The Mises View: "WaPo Attacks Austrian Economics..."

Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920

The Mises View: "What is Economic Growth?"

The Mises View: "Government Shutdown, Spending Cuts, and Other Fables

Keep this in mind when round 2 comes next year.

Rules for Bureaucracy

We’ve heard of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  The Mises Institute published The Seven Rules for Bureaucracy.  Here is the general outline.  Click the link below to read the article. 

Rule #1: Maintain the problem at all costs! The problem is the basis of power, perks, privileges, and security.

 

Rule #2: Use crisis and perceived crisis to increase your power and control.

 

Rule #3: If there are not enough crises, manufacture them, even from nature, where none exist

 

Rule #4: Control the flow and release of information while feigning openness.

 

Rule #5: Maximize public-relations exposure by creating a cover story that appeals to the universal need to help people.

 

Rule #6: Create vested support groups by distributing concentrated benefits and/or entitlements to these special interests, while distributing the costs broadly to one's political opponents.

 

Rule #7: Demonize the truth tellers who have the temerity to say, "The emperor has no clothes."

 

Americans are finally waking up to this whole charade. Hopefully, we’ll be able to throw off our shackles and dismantle this slave ship.

 

Source:  http://mises.org/daily/5955/

Paul Krugman is More a Political Hack Than an Economist

The Progressives favorite economist is not actually an economist in the truest sense. Paul Krugman, the man that every big government liberal loves to hug, is a political hack. This is not my critique; instead it comes from William Anderson, an adjunct scholar, from the Mises Institute:

This is harsh criticism, I realize, so I must explain my views in full. Yes, Krugman has a Ph.D. from MIT in economics, but his writings, both popular and academic, demonstrate that he does not believe in laws of economics. Instead, like most folks with socialist leanings, he believes that the state is both omniscient and omnipotent and simply by fiat can eliminate those pesky little problems caused by scarcity.

If one can surmise anything from Krugman's columns, it is that he is an unabashed Keynesian. While others in the economics profession have forsaken the Keynesian faith for things like "Rational Expectations" or "Real Business Cycles," Krugman remains true to the Church of John Maynard Keynes.

Keynesian economics has been a proven failure time and time again. But that of course doesn’t deter the adherents of this flawed theory. You would’ve thought that FDR’s failed economic policies would have been the epitaph of this failed theory; or the debacle of the 1970’s; or more recently the failed Stimulus Plan. No, there are still those who are clinging by their fingernails on this crumbling ledge.

Just recently, the three Democratic senators in the infamous super-committee stated that the country needs another stimulus plan. That is amazing considering the colossal failure of the last one. But that is what Paul Krugman and all of his leftist adherents have been clamoring for. That is unbelievable!

William Anderson sums up the statist thinking of the “economist” professor at Princeton:

No doubt, Krugman is an "authoritative" voice to those who advocate statism. He is a product of an elite university and has taught at the "highest levels" of academe since first earning his doctorate. Thus, those who cite Krugman as an authority in economics commit the informal fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority). However, if one wishes to appeal to logic, clear thinking, and the realization that economic analysis begins with the individual, then Krugman is not the person to whom one goes to find answers. One might as well call on a politician for intellectual sustenance as to call on Paul Krugman. In the final analysis, both will provide the same answer: expand the state, and when that creates problems, expand the state some more.

And that is exactly what is happening.

Source: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/177175-dem-supercommittee-members-want-focus-on-stimulus-
http://mises.org/daily/1318

Keynesian Economics and World War II

This video pretty much says it all.  No matter how many times the Keynesians have been proven wrong the press always ignores the end results of this flawed theory.

Whenever you get into a debate with these statist, they always point to WWII and how the military machine and the heavy handed policies of FDR brought us out of the Great Depression.  That argument is being refuted.  Economist Robert Higgs points out the fallacy of this theory in his piece World War II and the Triumph of Keynesianism.  Here is an excerpt:

So, government policies created sustained high unemployment, and Keynesians blamed the market. The Keynesians then credited the government's wartime deficits for pulling the economy out of the Great Depression and continued to credit defense spending for preventing another economic collapse. In this way, sound economics was replaced by economic ideas congenial to spendthrift politicians, defense contractors, labor unions, and left-liberal economists.

How much better it would have been if the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises had been taken to heart. In Nation, State, and Economy (1919), Mises said, "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings." The analogy was apt in World War I, in World War II, and during the Cold War. It is still apt today.

To read the whole article click on the link below:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0395d.asp

Keynesian Economics: The Beast That Refuses to Die

Starring Paul Krugman as Igor.