If “some economist claims he can be prudent on your behalf [it] is not something you should believe if such knowledge could make him rich, and as an adult it’s not something you should stand for. You are not being made ‘free’ by being manipulated by the government.” ~The Vices of Economists – The Virtues (more…)

From “Maybe Next Time,” by Don Boudreaux, 3 Sept. 2011, Cafe Hayek. Excerpt: Too bad that too few Americans, when presented with the latest Glorious Vision or Beautiful Plan, are as clear-eyed as is the economist Deirdre McCloskey, who writes “If you are prudent and bourgeois, not a romantic aristocrat or a gullible peasant, you (more…)

From Don’s entry at Cafe Hayek, 21 October 2011: Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the countries with bad economic policies are unhappy each in its own way. Good policies are boringly similar: rule of law, property rights, and above all dignity and liberty for the bourgeoisie. From McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, p. 122.

The “quotation of the day” by DON BOUDREAUX, 17 March 2012 is from page 265 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2010 Bourgeois Dignity; “here, Deirdre is referring to the remarkable increase, over the past couple of centuries, in the productivity of bourgeois economies:” Exploiting the workers, to repeat, like overseas imperialism, does not yield enough loot to (more…)

The following entry is from Cafe Hayek, 29 April 2012: During the 1930s and early 1940s the prospect of diminishing returns deeply alarmed economists such as the British economist John Maynard Keynes and the American follower of Keynes at Minnesota and Harvard, Alvin Hansen. They believed that the technology of electricity and the automobile were (more…)