Dismal Economics

March 19, 2009 12:05 PM by Anthony Gregory

I remember how much I loved Mises University in 2006, which got me more into reading economics. I was a Rothbardian well before that, loyal to free banking, property rights and a total free market, but I had simply not been reading as much about economics, which I soon realized was, unlike topics like war, a very fun and energizing intellectual topic.

Sound economics, the study of production and distribution, explains the beauty of the market economy, is a great angle from which to appreciate the glory and humanity, and offers wonderful hope for the future. It is the joyous science. As a break from studying what was wrong with the state and especially its acts of mass murder, studying economics is akin to studying the very basis of civil society and human flourishing. It was easy to see the glass half full, since you were focusing on the water itself.

What a fantastic topic. And encouraging, I thought, since America and the world have come a long way in economic understanding. Full-blown socialism and old-style hard fascism (at least by name) had been largely discredited. Even the left knew markets could not be abolished altogether. Price controls and protectionism were less popular. The debate had, since World War II, shifted to our benefit, I had long thought.

Ugh. I knew the left and right alike were weak on economics, but the situation today is simply dismal. The idea that credit and spending should be unleashed to combat a crisis of too much credit and spending is no less frustrating, especially in its current ubiquity and calamitous implications, than the crazed idea that bombing, invading and occupying foreign nations would stem terrorism.

Higgs: War Is the Health of the State, Sickness of the Economy

April 3, 2008 9:13 PM by Anthony Gregory

In the newly announced Independent Institute blog, the Beacon, Robert Higgs has a wonderful piece on how war allows the state to grow, all at the expense of the free and productive economy (even if this is typically obscured by Fed trickery). Indeed, even non-"defense" spending skyrockets during war:

"[D]uring wartime many people increase their broad support for the government, and hence they are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing to do with the war. Hardly anyone was surprised that real defense spending (as measured in accordance with the government's own narrow concept) increased by almost 60 percent between 2000 and 2007, while real GDP rose by only 18 percent. Note, however, that the government's real nondefense outlays increased concurrently by more than 24 percent―an increase one-third greater than that of GDP. When people let down their guard because they 'support the troops,' they permit the government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge its spending in a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature."

Read the rest, and visit the blog, which features Robert Higgs along with bloggers Peter Klein, Jonathan Bean, David Beito, David Theroux, me and several others.

Liveblogging My Old Right Journey With Dr. Rothbard, Part V

March 17, 2008 12:25 PM by Anthony Gregory

(To read the earlier installments, go here.)

And at this point, the title I chose for this blog series has become somewhat of a misnomer. It has outlived its time. For no longer is there anything best described as an Old Right. It has died. Its remnant is scarce and far between. The circumstances in which the somewhat tenuous coalition presented itself -- in reaction to the foreign and domestic New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt -- is long gone. The libertarian hard core has been marginalized, or has passed on. Rothbard and a few remain, but the right, in all popularly conceived senses, is nothing like it was in the years of Garrett, Mencken and Nock.

The anti-World War II coalition -- which, as Rothbard astutely and importantly points out, somewhat in passing, was never so grand and impressive once the war was underway; the true non-interventionists were few after the populist America First movement was depopulated by the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor -- gave way to something approximating its precise opposite on the right: The Cold War coalition. Domestically, the alienated and persecuted rightwing struck back at the left with McCarthyism and grassroots red-bating -- a concoction of political revenge so tempting, and so well cloaked in the garb of anti-Communism that Rothbard himself was taken in at first. Then, of course, there was the nakedly coercive backlash: The repression of civilian socialists, a program that our principled libertarian author rejected outright and always saw as a vile and pernicious practice. Then there was the war itself: War against godless Communism, against the greatest threat to mankind, which a totalitarian American bureaucracy, even with Truman at the reins of it all, must be erected and glorified for the duration of the titanic clash between Civilized American Man and the Soviet Devil. On this program, Buckley (RIP) transformed nearly the entire right into a movement for which war, even nuclear war, was the fundamental issue, under which all else would be subordinated, and for which the official gatekeepers would come to purge the movement of classical liberals, antiwar rightists, those with Randian or Bircher alliances and, of course, Murray N. Rothbard. The conservative movement, which has persisted in that essential character to this day, was born. The Old Right was dead.

Thus does the last phase of the story described in Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right commence.

Continue reading "Liveblogging My Old Right Journey With Dr. Rothbard, Part V " »