Monday, August 15, 2016

A Yale and A Berkeley Professor Fail to Make the Case for the Mixed Economy

Jacob S. Hacker, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Paul Pierson, the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. in a new book, American Amnesia, attempt to make the case that a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity, that is, a combination of the private sector and government intervention.

Indeed, they go so far as to say that the mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. 

In a full out attack on the arguments presented by Hacker and Pierson, David Gordon. senior fellow at the Mises Institute. destroys their theory and reaches the conclusion:
  Despite the eminence of the authors, and their book’s fifty-nine pages of notes, American Amnesia is a work of propaganda, not of scholarly inquiry.
Gordon's full review is here

  -RW

1 comment:

  1. I read Mr. Gordon's review and it is certainly scathing. I am interested in reading Rothbard's take on externalities because the term has been abused by the enemies of markets throughout the decades in a way that would suggest a stated purpose for markets which is not achieved for whatever reasons these enemies indicate, something that is complete nonsense in light of the spontaneous nature of markets themselves.

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