Your gateway to a free society
Book
Contra Krugman
With a foreword by Ron Paul
This book is a relentless assault on the ideas of Krugman and on the Keynesian economics that would have the government direct the economy in order to maximize prosperity and prevent recessions.
In fact, the more they try to manage the economy the worse they make it - as during the housing bubble years when the Fed and the federal government colluded to gin up the housing market in order to keep the economy robust after 9/11. Oops.
Unfortunately for Krugman and his followers, Krugman is able to declare victory for Keynesianism only by citing highly selective data, by ignoring or misrepresenting his own predictions, or by misstating the views of his opponents. Krugman even claims to have predicted the housing bubble - after having called for the very policies that created it.
Economist Robert Murphy (PhD, NYU) has an uncanny ability to recall Krugman's columns and interviews and puts his command of this material to devastating use in this book. As Murphy shows, in no way can it be said that Keynesian analysis has won the day. To the contrary, the Austrian School - which has been critical of government intervention, particularly central banking - has been vindicated in episode after episode.
Topics include:
- The Great Depression
- Obamacare
- Krugman's predictions
- Monetary policy
- Climate change
- Financial "reform"
- Employment and wages
- The minimum wage
- Business cycles
- Stimulus
Listen to this book, and never lose a debate again.
aboutLiberty Portal
Liberty Portal is a gateway for free markets and free thinking. We aggregate open-sourced content to promote and popularize important lessons from economics, philosophy, history and more.
suggested
Leonard E. Read
I, Pencil
The classic, short essay by Leonard E. Read remains one of the best introductions to the unseen complexity of the free market system. Read it for FREE at econlib.org
Read more
Scott Adams
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Blasting clichéd career advice, the contrarian pundit and creator of Dilbert recounts the humorous ups and downs of his career, revealing the outsized role of luck in our lives and how best to play the system.
Scott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the game plan he’s followed since he was a teen: invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket.
No career guide can offer advice that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares how he turned one failure after another—including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants—into something good and lasting. There’s a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of entertainment along the way. Adams discovered some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance:
• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.
• “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy.
• A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable.
• You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others.
Adams hopes you can laugh at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas on your own path to personal victory. As he writes: “This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.”
Read moreScott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the game plan he’s followed since he was a teen: invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket.
No career guide can offer advice that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares how he turned one failure after another—including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants—into something good and lasting. There’s a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of entertainment along the way. Adams discovered some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance:
• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.
• “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy.
• A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable.
• You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others.
Adams hopes you can laugh at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas on your own path to personal victory. As he writes: “This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.”
David Friedman
The Machinery of Freedom
This book argues for a society organized by voluntary cooperation under institutions of private property and exchange with little, ultimately no, government. It describes how the most fundamental functions of government might be replaced by private institutions, with services such as protecting individual rights and settling disputes provided by private firms in a competitive market. It goes on to use the tools of economic analysis to attempt to show how such institutions could be expected to work, what sort of legal rules they would generate, and under what circumstances they would or would not be stable. The approach is consequentialist. The claim is that such a society would produce more attractive outcomes, judged by widely shared values, than alternatives, including the current institutions of the U.S. and similar societies.The second edition contained four sections, this third edition adds two more. One explores some of the ideas already raised in greater depth, including discussions of decentralized law enforcement in past legal systems, of rights seen not as a moral or legal category but as a description of human behavior, of a possible threat to the stability of the system not considered in the previous editions, and of ways in which a stateless society might defend itself from aggressive states. The final section introduces a number of new topics, including unschooling, the misuse of externality arguments in contexts such as population or global warming, and the implications of public key encryption and related online technologies.
Read more
support
If you like what we do and want to support us, then you are a fine humanitarian. Click the link below to find out more.
Support the liberty movement
Become a contributor
Want to join the fight and publish your content here? Email us at team at libertyportal dot com!
Collaborate with Liberty Portal