Austrian school of economics solution

This nearly one hour video points to the solution to all the financial issues now confounding the West.

FDR's depression and turnaround

The key to understanding how the country came out of the Great Depression of the '30"s lies in reading certain economists' explanation and avoiding the deeply flawed liberal historians's account. Liberal historians typically want to give credit to all FDR's collectivist programs, i.e., NIRA, NLRA, et al., when the opposite is the case.  Once these failed experiments were overturned in the courts and voluntarily by the administration in 1938-39, productivity and employment began to rise.  As pointed out in this WSJ piece the real recovery was well underway, and unemployment was declining, well before the out break of WWII.  Roosevelt's programs actually retarded the recovery and prolonged the suffering and unemployment by several years at least.  The Austrian economists, von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and others predicted this outcome but were shouted down by "interventionists", collectivists and all the other charlatans who promoted government solutions to solve the perceived shortcomings of capitalism and the free enterprise system.   In reality all the GD proved was the more the government interferes in  the free market, with credit creation, employment programs and the like, the worse things get.  Some people never learn, witness the Obama administration, and for that matter the Bush administration that preceded it.

Hayek revival

Steven Hayward is a significant addition to the Powerline blog; it is reason enough to read his contributions just for his knowledge and understanding of the Austrian economist Fredrich Hayek.   Hayek's writings debunk the Keyensian school's economics as wells as all forms of socialism, and his ideas have proved prescient.    In this post Hayward tells us why Hayek makes such good sense and in the process tells us why the Obamanomics has been a failure.  The Austrian School economists, including von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Hayek suggest that the founding fathers had it about right when they proposed a limited central government with checks and balances that would prevent too much power accumulating in the hands of any one branch.  It's hard to imagine what the Austrians and the founding fathers would think about the power grab by the central government that has been going on for many decades in this country and has been accelerating under Obama.

More on Hayek

Powerline's new regular contributor Steve Hayward turns out to be a Friedrich Hayek acolyte which accounts for his refreshing common sense on matters economic and in general.  In this post Hayward quotes Hayek on the subject of the indivisibility of freedom and how liberals try to compartmentalize it into that of speech and economic activity, supporting the former and regulating the latter.  As Hayward points out, Hayek condemns this position as a contradiction which accounts for the liberals embrace of collectivism and socialism over the years.  The indivisibility of these two freedoms. if you will, goes to the heart of the Austrian's school of economics.