Predictably, within days of the unmitigated disaster and massive loss of life (10,000 and counting) in Japan from the record 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, a major Keynesian economist has gone on the record in defending the “broken window fallacy” in economics by claiming that the Japanese disaster will actually boost economic growth. The economist...
Read More »

On this President’s Day weekend, let us commemorate the record of the best president in U.S. history: John Tyler. A random poll of Americans would draw mostly puzzled looks at the name, but according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland, in his 2009 ranking of the presidents, Recarving Rushmore, this 10th U.S. president...
Read More »

In a poll of business executives following Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, the Wall Street Journal finds most remain skeptical of President Obama’s new, business-friendly rhetoric, and confirmed that his policies to date account for the continued economic malaise. As encapsulated by Anthony Guzzi, CEO of Emcor Group Inc., a construction and facilities-services...
Read More »

The Great Depression has been a deeply contested subject from the very beginning. After John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory became sacred writ for most mainstream economists, Keynesian interpretations generally prevailed, notwithstanding pockets of resistance among older economists, in general, and Austrian school economists, in particular. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s monumental Monetary History of...
Read More »

Download mp3 file. Here also are relevant books from Dr. Higgs: Depression, War, and Cold War Neither Liberty nor Safety The Challenge of Liberty Against Leviathan Crisis and Leviathan

Consider the following commentary on the economic situation: Foolhardy procedures which are divorced from economic realities, or whose economic implications are not understood by their promoters, do not perforce become sanctified and wise merely by designating them as “action”; tilting at windmills does not draw water. [W]hen a recovery program, which, while it may...
Read More »

First performed publicly last week in New York at The Economist‘s conference, The Buttonwood Gathering, here is the sequel to the sensational rap video pitting the economic ideas of Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek against those of interventionist John M. Keynes. The original video, “Fear the Boom and Bust,” has had more than 1.5...
Read More »

It’s all over the news. “The recession is over.” The mainstream economists say so. This was the longest recession since World War II, I heard on the news (say, I thought the economy was just dandy throughout that war—oh, never mind). The end of this terrible recession into which the free market plunged us...
Read More »

As businessmen, including many who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, continue to go public with complaints about regime uncertainty and its discouraging effect on the economy’s recovery, some observers are speculating that the tycoons’ animus is driven at least in part by their sense of betrayal: they had recognized Obama as a member in...
Read More »

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed by Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio on the widening gap between public and private sector pay, the increasing affluence of military towns compared with others, the disappearance of traditional checks on government power, and the predation and incremental “ratchet effect” of expanding governmental powers that increase...
Read More »