Three important news stories
17/11/06 14:42 Filed in: News
A continuing series about news you shouldn't miss.
In Tonga, wilful destruction is the predictable result of the decay of a laughable, undemocratic, incompetent and backward monarchy, which has been tolerated for far too long by governments in the Pacific including New Zealand. Call me a neo-con, but why shouldn't we offend Tonga's monarchy? What are they going to do about it?
Milton Friedman is dead. I'm sure when I studied economics you used to get an A for getting the 'i' and 'e' the right way round. I didn't get so many As. I can still spot bollocks at a thousand paces.
The BBC claims he never lost an argument - that would be, except with the facts.
Friedman got the Nobel Prize for inventing the Nairu - the Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, also known as The Theory Of Why Unemployment Is Good And We Have To Have Lots Of It. It was perhaps the most destructive idea to blight developed economies in the late twentieth century. And there were plenty of candidates. He said low unemployment was incompatible with price stability. What the theory actually is, is a discovery that full employment is slightly redistributional. It shifts money from the owners of capital to people who would otherwise have nothing, not even an income from their labour. One reads about Nairu vainly searching for reflection that the cost of unemployment has to be paid for in the costs and consequences of unemployment. Factor that in and the theory collapses. Friedman never coped adequately with that simple objection. I'm, also amused at the illiterate obits describing Reagan as a Friedmanite. That would be because Reagan himself did, but Hullo! Reagan ran the most Keynsian economic policies since Roosevelt: A massive blow out in the fiscal deficit? Theory that tax cuts pay for themselves in faster growth? It's all in the General Theory. Friedman actually said, "If this is monetarism, I am no longer a monetarist".
Back in France, as the cops noted, there is daring and then there's stupid.
In Tonga, wilful destruction is the predictable result of the decay of a laughable, undemocratic, incompetent and backward monarchy, which has been tolerated for far too long by governments in the Pacific including New Zealand. Call me a neo-con, but why shouldn't we offend Tonga's monarchy? What are they going to do about it?
Milton Friedman is dead. I'm sure when I studied economics you used to get an A for getting the 'i' and 'e' the right way round. I didn't get so many As. I can still spot bollocks at a thousand paces.
The BBC claims he never lost an argument - that would be, except with the facts.
Friedman got the Nobel Prize for inventing the Nairu - the Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, also known as The Theory Of Why Unemployment Is Good And We Have To Have Lots Of It. It was perhaps the most destructive idea to blight developed economies in the late twentieth century. And there were plenty of candidates. He said low unemployment was incompatible with price stability. What the theory actually is, is a discovery that full employment is slightly redistributional. It shifts money from the owners of capital to people who would otherwise have nothing, not even an income from their labour. One reads about Nairu vainly searching for reflection that the cost of unemployment has to be paid for in the costs and consequences of unemployment. Factor that in and the theory collapses. Friedman never coped adequately with that simple objection. I'm, also amused at the illiterate obits describing Reagan as a Friedmanite. That would be because Reagan himself did, but Hullo! Reagan ran the most Keynsian economic policies since Roosevelt: A massive blow out in the fiscal deficit? Theory that tax cuts pay for themselves in faster growth? It's all in the General Theory. Friedman actually said, "If this is monetarism, I am no longer a monetarist".
Back in France, as the cops noted, there is daring and then there's stupid.
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