Well it certainly is a scare tactic. In as much as it might make people more aware of our excess debt then it might be useful. However, It is an important question to ask, who is the master and who is the slave? The borrower or the Lender? The Lender must certainly try to prop up a worrisome borrower if he wants his money back. The problem with our debt is not that it is owned by other nations, it is a problem because it is excessive and will require larger and larger shares of our income to service it.

I think it is demonstrable that money supply has a great effect upon aggregate economic movements, as described by Troy Camplin. This is a major flaw in Mises' theories. While at the same time I think the Monetarists overstate the action of money supply. Take our recent economic downturn. While I might take issue with Tarp and some of the fiscal steps taken to deal with it. I will say that the action of the FED to pump money and liquidity into the system was exactly the right thing to do at the right time. You cannot prove a negative and so we cannot know it another policy, or no policy would have worked as well, but I certainly do not think so.

Current writes: "Should the increase of traffic require more money to facilitate it, the want is easily supplied, and is a strong indication of prosperity—a proof that a great abundance of values has been created, which it is wished to exchange for other values. In such cases, merchants know well enough how to find substitutes for the product serving as the medium of exchange or money:" I wonder how well that fits into the history of money, as when in the 19th century, the money supply was controlled by gold strikes and new sources of bouillon.

Interesting, so an oversupply of money can cause, not only inflation, but shortages of goods and services. That is reminiscent of the late 1970's.

Keynesianism is coherent in much the same way as "Star Wars". It is coherent, but it is a total fantasy.

I would say that a large part of "regime uncertainty" comes from our tort system. Since every time you have a class action lawsuit it is a crapshoot. There is nothing more frightening to businessmen to see that their profits might be looted for either unrealistic judgements, or liability for things that were not in their control.

LOL all you needed was Paul Krugman to make the party complete.

Is it actually true that economists failed to predict the recent financial crises? I seem to recall hearing lot's of warnings from about 2006 onward. And I, myself started reducing my personal debt and buying gold as early as 1st qtr 2007 because of those warnings. I'll give him this, in as far that some economists were deep in DSGE theory, maybe they failed to see the obvious warning signs of a classic high credit- easy money bubble..

It seems to me that if agents do not always act as the "perfect" agents of theory, That, in itself is not a problem. The real problem is, does your theory take actual human behavior into account in a better way than a competing theory. For instance. A theory of free markets and laissez Faire does not have to prove that every person will maximize their potential in the way that perfect theory predicts. It is only necessary to show that it much more accurately predicts the behavior of free agents than a competing theory of let us say Keynesian government control..

Dr. Boettke, How much does your work concentrate on the influence of Austrian economics outside of academics. More precisely, how much influence has Hayek and Von Mises had on the political class. Is it waxing or waning? Or perhaps I have to read all three volumes of your work? Grin..

Sweatshops in third world countries are a favorite "cause" for the Glittering Ignoratti. So they think they are doing a good thing if they shut down a factory and take away those people's jobs. Back to the fields for you Hadji, or maybe begging or prostitution. But you just can't make anymore shoes and earn any actual money, some rich American celebrity said so!

I read the Rothbard book when I was an undergrad. My professors were actually Chicago economists, but they gave me a lot of interesting things to read. That was way back in the late 1970's. Since then I have forgotten much detail, but the basic Ideas have stayed with me. .

Well let's see, we have some people who claim that things got a lot better under Roosevelt, Sorry, that is just factually untrue. They seem to think that debt does not matter, Also factually untrue. (sure you can grow out of them, but what if your policies do not provide any growth?) And they seem to buy into that old myth that the government can stimulate aggregate demand enough to pull us out of a recession. Of course, the experience of the US in the 1930's, Britain in the 1950's, Japan in the 1990's, and the US again recently seem to prove that is a bunch of bunk also..

Hello everyone, I am a frequent Blogger on Newmarks Door, and on Red state and Q & O. I lurked here for a while and I like it. I only have a BS in economics, so I won't try to understand everything that is being said.

Boonton, The New deal deepened the great depression. It gave us powerfull government which has been a threat to our liberties. It is true that we were able to overcome most of that and teh world war two debt, but guess why? Because all of the other major industrial nations had been devestated by a world war. For a while we were nearly the only people with jobs and were rebuilding the world. No such advantage exists today.