UPI Columnist Martin Hutchinson has penned a fascinating essay titled Escaping from Depression, which sounds almost like Rothbard in many passages.
“As I said, traditional Keynesian remedies for recession, trotted out every time there appears to be a problem, will not at that stage be available. However, there is a dirty secret about Keynesian stimulus by a burst of government spending: it doesn’t work. As the U.S. economy of 2001-2003 has exhaustively demonstrated, such stimulus can provide a considerable boost to the economy in the short term. However, increasing the size of government, which increases the percentage of national output absorbed by government, inevitably less efficiently allocated than by the private sector, is a serious depressant to the long term rate of economic growth”
Hutchinson goes on to examine the effects of sound money, trade policy, publi sector spending, and tax rates on the economy’s path toward depression, and comes to some very Austrian-sound conclusions.
