This essay from the Mises Foundation does a nice job explaining the key ideas of Austrian economics while rebutting Paul Krugman.
I do not claim that the Austrian theory of the business cycle captures every pertinent feature of modern recessions. What I doclaim is that a theory — including any of Paul Krugman's Keynesian models — that neglects the distortion of the capital structure during boom periods cannot possibly hope to accurately prescribe policy solutions after a crash.
This essay by economist Lawrence Reed challenges the current on the Left about our economic ills being caused by the excesses of the free market. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute.
The genesis of the Great Depression lay in the inflationary monetary policies of the U. S. government in the 1920s. It was prolonged and exacerbated by a litany of political missteps: trade-crushing tariffs, incentive-sapping taxes, mind-numbing controls on production and competition, senseless destruction of crops and cattle, and coercive labor laws, to recount just a few. It was not the free market which produced 12 years of agony; rather, it was political bungling on a scale as grand as there ever was.
Here is the introductory paragraph providing the background to this letter to the editor.
With all the recent articles and editorials calling for gun control, the New York Times ran letters responding to their pieces today.Of the five letters, four supported more gun control and mine took the other side (that is 503 words versus 162). Mine was the fourth in the list. It is strange that the New York Times has set this up so that Google searches don't show people the page when they search on (Kristof John Lott gun) (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/opinion/l22guns.html).
[T]he overwhelming majority of studies support my results. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data find that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none find a bad effect from the law. Among non-refereed studies, three find drops in crime and two say either no effect or possibly small increases in crime.
Yet while Obamacare is suppressing genuine marketplace competition for medical services, it is also spurring a more sinister facsimile of competition - for political favors. Employers and insurers with sufficient political clout can save money by obtaining a much-coveted "waiver," exempting them from onerous new insurance regulations. The 222 current recipients of such waivers include popular employers such as McDonald's and Universal Orlando as well as the Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures members of the Service Employees International Union (a major political supporter of the Obama administration). Because these waivers are granted at the discretion of the secretary of health and human services, they create easy opportunities for political favoritism and corruption.
Nor will the political favor-seeking be limited to insurance waivers. If the Obamacare individual insurance mandate survives current legal challenges, it will also spur a lobbying frenzy from special-interest groups seeking to include their pet benefits in the mandatory insurance package Americans must purchase.
This past week, the nation of Belarus in Eastern Europe held another rigged “election.” Now, long-time Stalinist dictator Alexander Lukashenko has cracked down on his opponents with a ferocity not seen since the worst days
of the old Soviet empire.
I like this post by Paul Hsieh. I agree with his comments about the Republicans getting the right message. I too think the election expressed the frustration people are feeling with the health care bill and the economy, not whether gay marriages should be allowed or whether abortion should not be allowed.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/gop-dance-with-the-one-who-brung-you/?singlepage=true
