Steven Kates: Why Your Grandfather’s Economics Was Better Than Yours
Steven Kates presents the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the 2010 Austrian Scholars Conference.
Amy Peikoff Interview with John Allison
From Don’t Let It Go:
At the top of the second hour of today’s show I’ll have the pleasure of interviewing John Allison, who is currently President and CEO of The Cato Institute, and formerly was the CEO of BB&T, the 10th largest financial institution in the United States. We’ll be discussing his book, The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why the Future of Business Depends on the Return to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, in which Allison presents the principles necessary to achieve success and happiness—principles applicable to individuals, organizations and society as a whole.
During the first hour I’ll be discussing some news more generally, most likely focusing on the current hostage situations in France, one of which involves the jihadists who massacred 12 journalists and cartoonists working for Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that dared to mock Islam and Mohammad.
Join in live, either by phone or in the chatroom.
The show can be accessed here.
DOLLAR: New Book on the Business Cycle and a Free Market in Money and Banking
Dr. Brian P. Simpson, author of Markets Don’t Fail! (Lexington Books, 2005) and an economist at National University in San Diego, CA, has written a new book on the business cycle and a free monetary and banking system. The book shows how government interference—particularly in the monetary and banking system—causes the business cycle, including the recessions, depressions, and financial crises that are a part of it. The book also shows how establishing a free market in money and banking can virtually eliminate the business cycle.
This book is a major contribution to the monetary, banking, and business cycle literature. It builds on the business cycle theory developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The two-volume book is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is titled Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, with subtitles of Integrating Theory and Practice for volume one and Remedies and Alternative Theories for volume two. Volume one was published in April. Volume two is due out in July.
Part one of volume one shows how manipulations of the supply of money and credit by the government are the primary cause of the cycle. Part two applies the theory to over 100 years of U.S. history to illustrate the explanatory power of the theory. The author uses extensive quantities of data to make his case, including data for interest rates, the rate of profit in the economy, the money supply, the velocity of money, industrial production, GDP/GNP, gross national revenue (a more comprehensive measure of spending and output than GDP/GNP), and more. He shows how the theory explains the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the recession of the early 1980s, and all episodes of the cycle in the U.S. since 1900. In addition, he goes back to 18th century France and the Mississippi Bubble to demonstrate the explanatory power of the theory.
Part one of volume two critiques alternative theories of the cycle, including Keynes’s theories of depressions and fluctuations, Keynesian “sticky” price and wage theory, and real business cycle theory. Part two shows what a free market in money and banking would look like, provides an outline to transition to a free market in money and banking, and gives a detailed explanation of why it would lead to greater stability in the monetary and banking system and raise the rate of economic progress in the economy.
Here are links to the two volumes:
Volume 1: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle/BrianPSimpson
Volume 2: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle-1/BrianPSimpson
It is also available at Amazon at a discounted price.
Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume I: Integrating Theory and Practice: 1
Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume II: Remedies and Alternative Theories
The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in free-market ideas or monetary, banking, and business cycle theory. Economics professors will find both volumes excellent for courses on “macroeconomics,” money and banking, Austrian economics, or the business cycle. Both volumes would also be great additions to the collections of university libraries and libraries of free-market institutions.
DOLLAR: Binswanger Torpedoes Piketty
Thomas Piketty’s latest book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has had its fair share of criticisms. The political right continues to bludgeon the latest critique of capitalism by challenging the veracity of the book’s mathematics, formulas, and quantitative reasoning. But Harry Binswanger understands that the basis for every attack against capitalism is grounded in the idea that capitalism is inherently immoral. Therefore, any defense of capitalism cannot, and should not, be grounded in statistics, but must challenge the existing moral premises that permeate today’s society…
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” offers up the same failed, blood-soaked doctrines as its forbearer, “Das Kapital.” But in our Twitterized culture, yesterday’s disgraced notions, now forgotten, can be re-Tweeted as revelations.
[…]
Evil cannot be combated by offering counter-statistics, as many conservatives are doing. No one is concerned with the statistics, only with the moral narrative. And the book’s opening epigraph gives us that, via a quote from France’s 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”:
“Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.”
In quiet, understated language, that statement lays down the formula for total collectivism. It cuts the ground out from under individual rights, substituting “common utility” as the standard for state action. It demands the yoking of the individual to the group.
M. Piketty doesn’t mention that four years after that ill-named Declaration of Rights came the Reign of Terror. The sequence is logical: the Declaration appealed to the raw envy of the mob, whose instrument became the guillotine.
The whole thing can be read here.
Cradle To Grave? Brook and Watkins on The “On Your Own” Economy
Write Yaron Brook and Don Watkins in The “On Your Own” Economy – Forbes:
Are you bothered by the thought of government embedding itself in every aspect of your life? According to President Obama, the only alternative is “a government that tells the American people, you are on your own. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own. . . . That’s not the America I believe in.”
[…]
Did people shrink from the twin values of freedom and responsibility? On the contrary, the vast majority of Americans during the 18th and 19th centuries eagerly embraced life’s challenges and flourished under the new system. People didn’t flee from America, they fled to America. They
came here poor, but ambitious—ready to carve out a life for themselves in a country that offered them the only thing they asked for: an open road.Of course, Americans during this era were not “on their own” in the lone-wolf, asocial sense implied by Obama. Free Americans developed complex webs of association based on voluntary agreement. An unprecedented division of labor—capitalists, businessmen, and workers
coming together to create wealth on an industrial scale—was a product of this new found freedom.Read the full article at: The “On Your Own” Economy – Forbes]