Socialdem. 21st Century

It is well known that the Great Depression hit Weimar Republic Germany particularly hard. There was severe unemployment, and the wage and price deflation was also severe, as can be seen in these graphs (with data from Mitchell 1992): Moreover, the wage and price deflation did not bring about a rapid or effective recovery. Austerity policies clearly failed in the Weimar Republic, and a number of German businessmen, bureaucrats, journalists, and unorthodox economists were driven to advocate...

Tucker Carlson channels left-wing economics in this debate with the free market, Neoconservative charlatan Ben Shapiro: [embedded content]You have to admire Tucker Carlson for this, despite the gushing praise for the ill-defined concept of “capitalism.” Shapiro, in response, mouths utterly dumb, empty, meaningless drivel.Tucker Carlson is easily the best thing to ever happen to the brain-dead Conservative media in America, probably in living memory. Tucker has morphed from a pointless...

From 1933 to 11 March 1938, Austria was ruled by the clerical fascist Fatherland Front in a regime called the Austrian Federal State.The two dictators of Austria in this period were as follows:Dictators of the Austrian Federal State 5 March 1933–25 July 1934 – Engelbert Dollfuss 29 July 1934–11 March 1938 – Kurt SchuschniggAlthough the Fatherland Front had some anti-capitalist elements, the fact is that in power Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg pursued spending cuts, austerity, budget...

In this recent stream on economics, Academic Agent attempts to defend Rothbard’s views on the American economy in the 1870s.[embedded content]In my Twitter debates on this issue with Academic Agent – who is an unusually ignorant libertarian – I directed him to my post here.I said explicitly in that post that, while Rothbard was correct that there was no depression in the sense of a fall of GDP/GNP of 10% or more, Rothbard was nevertheless wrong to claim that the 1873–1878 period saw...

Academic Agent’s video on Herbert Hoover is below:[embedded content]First of all, it is true that Hoover was not a strict liquidationist. He supported limited interventionism, and was – for his time – a type of corporatist Republican. But was Hoover an “interventionist” relative to the interventions that became commonplace in Western mixed economies after 1933 and certainly after 1945? The answer is: no, Hoover was relatively non-interventionist in relation to the mixed economies of the...

An interesting talk on the history of the Austrian School by Ludwig M. Lachmann:[embedded content]For more on the history of the Austrian school, see here:“Why are there no Austrian Socialists?,” June 3, 2011.“The Neoclassical Wing of the Austrian School,” June 5, 2011.“Vaughn on the Early History of the Austrian School,” June 23, 2013.“The Early Austrians and Walrasianism,” November 7, 2013.“Axel Leijonhufvud Interviews Hayek on the History of the Austrian School,” April 25, 2013....

A video of Tony Thirlwall’s lecture on Nicholas Kaldor, given in Hungary in 2017, is below:[embedded content]

Charles Darwin – the discover of evolution by natural selection – wrote a book called The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), with a second edition of the book published in 1874.Chapter 7 of The Descent of Man is called “On the Races of Man.”There is no doubt that Darwin thought evolution applied to human beings, and that all humans descended from a common ancestry and species. But he also thought that there were distinct races or sub-species of man (Darwin 1874: 162,...

Could there be anything more absurd than the spectacle of Dinesh D’Souza? His new movie is called Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?.Some videos below give us a summary of his ideas:[embedded content][embedded content][embedded content]The fundamental thesis of Dinesh D’Souza is, in essence, that the Democratic Party and American progressive Liberalism are linked to Nazism and are, by implication, on a moral level with Nazism. Furthermore, D’Souza thinks that Nazism (or...

Robert P. Murphy recently gave a talk on fractional reserve banking and free banking:[embedded content]Listening to this video really brings home what a lame cult of losers American libertarians actually are.Murphy repeats the same tired lies about fractional reserve banking we have all heard before: e.g., that a demand deposit involves two entities (the bank and depositor) owning the same money (when this is a blatant falsehood), and the fake legal history of fractional reserve banking...