braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note… First: Coming up on Wednesday: Adam Gurri: ’Today Matthew Downhour writes about Henry George’s Protection or Free Trade, a new edition of which is being released soon and an event with DeLong and others will be held next week to discuss it… 1/
... LINK: <https://twitter. com/adamgurri/status/1397902403488333825> <https://t. co/wV7XBmvSyA> Plus: Paul Krugman: Friedman tried to save free-market economics from itself, admitting that the economy wasn’t self-correcting but arguing that a rule that didn’t sound... 2/
... Keynesian would let conservative avoid thinking about that…. But ultimately free-market Keynesian, even disguised with a monetarist mask, wasn’t sustainable <
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1395927328904015873>: Jim Beller: Having his disciples throwing people out of airplanes was a bad look... 3/
...Brad DeLong: But, as you note, Bernanke in 2002 and Mankiw in 2006 still saw Friedman as “the economist of the century” <gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/11/milton…> <federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEE…>. They were fine with the “government should not interfere with the economy” and “whatever is the... 4/
... monetary policy that happens to stabilize aggregate demand is the true non-interfering ‘neutral’ monetary policy”. It was a con, yes, but it was a successful con. And it is not clear that it was wrong as a practical policy position… 5/
...Thus I think you are (a) right, (b) much too compressed, but (c) ignores the problem of “where do you stop?” Having the government establish & maintain a property-rights order & enforce contracts is, after all, a form of “interference” to the anarcho-capitalists. So... 6/
... why is police & courts acceptable, while police & courts & demand management is not? I think it has something to do with Schumpeter, von Hayek, and von Mises and the context of early–20th center Vienna, with the idea that humans are individuals for whom private property... 7/
... and one-shot exchange are “natural” (as opposed to creatures that establish and cement societal bonds via ongoing reciprocal gift-exchange relationships), with the philosophical position that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds, and the... 8/
... resulting theological belief that “the market giveth; the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market”. In short, I think you are right, but I do not understand why you are right. 9/END
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