Despite the Exoneration...

Since PPE is ostensibly a voluntary organization, with beliefs and principles I supposedly agree with, I'll post my thoughts on Friedman and Hayek anyway.

Friedman's book was surprisingly philosophic in nature, and though it almost exclusively analyzed economics, there were some strong metaphysics employed in the advance of its principles. Friedman begins by maximizing the value of freedom, an assumption that is sure to result in the superiority of a free market system of economics, and proceeds to demonstrate that other forms of economic arrangements, notably central planning, fail both in efficiency and in ideological legitimacy. This connection itself is noteworthy; the fact that using assuming freedom as the central value results in the maximum efficiency may be enough to validate the assumption. Hayek, though ideologically more socialist with regard to distribution, confirms the importance of free markets in assigning, evaluating, and communicating relative values between goods. The relationship between market prices and value, the concept on which almost all of these arguments hinge, is extremely efficient at distributing resources in the arrangement that is most universally desirable, while a planned economy can only arrange resources on the basis of political agendas, rather than on economic value.

Along the same line, centrally planned fiscal policy may be less responsive to the market information Hayek describes than monetary policy. When capital is stimulated through the expansion of the money supply, marginal dollars essentially produce products of the next-highest value; the market determines what goods a society desires to be produced with that marginal increase in available monies. However, if government spending injects funds into the economy, these funds impose a societal preference for the subject of the expenditure, often in irreconcilable conflict with other viewpoints held by the public at large. Since the political process is so easily and frequently corrupted by entrenched interests, government funding is unlikely to appeal universally, and the only legitimate government expenditure would be an appealing enough idea that its funding would be justified by the market, but barriers to entry rendered the market unable to adjust: an externality. Seems to me to be pretty good justification for abstaining from government spending except on externalities.

Heilbroner and Keynes

"Heilbroner describes the development of thinkers and the formation of their ideas in their social and intellectual context -- and explores the ways in which they and their ideas in turn influenced the policies of elites and broader social and cultural trends. Adam Smith sought to address the problems of mercantilism, Karl Marx the dislocations of the industrial revolution, Keynes, the problems of deflationary economic policy."

Please reply to this seed with your posts on the reading.

Auspicious Beginnings

Welcome to the discussion site for Claremont McKenna College PPE Class of '06, the reluctantly dubbed "One and Only Arrogant Class."

In the names of Edward J., Bjork, Roth, Elliott, and Blomberg!