gopixa/shutterstock.comRegulation Recessions
In his column "Robber Baron Recessions" Paul Krugman argued this Monday that American companies have been investing less because of greater market concentration in their industries. Exhibit A for Krugman is Verizon: he contends that it has not sufficiently invested in Fios, a fiber optic system that would accelerate internet speeds. He thus wants more government intervention to police monopoly power and decrease economic concentration. Both Krugman’s claim and his remedy are dubious. Let’s begin with alternate explanations for low corporate investment. The most obvious is government regulation. The Obama administration has been one of the most aggressive regulators in history.…
Krugman on the VA but not on the VA Scandal
With the VA scandal in the news, it is worth pointing out that the VA is a form of government health insurance – in fact, of socialized medicine, if you will. Thus, this scandal must be seen as a blemish on socialized medicine. Who says so? Well, in a way, one of the principal defenders of government provided health care: Paul Krugman. In this column from the end of 2011, Krugman wrote: Everyone . . . should know . . . that the V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform. Multiple surveys have found the…
Krugman’s Slice of Labor
One would hesitate, for the most obvious of reasons, to dispute astrophysics with a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist, but the case is quite otherwise with a Nobel prize-winning economist. This at the very least suggests a difference in the intellectual difficulty, rigor, or foundation of the two sciences. Common sense will not get you very far with black holes or antimatter, but in economics common sense is a necessary if not a sufficient quality in him who would think about it.
Friday Roundup, December 13th
In our Books section this week Vern McKinley reviews The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire: Irwin’s book starts out as a history of central banking as he chronicles a litany of central bank failures, which can be summarized as ‘stories about how central bankers completely tanked their nation’s economy.’ He in sequence recounts the story of the first central bank in Sweden, Stockholms Banco, the predecessor to today’s Sveriges Riksbank. It was led by one Johan Palmstruch, who Irwin refers to as “history’s first central banker” whose “actions as a man with the power to print money…
Friday Roundup, November 22nd
A new Liberty Law Talk is available on how the growth in interest group politics and a centralized administrative state undermines America's exceptional principles regarding immigration. Our feature book essay this week: Reviewing the extraordinary path to power of Obamacare: The story of the Affordable Care Act is as twisted and bizarre as anything ever written by Stephenson, Kafka, or Orwell. It is an Act that saw the President oppose his signature legislation, before he supported it, and that saw the President’s challenger sire the Act, before he disowned it. The Act sparked conservative outrage around the country, though it was conceived…
Friday Roundup, July 26th
Our Books section this week features an incredibly insightful review from Alex Pollock on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's collection of speeches entitled The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis. Pollock notes the size and potential legacies of Bernanke's big bet: How future histories characterize the author will reflect something they will know, which we cannot: what the outcome of the Bernanke Fed’s massive manipulation of the government debt and mortgage markets will have been. This is something that we, and the Federal Reserve itself, now can only guess about. We do know that this has taken the Bernanke Fed’s assets to…
Friday Roundup, September 21st
David Henderson finds joy in Paul Krugman's discovery of Life Cycles.
Excellent Fed Soc podcast on over-criminalization and the federal law.
Get rid of that Lawyer Glut!
Justin Dyer at The Public Discourse on Slavery and the Constitution. In this regard, don't miss Lucas Morel's review for Law and Liberty of A Slaveholders' Union.
From Daniel Johnson's excellent publication, Standpoint, "Hayek, the Market, and the Good Life," an exchange between Robert Skidelsky and Karen Horn.
Joseph Epstein asks "Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"
