Dr. Keith Hall has been appointed to serve as the next Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Hall was a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Koch-funded Mercatus Center and as a professor at GMU,
Hall’s term as CBO Director will begin April 1, 2015.
According to the Mercatus web site:
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.It is really difficult to square this view with the work that is done at the CBO, which is essentially to analyze the supposed costs and benefits of government interventions in the economy,
A university-based research center, the Mercatus Center advances knowledge about how markets work to improve people’s lives by training graduate students, conducting research, and applying economics to offer solutions to society’s most pressing problems.
Our mission is to generate knowledge and understanding of the institutions that affect the freedom to prosper, and to find sustainable solutions that overcome the barriers preventing individuals from living free, prosperous, and peaceful live.
If Hall was serious about his task and expressed them from a free market perspective, he would simply send back to Congress this analysis on every piece of legislation the CBO was tasked with analyzing:
Government programs always interfere with free market operations. This legislation is no different. The economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard taught us that cost benefit analysis can not be conducted on government bureaucratic programs, since there are no consumer signals when programs are initiated via central planning and coercion.--RW
To reach an optimum economy, the program envisioned by this program should be canceled and the funds returned to taxpayers.
"On the free market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interferes with the process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it." -- Ludwig von Mises
RW - This would be a fine statement if you were addressing rational human beings. But congress is full of thieves and murders who are only interested in getting away with their next crime. This kind of statement would get you banished if not imprisoned. Better to simply decline the job...or call a spade a spade and bring your case to the people. But then you are already doing that so well right here at Economic Policy Journal.
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