Gerard Jackson
What is the real connection between inflation and unemployment? Then again, maybe that should be inflation and employment. That this has been raised several time on this site which got me thinking about a 1993 study called The Costs of Unemployment in Australia1 by Raja Junankar and Cezary Kapuscinski. The authors, both of whom are Keynesians, argued that a “fight inflation first” policy generally incurs more costs than benefits, a view that is held by most of the economics profession.
As I recall, this study elicited a favourable response from our media. The striking thing — in my view — is that though 22 years has passed it seems that not a single free market commentator made an effort to establish a link between inflation, booms and the consequent unemployment. What we do get is the likes of P. D Jonson, Peter Smith, Des Moore, Sinclair Davidson and Steve Kates2, etc., falsely asserting that the so-called boom-bust cycle is a natural part of the free market order and that we will just have to grin and bear it. (This attitude is music to the ears of the left and Keynesians because to them it justifies their own so-called solutions to the problem of recurring recessions). Continue reading Unemployment and reduced output is the cost of having inflation, not the cost of fighting it →
Gerard Jackson
George Soros’s fascist economic thinking, part 1
In December 2011 Obama addressed the Democrats in Osawatomie where he amused these cultists by savaging trickle-down economics while heaping fulsome praise on Roosevelt’s policies: the same policies that kept the American economy in depression until WWII forced Roosevelt to change course. (Compare Australia’s record during the Great Depression with that of Roovelt’s).
Obama — the man who was praised by a corrupt media and sycophantic leftists masquerading as journalists as an outstanding intellect — didn’t know there is no such thing as trickle-down economics. The so-called trickle-down theory of prosperity is a canard that Samuel Rosenman, a Roosevelt speechwriter, concocted to malign Republicans and free markets.
The ignorance of history and economics that Obama displayed in his Osawatomie speech is truly staggering and exposed him as a thorough-going historical ignoramus with a fifth rate intellect who is totally lacking in intellectual curiosity. But this travesty of history that Obama mindlessly parrots is exactly what George Soros believes. It is this and nothing else that explains why he stands four-square behind the ignorant reactionary that occupies the White House. Continue reading George Soros’s fascist economics part 2 →
I wrote this in response to Sarah’s comments about Austrian economics and Catallaxy. It was my original intention to post it as a comment but I then decided to rewrite it as a post. Sarah wrote that the Catallaxy people are “trying to give the impression that they are the only ones in Australia who have read the Austrians”.
Well, she is spot on. The Catallaxy crowd have been trying for years to pass themselves off as experts on Austrian economics. Yet any genuine Austrian who read them would know they are faking it. When it comes to Austrian capital theory, for instance, Sinclair Davidson doesn’t know what he is talking about. He just regurgitates Roger Garrison. He also knows nothing about Austrian trade cycle theory or Austrian monetary theory. In addition, he is also ignorant of economic history and the classical economists. For heaven’s sake, the man is still preaching the gross historical error that Australia left the gold standard in 1931! His casual approach to the crash of 1937-38 is just as bad. He even thinks ‘Ricardo’s theory’ of economic rent “has its origin in the labour theory of value”. No one who had read the classical economists could make such an egregious error. Continue reading Catallaxy gets it wrong again on the classical economists on the trade cycle →
Over the weekend a friend asked me whether I rated George Megalogenis, a former economics writer for The Australian, as a decent economic thinker. No way. That people with Megalogenis’s low level of economic thinking get respect as economic commentators should bother anyone who holds economics in high esteem. My criticism of Megalogenis applies equally across the political spectrum. Economic arrogance and stupidity is not confined to one politically oriented group.
For example, he supported the destructive carbon tax and the daft idea that it would compel businesses to “switch to cleaner energy sources.” The idea that the tax would instead force them out of business did not occur to him anymore than the idea that the tax would lead to the dissipation of capital. But Megalogenis was not alone in this lunacy. In 2008 the Centre for Independent Studies published a monograph by John Humphreys making the same utterly absurd claims. Since then Alan Moran, Judith Sloan, Steve Kates, Sinclair Davidson, et al., have piled it on the carbon tax and also the assertion that so-called “cleaner energy sources” can support the economy.
Continue reading Bad economics and double-dealing →
Austrian School of Economics