Thursday, August 16, 2012

Josh Barro "Who Needs Posner When You Have Mises and Hayek?"

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-06/who-needs-posner-when-you-have-mises-and-hayek-.html

My comment: I think we are observing the biggest shift in the U.S. conservative movement since the WWII. I do not know much about philosophy and culture, but have a little bit of knowledge on economics. Even though the post-WWII U.S. conservatives were reluctant to take lessons from Keynesian economics, the logic of their policy had remained within something based on evidence, which I call neoclassical. During the Reagan Administration, public sector and airline industry deregulations were rationalized by William Baumol's contestable market theory or the Coase Theorem, not by the Austrian belief that free market is always better whatsoever. The Reagan tax-cuts were based on supply-side economics, and the supply-side economists, such as Art Laffer and Robert Mundell, have argued they got that idea from the Keynesian model. Even Milton Friedman was unable to avoid Keynesian concepts of aggregate demand and supply when he explained macroeconomics. Still within the profession, things are like that and the Republican candidate Romney is surrounded by very respected economists who are within neoclassical and New Keynesian tradition. That used to be conservatism in the U.S. and actually Romney represents that old conservartism. Now the people who still remain within that tradition are minority in conservatives. Mitt Romney had to nominate Paul Ryan as his vice-candidate to make sure these days' radicalized conservatives that he would pledge to what he is saying but apparently does not believe in according to what he did as a governor of Massachusetts and what he himself reveals occasionally. In this circumstance, it is not surprising that a person like Richard Posner, who has been conservative and libertarian for his life and devoted himself to making every aspect of our life more conservative and libertarian, confesses, "Now,I'm Keynesian" or "the recent GOP has made me less conservative."

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