United States Federal Reserve Bank building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. (Rob Crandall / Shutterstock.com).The Baleful Consequences of Robert Skidelsky’s Keynesianism
John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of John Maynard Keynes
Detail image of "The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June, 1919," by William Orban. Part of the collection of the Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 2856).How Nation-States Secure Freedom
Jacques Rueff: Statesman of Finance and “l’anti-Keynes”
French economist and adviser to the French Government Jacques Rueff at his home in Berville, 1965. (Photo by Henri Bureau/ Getty Images)Ending the Fed’s Permanent Inflation Policy
The Federal Reserve Board seeks to maintain an inflation rate around two percent per year. While this rate might sound low for older types who remember double-digit inflation rates in the late 70s and early 80s, and a rate of 5.4 percent as recently as 1990, why tolerate, let alone seek to sustain, any inflation at all? Why not seek to establish zero inflation and stable prices? After all, even an inflation rate of only two percent a year means nominal prices still double every 36 years. And while people can and do broadly adjust their behavior in the face of anticipated inflation, it’s not a seamless process. Inflation distorts people’s economic decisions, whether as producers or consumers, labor or capital, and so imposes costs on us all.
Making Myths about “Money Makers”
To compare The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace to a 100,000-word inflationist op-ed by Paul Krugman would be unfair—unfair to Paul Krugman. It goes beyond Keynesian hagiography to Keynesian deification.
America Has Gone Wobbly
The American experiment has always been a rickety thing, a wobbly stool balanced on the three legs of its politics, its economics, and its public morals. From its founding, the United States had a political impulse toward greater equality, while the nation’s economics sought free markets, and the American cultural ethics generally expressed the country’s broadly shared Protestantism. Through much of our history, each of these three legs both accommodated and strained against the other two. Democracy, for example, grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always…
