Oxymoronic compulsory volunteering
On the eleventh day of Christmas...
Blog Review 829
Agreeing with James Hansen on climate change
Political highs and lows
On the tenth day of Christmas...
Blog Review 828
Credit Crunch update: why not go with the form?
Chutzpah indeed! So why not go with the form – which means Ludwig von Mises (who throughout the second half of the 1920s predicted the Great Depression) and the Austrian School. As Mark Thornton writes about the last crash (1999-2002): “Given that the Austrian School is both small in number and marginalised in the profession, their dominance in making predictions seems like an elephant in the soup bowl". The same goes this time round with several Austrians pointing out the unsustainability as early as 2004 (with one such prophet called Alan Greenspan “Mr. Bailout"). Or compare an article written about the same time as Kaletsky’s a year ago “Economic Outlook 2008: Darkening Clouds".
Why should anybody believe anything that these guys write? Certainly Kaletsky (and no doubt Aaronovitch when strolling into economics) is a dyed in the wool Keynesian. The experience of the UK in the 1970s and Japan in the 1990s should have been enough to dismiss Keynes as an illiterate and incoherent charlatan (see also here) in the field of Economics (in fact he was not an economist at all).
I make no apologies for the fact that most of my web links herein are to the Ludwig von Mises Institute. As I have said, study the form. And, perhaps more important still, study the theories.
Terry Arthur is the author of Crap: A Guide to Politics. Buy it here from Amazon.co.uk