Tag: Austrians

Must-Read: Paul Krugman (2013): Friedman and the Austrians: “Still thinking about the Bloomberg Businessweek interview with Rand Paul…

…in which he nominated Milton Friedman’s corpse for Fed chairman. Before learning that Friedman was dead, Paul did concede that he wasn’t an Austrian. But I’ll bet he had no idea about the extent to which Friedman really, really wasn’t an Austrian. In his ‘Comments on the critics’ (of his Monetary Framework) Friedman described the ‘London School (really Austrian) view’

that the depression was an inevitable result of the prior boom, that it was deepened by the attempts to prevent prices and wages from falling and firms from going bankrupt, that the monetary authorities had brought on the depression by inflationary policies before the crash and had prolonged it by ‘easy money’ policies thereafter; that the only sound policy was to let the depression run its course, bring down money costs, and eliminate weak and unsound firms.

and dubbed this view an ‘atrophied and rigid caricature’ of the quantity theory. [His version of the] Chicago School, he claimed, never believed in such nonsense. I have, incidentally, seen attempts [by Larry White and company] to claim that nobody believed this, or at any rate that Hayek never believed this, and that characterizing Hayek as a liquidationist is some kind of liberal libel. This is really a case of who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes. Let’s go to the text (pdf), p. 275:

And, if we pass from the moment of actual crisis to the situation in the following depression, it is still more difficult to see what lasting good effects can come from credit expansion. The thing which is needed to secure healthy conditions is the most speedy and complete adaptation possible of the structure of production to the proportion between the demand for consumers’ goods and the demand for producers’ goods as determined by voluntary saving and spending.

If the proportion as determined by the voluntary decisions of individuals is distorted by the creation of artificial demand, it must mean that part of the available resources is again led into a wrong direction and a definite and lasting adjustment is again postponed. And, even if the absorption of the unemployed resources were to be quickened in this way, it would only mean that the seed would already be sown for new disturbances and new crises. The only way permanently to ‘mobilize’ all available resources is, therefore, not to use artificial stimulants—whether during a crisis or thereafter—but to leave it to time to effect a permanent cure by the slow process of adapting the structure of production to the means available for capital purposes.

And so, at the end of our analysis, we arrive at results which only confirm the old truth that we may perhaps prevent a crisis by checking expansion in time, but that we can do nothing to get out of it before its natural end, once it has come…

If that’s not liquidationism, I’ll eat my structure of production…