Murray Rothbard (1982) on Israeli settlements in the West Bank
10 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in International law, libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: Israel, Murray Rothbard, revanchism, West Bank
To be fair, on the State of Israel, Murray Rothbard was an anti-Zionist warmongering revanchist. In 1969, for example, he argued that there are some wars that can be blamed more on one state than another and that the Israelis were to blame for most of the Israeli-Arab wars.
Palestinian revanchism is a recipe for endless wars
06 Aug 2014 8 Comments
in laws of war, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, irredentism, Murray Rothbard, revanchism, warmongering
Why are borders in 1861, 1919, 1945, 1948, 1956 or 1967 or any other time morally superior?
Palestinian revanchism is a recipe for endless wars. Revanchism is the desire to reverse territorial losses.
Revanchism is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains “unredeemed” outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state.
• A return of German revanchism would plunge Europe back into war as Germany marched to reclaim Western Poland and the Sudetenland lost after the massive ethic cleansing in 1945 and the moving of Poland 1/3rd to the left after Potsdam.
• The Balkans and Eastern Europe would be plunged into war to revise the 1945 and the 1919 boundaries.
• Irish revanchism and irredentism over protestant Northern Ireland led to war from 1922 onwards.
The just war doctrine of the Catholic Church found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a convenient summary as any on what is and is not a just war, lists four strict conditions for legitimate defence by military force:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition).
Hamas does not have any serious prospects of success in its attacks on Israel. Therefore any military action by Hamas is an unjust war
Every time the Fed tightens the money supply, interest rates rise (or fall); every time the Fed expands the money supply, interest rates rise (or fall).
08 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in macroeconomics, Murray Rothbard Tags: inflation, interest rates, Murray Rothbard
The problem is that… there are several causal factors operating on interest rates and in different directions.
If the Fed expands the money supply, it does so by generating more bank reserves and thereby expanding the supply of bank credit and bank deposits. The expansion of credit necessarily means an increased supply in the credit market and hence a lowering of the price of credit, or the rate of interest. On the other hand, if the Fed restricts the supply of credit and the growth of the money supply, this means that the supply in the credit market declines, and this should mean a rise in interest rates.
And this is precisely what happens in the first decade or two of chronic inflation. Fed expansion lowers interest rates; Fed tightening raises them.
But after this period, the public and the market begin to catch on to what is happening. They begin to realize that inflation is chronic because of the systemic expansion of the money supply.
When they realize this fact of life, they will also realize that inflation wipes out the creditor for the benefit of the debtor. As creditors begin to catch on, they place an inflation premium on the interest rate, and debtors will be willing to pay it.
Hence, in the long run anything which fuels the expectations of inflation will raise inflation premiums on interest rates; and anything which dampens those expectations will lower those premiums. Therefore, a Fed tightening will now tend to dampen inflationary expectations and lower interest rates; a Fed expansion will whip up those expectations again and raise them.
There are two, opposite causal chains at work. And so Fed expansion or contraction can either raise or lower interest rates, depending on which causal chain is stronger.
Which will be stronger? There is no way to know for sure. Will In the early decades of inflation, there is no inflation premium; in the later decades, such as we are now in, there is. The relative strength and reaction times depend on the subjective expectations of the public, and these cannot be forecast with certainty
Economists, using charts or high-speed computer models, can accurately forecast the future
01 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship, macroeconomics, Murray Rothbard Tags: forecasting errors, Murray Rothbard, The pretence to knowledge
Many studies, formal and informal, have been made of the record of forecasting by economists, and it has been consistently abysmal.
Forecasters often complain that they can do well enough as long as current trends continue; what they have difficulty in doing is catching changes in trend. But of course there is no trick in extrapolating current trends into the near future.
You don’t need sophisticated computer models for that; you can do it better and far more cheaply by using a ruler.
The real trick is precisely to forecast when and how trends will change, and forecasters have been notoriously bad at that. No economist forecast the depth of the 1981–82 depression, and none predicted the strength of the 1983 boom.
The next time you are swayed by the jargon or seeming expertise of the economic forecaster, ask yourself this question: If he can really predict the future so well, why is he wasting his time putting out newsletters or doing consulting when he himself could be making trillions of dollars in the stock and commodity markets?
Defer to experts except when they are economists putting limits on your utopian thinking
30 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
Have you ever heard of a private firm proposing to solve a shortage of the product it sells by telling people to buy less?
27 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
Imports from countries where labour is cheap causes our unemployment to rise
25 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, international economics, Murray Rothbard Tags: Murray Rothbard, tariffs
One of the many problems with this doctrine is that it ignores the question: why are wages low in a foreign country and high in the United States?…
Basically, they are high in the United States because labour productivity is high – because workers here are aided by large amounts of technologically advanced capital equipment.
Wage rates are low in many foreign countries because capital equipment is small and technologically primitive. Unaided by much capital, worker productivity is far lower than in the United States.
Wage rates in every country are determined by the productivity of the workers in that country. Hence, high wages in the United States are not a standing threat to American prosperity; they are the result of that prosperity…
we must realize that wages in each country are interconnected from one industry and occupation and region to another.
All workers compete with each other, and if wages in industry A are far lower than in other industries, workers – spearheaded by young workers starting their careers – would leave or refuse to enter industry A and move to other firms or industries where the wage rate is higher…
If the steel or textile industries in the United States find it difficult to compete with their counterparts abroad, it is not because foreign firms are paying low wages, but because other American industries have bid up American wage rates to such a high level that steel and textile cannot afford to pay.
In short, what’s really happening is that steel, textile, and other such firms are using labour inefficiently as compared to other American industries.
Tariffs or import quotas to keep inefficient firms or industries in operation hurt everyone, in every country, who is not in that industry. They injure all American consumers by keeping up prices, keeping down quality and competition, and distorting production. Tariffs and import quotas also injure other, efficient American industries by tying up resources that would otherwise move to more efficient uses.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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