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One of my pet peeves with Paul Krugman is his constant rewriting of history, a rewriting that just happens to coincide with left-wing political talking points. For example, we hear that the Great Depression occurred because Herbert Hoover was a staunch believer in laissez-faire and took the advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who called

While Paul Krugman likes to present himself as being a Keynesian, in reality, his intellectual roots run back a few centuries to the mercantilists. If you wish to see the Krugman of 300 years ago, read Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees , first published in 1705, to see all of the same economic (and logical) fallacies that haunt

[ This article was originally published August 10, 2010. ] The Paul Reveres of the economics profession are riding their horses, warning Americans, “Deflation is coming! Deflation is coming!” From Paul Krugman to Joseph Gagnon to the various mainstream news publications, the message is the same — the government needs to induce inflation now, or

A friend of mine a decade ago was looking to do doctoral work in economics, and one of the places where he inquired was his state’s flagship university. But he decided not to seek his doctorate at that particular place after he spoke to someone who was just about to defend his economics dissertation there. This soon-to-be PhD, it seems, was not

I recently took time from criticizing the actions of the Federal Reserve System (and associating with my “End the Fed” friends) to attend a conference in New York City that was hosted by none other than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . As much as anything, I was curious as to what goes on at a Fed conference, and it also gave me the chance

In a recent screed masquerading as the thoughts of a Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman excoriates those who speak of fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. Scare stories are very much on politicians’ minds. As Krugman explains, such worries are irrational and certainly untrue: None of

Now that we are more than a decade into the third millennium, I wish the political classes would stop their incessant references to “21st-century” plans and “21st-century” regulations. They talk as if living in the year 2011 gives government some special new access to the truth. Washington is full of this nonsense, and perhaps no one is more full

[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] The Supreme Court’s recent Walmart decision has stirred a hornet’s nest at the New York Times . Indeed, what else can one expect from that paper but the belief that it would be a very good thing for lawyers and the government to loot one of the country’s

While Austrians and Keynesians don’t agree on a lot of things, there is one thing on which they both seem to agree: the US economy is sinking into the morass of depression. At that point, however, the agreement ends, as the two schools have very different explanations as to why this is happening. The Keynesians, through Paul Krugman and his New

The New York Times recently ran an “analysis” article entitled, “ Debt Problem’s Sure Cure: Economic Growth .” This is something that falls into the category of “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?” All you need is growth, so let’s go get us some growth! That will take care of everything! Journalist Catherine Rampell asserts, There is, in theory, a