In a piece titled "The Republicans' New Voodoo Economics?" Greg Ip writing in The Washington Post tries to connect up the current GOP with a whole variety of what he sees as wrong-headed ideas, including those of the Austrians. What's most frustrating about the piece is his…
George Selgin wrote a post on expressing ideas in words rather than mathematics. Here are my two cents of commentary. Math is useful when we want to know "how much?" How much is the U.S. economy growing? How much is the value of the dollar changing against…
I am, generally, a big fan of Robert Higgs, but I have some quibbles with this analysis (though this analysis is common among other people I like). Higgs outlines his arguments in a blog post here. His main argument is that Since late December 2008, the bank…
Anyone who peruses my work on free banking—or my other writings for that matter—will notice that I'm not especially inclined to express my ideas mathematically. To put the matter more positively: I prefer plain English. The preference has if anything grown more marked over time. While writing…
(This one's especially for GPO.) In the aftermath of the U.S. banking crises of the 1930s, it became common for American economists to speak of the "inherent" instability of fractional-reserve banking and of the "perverse elasticity" of money supply in fractional-reserve banking systems. What the economists in…