Perfect to listen to if you've just paid taxes last month! You may also read our very own Sam Jacobs' article on Mr. Friedman here: ammo.com/articles/milton-friedman-forgotten-history-godfather-of-american-conservative-libertarianism

Can we finally admit that eight years of following the Keynesian coloring-book have not just failed, but failed spectacularly? ___ What do we call a status quo in which "emergency measures" have become permanent props? A failure. The "emergency" responses to the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09 are, eight years on, permanent fixtures. Everyone knows what would happen if the deficit spending, money-printing, zero interest rates, shadow banking, asset purchases by central banks and all the rest of the Keynesian Cult's program stopped: the status quo falls apart. Keynesianism Vs The Real World Let’s start by reviewing the core contexts...

...Kudlow is being eyed by the incoming Donald Trump administration as the next Council of Economic Advisers Chairman. Kudlow is not afraid of good ideas, nor does he dismiss good policies solely because they come from the Democratic Party... ...Kudlow understands this well, and will bring this common sense to a CEA that has too often embraced what is senseless. Sadly, it’s not just on the subject of inflation that credentialed economists have lost their way. To see why this is true, ask most any economist what ended the Great Depression. Almost to a man and woman the reply will...

John Wayne’s excerpts from a 1975 interview between Tony Macklin and Wayne. His words, which are nearly 40 years old, sound like they could have been uttered today, as Wayne digs into liberal political tactics and fiscal policies

When David Lipton, a promising economist, was finishing his graduate work at Harvard in the early 1980s, he faced one of those potentially life-changing choices. He had one job offer from the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the multinational institution that for 70 years has served as a lender of last resort and dispenser of orthodox economic advice to countries that get into financial trouble. There was also an offer of a teaching job from the University of Virginia. Unsure of which path to take, he turned for advice to an intellectually restless and charismatic assistant professor, a Frenchman named...

Paul Krugman is so frustrated by the lack of support for another round of stimulus spending that he's now calling for a fake alien invasion of the United States to spur a World War II-style defense buildup.

Paul Krugman has become an embarrassment to the economics profession. Despite his Nobel Prize and despite his previous high regard in the profession, his twice-a-week editorials in The New York Times are causing even progressive economists to treat him as somewhat of a kook.Since 2011, the United States has followed what Krugman correctly calls a policy of “austerity.” For example, the federal budget deficit has declined from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to a predicted 2.9 percent of GDP for all of 2014. All along the way Paul Krugman protested that such policies would prolong the recession and even...

Financially speaking, Japan is fast becoming a Keynesian dystopia. Its entire economy is now hostage to a fiscal time bomb. Namely, government debt which already exceeds 240% of GDP and which is growing rapidly because even the recent traumatic increase in the sales tax from 5% to 8% does not come close to filling the fiscal gap. Moreover, even at today’s absurdly low and BOJ rigged bond rate of 0.6% nearly 25% of government revenue is absorbed by interest payments. Now comes the coup de grace. Japan’s savings rate has collapsed (see below) and its vaunted current account surplus is...

The nomination of Janet Yellen to become head of the Federal Reserve System has set off a flurry of media stories. Since she will be the first woman to occupy that position, we can only hope that this will not mean that any criticism of what she does will be attributed to sex bias or to a "war on women." The Federal Reserve has become such a major player in the American economy that it needs far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received, regardless of who heads it. Ms. Yellen, a former professor of economics at Berkeley, has...

While all eleven minutes of Obama’s apocalyptic “government shutdown” speech is well within the definition of “disingenuous”, there was one mundane comment that demands attention. The comment was more or less a throwaway line, aimed at illustrating the gravity of a government shutdown. Startling, the President uttered a fact during his 11 minutes of blaming Republicans. The Federal Government is, in fact, the largest employer in America. “The federal government is America's largest employer” Obama reminded the press as he launched into a childish explanation of Keynesian economics. And now, some of those “non-essential” employees might be getting furloughed. (Inexplicably,...

David Stockman, author of The Great Deformation, summarizes the last quarter century thus: What has been growing is the wealth of the rich, the remit of the state, the girth of Wall Street, the debt burden of the people, the prosperity of the beltway and the sway of the three great branches of government - that is, the warfare state, the welfare state and the central bank... What is flailing is the vast expanse of the Main Street economy where the great majority have experienced stagnant living standards, rising job insecurity, failure to accumulate material savings, rapidly approach old age...

...Obama’s greatest adversary in the latest budget battle isn’t the Republican leadership in Congress — it’s his confidence in his own ability to force a win. He has been so certain of his campaign skills that he didn’t open a line of communication with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell until Thursday, a week before the spending ax hits. And when they did finally hear from Obama, the calls were perfunctory, with no request to step up negotiations or invitations to the White House. ...In the last two days alone, he’s courted local TV anchors, called...

Ideology is powerful, capable of masking unpleasant facts. Whether we recognize it or not, we are all slaves to ideology. Economists are no different in that regard than other people. They hold preconceived ideas which affect the interpretation of data and facts. In the extreme, ideology is capable of blocking the recognition of contradictory information, effectively blinding a person to valuable evidence. Keynesian economists believe, regardless of logic and data, that economies can be managed from the top down. In their world, economies are little different than machines. Change some inputs here, speed them up over there, add some lubrication,...

I agree that Obama inherited a crappy economy, and I think it is silly to assert that he bears any responsibility for the severity of the 2007-2009 recession. But it is very fair to hold him responsible for what’s happened since the recession ended. I’ve cited data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on both employment and gross domestic product to show that Obama has presided over the weakest recovery in the post-World War II period.And I think it is fair to blame Obama for the economy’s anemic performance during that time, largely because his agenda of faux stimulus and Obamacare...

Hurricane Sandy was an invader, one that splashed ashore with as much destructive power as any foreign (or perhaps interstellar) invader could hope to bring to bear against our coasts. Thus, in the opinion of economist Paul Krugman, the storm should help boost the American economy. “If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” the Nobel Prize winning economist declared on CNN in 2011....

The Great Recession was primarily caused by the collapse in economic demand as 80 million “baby-boomers” born between 1946 and 1964 moved out of their peak spending years in their mid-30s to mid-50s and into retirement in their late 50s and early 60s. The U.S. government over the last five years squandered $7.6 trillion on Keynesian demand-side stimulus trying to resuscitate this demographically shrinking demand. With only 23 million born between 1995 and 2012 that comprise “Generation Z”, this population is just too small for demand-side stimulus to revive the economy. America is now deep in debt, facing 23 million...

Does the employment of Keynesian economics actually spark the economy, or merely help those in office keep their jobs? Low interest rates: check. Tax breaks: check Deficit spending to stimulate the economy: check. Three primary tools in the Keynesian toolbox, used in significant doses in order to combat economic instability. For decades, they have been the central tenets utilized by various governments in numerous battles to stabilize the economy, up to and including the recent devastation wrought by the post-2008 financial crisis. In this latest iteration and via numerous efforts bookended by TARP and QE2, the United States has invested...

In country after country, increased government spending acted more like a depressant than a stimulant. - Policy makers in Washington and other capitals around the world are debating whether to implement another round of stimulus spending to combat high unemployment and sputtering growth rates. But before they leap, they should take a good hard look at how that worked the first time around. It worked miserably, as indicated by the table nearby, which shows increases in government spending from 2007 to 2009 and subsequent changes in GDP growth rates. Of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, those...

Keynesian (and some Monetarist) versus Austrian views on the business cycle revolve around two basic empirical issues: the nature of capital and production and the nature of the national budget constraint. Concerning capital: Ironically, Keynesians appear to assume a kind of “equilibrium always” story in which productive (human and physical) resources can, at low cost, be simply shifted to and plugged in to the production of whatever product or service happens to be the object of demand stimulus; and, further, that if enough of this is done, income, employment and tax-payments will rise precipitously. In this way economic-policy can produce...