Left-Liberal Blogger Worried About Tom Woods

Tom’s Meltdown – among its other virtues, a brilliant and comprehensible discussion of Austrian business cycle theory – is worrying the advocates of central banking. See Matt Yglesias’s hilarious (and heartening) blog. (And there are comments.) Austrian business cycle theory pins the blame for artificial booms and busts on the Federal Reserve. The Fed, the key institution of the regime, is not supposed to be criticized, but more and more students and other Americans realize that the Keynesian-Monetarist consensus is deeply wrong, and are looking to the works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Hazlitt, and the other great economists of the Austrian School. Why now? Well, Ron Paul has been teaching all this for almost 40 years, and the Mises Institute has been doing its work for 26. And then we have the current Greenspan-Bernanke crisis, as well as Meltdown. See also the latest Bob Murphy book, which continues the Rothbardian analysis of New Deal economic policy, so relevant today. The state is flailing, and we are making great progress, as Mr. Yglesias notes.

UPDATE from Anthony Gregory:

I used to wonder why some left-liberals got hysterical about libertarians, when we’re such a small group. But we are growing and have the truth. The truth is very possible. Everyone gets subjected to Keynesian baloney in school, and still many don’t believe it. If everyone were even explained the ATBC, we would win. That’s why they fear our ideas.

Share

9:26 am on May 6, 2009