This MSNBC interview was halfway through before I got a chance to talk, so I was beginning to think I was a victim of bias, but then the host mentioned Greece degenerating like a scene out of Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure what to think, but I did get in some good shots at Keynesianism. I […]

The White House is claiming that the so-called stimulus created between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs even though total employment has dropped by more than 2.3 million since Obama took office. The Administration justifies this legerdemain by asserting that the economy actually would have lost about 5 million jobs without the new government spending. […]

Much of the economic debate in Washington revolves around the silly Keynesian notion that politicians can stimulate an economy by borrowing money from the private sector and using the funds to make government bigger. That didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt during the 1930s, Japan during the 1990s, Bush in 2008, or Obama last year […]

I’m out in Sin City for the annual FreedomFest conference, where I moderated a debate earlier today on whether consumer spending or investment spending was the key to economic growth. As you can imagine, it was horribly painful for me to keep from injecting my two cents in the discussion, so I figured I would […]

In a debate with one of the hopeless ideologues from the Center for American Progress, I criticize the corrupt deals between big government and big business, I warn about the big tax increases scheduled to take effect next year, I explain that Republicans did Obama a favor by blocking a bill to subsidize unemployment, and […]

Nancy Pelosi is being appropriately mocked for her strange assertion that subsidizing unemployment is a great way to “stimulate” the economy, but keep in mind that this she is just mindlessly regurgitating standard Keynesian theory. Here are two videos. The first is Pelosi’s ramblings and the second is my analysis of Keynesian economics. I hope […]

That’s the title of Richard Rahn’s new column in the Washington Times, which discusses the delusional Keynesian policy being advocated – in America and around the world – by the current administration. As Richard explains, the evidence is overwhelming that government spending does not promote prosperity. In the face of the unprecedented congressional spending binge, […]

In his Washington Post column discussing a crisis of confidence among economists, Robert Samuelson correctly notes that Keynesians don’t seem to have the right answers. But he concludes that other schools of thought are similarly befuddled by current events. What he writes is not terribly objectionable, but it’s almost as if he thinks the fiscal debate in the […]

Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American “stimulus” and European “austerity” at the G-20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, “austerity” presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama’s definition of “stimulus,” by […]

Every so often, perhaps inadvertently, a collectivist says something very smart. In the case of Lula da Silva, Brazil’s socialist president, he made the common-sense observation that you can’t redistribute without first producing. He didn’t quite realize what he was saying, one imagines, since he presumably would have realized that capitalism is a superior system […]