The Strength of the Consumer

The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is all about the market restructuring back towards the consumer from a distorted consumption-savings ratio caused by Federal Reserve money printing.

The stock market is down this morning by more than 3%, so I checked the components of the 30 Dow Industrial stocks to see which were up and which down. They were ALL down, except one, consumer giant, WalMart. It was UP 3.2%.

Book Review: Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

It is a sad fact that most who graduate from college understand little if anything about the business cycle. It is even a sadder fact that most economists do not understand Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), even though the great economist Friedrich Hayek was specifically awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for the work he completed with regard to the theory.

Perhaps to some degree this poor understanding explains the confused reporting about the causes of the current economic crisis that regularly appear in mainstream media. If you are only getting your information about the current crisis through mainstream media reports, trust me, you aren't even getting half the story.

Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods Jr. is an antidote to this lack of understanding. Woods takes on the many fallacies that are now a part of the popular perception held about the current crisis. He does this by walking through, in timeline fashion, the start of the current crisis with the housing bubble, through the Wall Street bailouts and current government attempts to "battle" the downturn. At each step, he explodes the myths that currently exist and explains what the real causal factors are.

Woods then explains the business cycle itself, and the role of central bank manipulation of the money supply as the main culprit in creating the business cycle. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

From there, Woods reviews other booms and busts, including the Great Depression, and explains how they came about.

Woods concludes with an explanation of the role of money in an economy and then offers sound solutions to today's crisis that will bring the economy out of the current crisis and put it on sound footing.

There's a lot to learn from this book and there are a lot of people who should read it.

If you are simply curious about the world around you, or just a concerned citizen, this book will fill you in on how the world works from an economic perspective. If you are a businessman, an investor, or thinking about buying a house, this book will enlighten you as to the business cycle and help you make the important financial decisions in your life with much greater understanding of how the economy will impact you.

If you are a reporter, this book will put you miles ahead of your colleagues in understanding, and in your ability to provide important insights to your readers.

And, if you are President Barack Obama, you need to read this book and get a clue, because your current advisers are providing you with advise that will only result in you driving the economy off a cliff.

In short, anyone who reads this book and truly MASTERS it, will be in the top 1% of people who really understand what happened to cause the current crisis, and in the top fraction of 1% of the population who understand how the business cycle really works.

Carlyle Group Co-Founder Explains How the US Is Going to Really Get Out of the Current Economic Mess

The generally loquacious Carlye co-founder, David Rubenstein, is not disappointing reporters in Davos at the World Economic Forum.

Mark Kleinman with the UK's Telegraph details a cluster of Rubenstein observations and beliefs that have been thrown out by Rubenstein to those willing to listen. In the body of comments is this gem that tells it like it is:

The only good things for our country [the US] are that we do have the financial resources to deal with it; we do have, for example, the ability to print money: we probably got into this sooner than the rest of the world and we will probably also get out of it sooner than the rest of the world.

I have no reason to believe that Rubenstein understands Austrian Business Cycle Theory, but he sure has the gut instincts to understand, in an ABCT manner, how the whole thing works. Fed money printing is going to turn the economy around much sooner than most expect.

Of course, what baffles me about Carlyle and other PE groups is the waiting game they are playing before they start putting their sizable amounts of capital to work. No one is going to ring a bell when the trough in this downturn hits, but if all these PE groups start putting there capital to work at the same time, you are going to see a huge spike up in price of PE coveted assets.

We are sufficiently close emough to the bottom, given Fed money printing over recent months, that I believe at this point there is much more danger in being too late than too early.

The Capital Goods Sector versus the Consumer Goods Sector: The Picture is Clear

As ABCT theory would suggest, the only stocks showing gains (or small losses) in an overall dismal market, are consumer oriented stocks, led by WalMart and McDonalds.

Click on charts for larger view.

James Surowiecki Adds Support to ABCT

Of late, I have been pounding away at the fact that part of ABCT states that the consumption-savings ratio readjusts during a downturn in favor of consumption. And I have put some focus on the movie industry as an example of a consumption industry doing well during an economic downturn.

The New Yorker's business columnist, James Surowiecki, provides some further supporting commentary that the move industry is boomimg during the downturn, although seemingly unaware that he is supporting ABCT, when he does so:

MOVIES REALLY ARE RECESSION-PROOF

Back in the fall, as it became clear just how deep this recession was going to be, there was a lot of talk that this time around, the entertainment industry, and in particular Hollywood, wasn’t likely to be as “recession-proof” as it was reputed to be. (Box-office receipts rose in six of the last seven recessions, and the Depression, famously, was the heyday of movie attendance in America.) The reason proffered for Hollywood’s newfound susceptibility to an economic downturn? The Internet, of course. With so many free pieces of entertainment available on the Net, the argument goes, people were much less likely to schlep to the theatre and shell out eleven bucks for a film.

So much for that idea. Box-office receipts over the Christmas/New Year’s period were up almost twenty per cent from a year ago, with a wide range of films—from “Marley and Me” to “Benjamin Button” to even critical bombs like “Seven Pounds”—all doing solid business.

Tyler Cowen's "Sector Analysis"

Tyler Cowen has made no secret that he does not believe in Austrian business cycle theory, but, today, he has a long rambling post on fiscal stimulus, supposedly about when it will work and when it won't.

I will leave the majority of the post for others to dissect, but there is one section of the post which I found fascinating. Cowen writes (my emphasis):

Note that under standard theory neither monetary nor fiscal policy will set right the basic problems from negative real shocks and indeed the U.S. economy is undergoing a series of massive sectoral shifts. That includes a move out of construction, a move out of finance, a move out of debt-financed consumption, a move out of luxury goods, the collapse of GM, and a move out of industries which cannot compete with the internet (newspapers, Borders, etc.)

What is fascinating about this is that I think Cowen is really describing Austrian business cycle theory but doesn't realize it.

Now if there are basic things that are understood by all about ABCT, it is that the theory is based on the belief that the business cycle occurs because central banks distort the structure of production by printing money that ends up first in the capital goods sectors (with a very broad definition of capital goods). Further, as Murray Rothbard notes:

An adequate theory of depressions, then, must account for the tendency of the economy to move through successive booms and busts, showing no sign of settling into any sort of smoothly moving, or quietly progressive, approximation of an equilibrium situation. In particular, a theory of depression must account for the mammoth cluster of errors which appears swiftly and suddenly at a moment of economic crisis, and lingers through the depression period until recovery.

Note Rothbard discussing ABCT, he writes of a "mammoth cluster of errors."

Note Cowen, he writes of "series of massive sectoral shifts".

Mammoth cluster? versus Massive series? Cluster of errors? versus Series of sectoral shocks? Cowen may not realize it, but what he sees in the economy is exactly what ABCT theorists would expect to see.

Further look at the sectors he lists as having "real" shocks. He sees:

a move out of construction, a move out of finance, a move out of debt-financed consumption, a move out of luxury goods, the collapse of GM, and a move out of industries which cannot compete with the internet (newspapers, Borders, etc.)

To an ABCT theorist, they pretty much look like a list of problems in the capital goods sector. Out of construction? Check, a capital goods biz. Out of finance? Check-the very heart of capital goods financing. Debt-financed consumption? Notice how careful Cowen is here, and correctly so, it is debt financed consumption where problems exist. Check,this would fall under a sector financed by money printing credit creation. Luxury goods? The people buying luxury goods during the boom times are the ones who are getting the money first, this sector would suffer now, check. GM? Capital goods again, check.

The only area that does not easily fall into the ABCT theory is the newspaper, book sectors which are being hurt by the growth of the internet, but this stuff, new industries growing/old industries dying, happens all the time and falls under another Austrian theory, that of Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction.

Cowen may try and argue that there are "real" factors behind problems with finance, GM etc. (and there may be some), but that still does not explain why all these failures have become,as he puts it, a "series of massive sectoral shifts" all at the same time.

It's the cluster of errors queston that only ABCT answers. In short, Cowen may not believe ABCT theory, but his observations are ABCT all the way.

Why Government Spending Programs Won't Cure the Recession

This is quickly becoming Bob Murphy week at EPJ.

Bob has a great piece at mises.org today where he uses the new Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, as a punching bag to explain why Keynesian spending programs to fight a recession are way off base. He also simultaneously blows apart the static mainstream circular flow model. It is must reading.

Probably because he was too exhausted from all the punches he was throwing, he did allow Krugman to get away with one piece of Krugman/mainstream mis-categorization that is a pet peeve of mine.

Bob quotes Krugman as writing:

The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived…[R]eal consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.

My quibble with Krugman here is that he points out that the real drop in "consumer" spending is in the durable goods sector. Since the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) states that a downturn is about individuals re-establishing old savings/consumption ratios in favor of consumption, the decline in "consumer" spending has to be confusing to many of those trying to grasp the nuances of ABCT.

If ABCT is about consumers re-establishing stronger consumption patterns, then why is the consumption Krugman points to going down? The answer to the seeming paradox is that most of what Krugman is pointing to is not consumption, but saving.

Consumption is exactly that, consuming now, savings is about consuming later. If you rent an apartment, you are consuming now. If you buy a hamburger and eat it, you are consuming now. If you go to a movie, you are consuming now. If you buy a house, you are saving in the sense that you are acquiring an item that will result in saving for future consumption, in addition to a small amount for immediate consumption. The error of many economists is that they look at a physical good, such as a car or television and label it a consumption good. A good should only be defined by the purpose a good is being used for. If you are Elvis Presley like and you plan to shoot your television in the very near term, you have pretty close to a 100% consumption good. If, however, you plan on viewing shows on your television for the next 10 years, then you have purchased a good that is a small part immediate consumption good, but for the most part it is a capital good that will only provide consumption value in the future. Thus, "durable" consumer goods are really capital goods. It is not surprising that their sales should drop during a downturn, since the same financing that provides for such goods is the same financing that provides the boom in other capital goods sectors such as factory equipment, and which is now causing the downturn.

Note: This is a blog post and not a dissertation so I am not covering all the intricacies of a downturn, but I hasten to add that a downturn in an economy sometimes results in an increasing demand to hold cash balances, which creates an overall downward pressure on prices. This can appear to be a slowdown in consumer sales, when in fact it may be an across the board re-adjustment to a new general lower price level.

Going Global: Clueless Forecasts, Federal Reserve Style

TimesOnline headline, last week: Terror as Iceland faces economic collapse

As I have pointed out, New York Federal Reserve economists, McCarthy and Peach had no clue that the housing market was in a bubble.

Now comes word that Tryggvi Herbertsson, then an economist at the University of Iceland, and Frederic Mishkin, a Columbia professor at the time who would later become a Federal Reserve governor wrote a report in 2006 titled, “Financial Stability in Iceland“. The report states that “Although Iceland’s economy does have imbalances that will eventually be reversed, financial fragility is not high and the likelihood of a financial meltdown is very low.”

My reason behind posting these Irving "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Fisher type forecasts is to emphasize that Fed members have no special insights into the economy, and it is absurd to think the Fed is going to somehow regulate against economic bubbles, when there is no evidence that they can consistently detect them. Further, the Fed doesn't appear to understand ABCT, which points the finger at the Fed as the main culprit in most bubbles.

The Strange Mind of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman

By Robert Wenzel

I have never before read writing so twisted, deceiving and evil as an article written, 10 years and some months ago, by the new Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman. A quick reading of the piece will give one the impression that the piece is vicious, yet elegant. A deeper analysis reveals such evil that one has to wonder what twisted conditions faced Krugman as a child that he chose to use his mind in such an ugly manner.

I will dissect this article paragraph by paragraph so the article finds its justly spot, tossed onto an ash heap.

This is paragraph 1 from Krugman's piece, Hangover Theory:

A few weeks ago, a journalist devoted a substantial part of a profile of yours truly to my failure to pay due attention to the "Austrian theory" of the business cycle—a theory that I regard as being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire. Oh well. But the incident set me thinking—not so much about that particular theory as about the general worldview behind it. Call it the overinvestment theory of recessions, or "liquidationism," or just call it the "hangover theory." It is the idea that slumps are the price we pay for booms, that the suffering the economy experiences during a recession is a necessary punishment for the excesses of the previous expansion.

Notice the vicious launch, "I regard [Austrian Theory] as being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire".

Interestingly, it was the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, who taught that one should study all economic theories so that one could argue and point out the faults in weak theories. Apparently, Krugman has a superior method of understanding so that he does not even have to study a theory before he dismisses it. This nonsensical start by Krugman is enough to toss the paper. But, let us do something he claims he does not need to do, let us review arguments contra to our own thinking, that is, let us give the rest of his article full hearing.

He then writes: "the incident set me thinking—not so much about that particular theory as about the general worldview behind it". This is twisted cleverness if there ever is such a thing, because for the rest of the article he does nothing but discuss the theory, with one subtle deviation, when he attempts to force Austrian Business Cycle Theory ("ABCT") into a subtle box as a moral quasi-religious theory, as opposed to the well reasoned economic theory that it is.

He then begins discussing the theory, "Call it the overinvestment theory of recessions, or "liquidationism," or just call it the "hangover theory." It is the idea that slumps are the price we pay for booms, that the suffering the economy experiences during a recession is a necessary punishment for the excesses of the previous expansion."

There are a couple things that need to be pointed out here. First,in debus ex machima fashion, he begins the theory with the boom already in place. In ABCT, how the boom starts is integral to an understanding of the theory. ABCT holds that central banks create an artificial boom by printing money that ends up in the capital goods sector.

Thus, not all booms will cause the negative consequences of a bust. An increase in productivity can cause a roaring boom that every ABCT theorist would agree has no reason to end in recession.

And notice the deceiving use of the word "punishment". Nowhere do ABCT theorists use the word. It has the connotation that ABCT is some moral theory about those who party too hard getting their just desserts, in a moral sense. This is pure twisted evil Krugman. He is much too good a wordsmith not to know the deception he is spinning here.

On to paragraph 2:

The hangover theory is perversely seductive—not because it offers an easy way out, but because it doesn't. It turns the wiggles on our charts into a morality play, a tale of hubris and downfall. And it offers adherents the special pleasure of dispensing painful advice with a clear conscience, secure in the belief that they are not heartless but merely practicing tough love.

Ah yes, the use of the word "punishment" now sets the reader up for this poppycock paragraph about a "morality play" , hubris and downfall. Thus, the evil Krugman digs the deception deeper. And, notice the use of the word "seduction", for a theory that has perhaps 1.0% of the followers of Krugman's Keynesian religion.

Paragraph 3:

Powerful as these seductions may be, they must be resisted—for the hangover theory is disastrously wrongheaded.Recessions are not necessary consequences of booms. They can and should be fought, not with austerity but with liberality—with policies that encourage people to spend more, not less. Nor is this merely an academic argument:

The hangover theory can do real harm. Liquidationist views played an important role in the spread of the Great Depression—with Austrian theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter strenuously arguing, in the very depths of that depression, against any attempt to restore "sham" prosperity by expanding credit and the money supply. And these same views are doing their bit to inhibit recovery in the world's depressed economies at this very moment.

Notice the sly Krugman here, this “seductive” ( which accounts for 1.0% of trained economists) morality play (A morality play which is a strawman, created by Krugman's twisted and deceiving use of the word "punishment") "must be resisted."

Krugman then goes on to remarkably blame the Austrians for the Great Depression, a period during which FDR instituted more controls on the country than ever seen before. UCLA economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian have shown that FDR drove up wages and prices and was responsible for extending the length of the 1930s economic downturn by years.

Paragraph 4:

The many variants of the hangover theory all go something like this: In the beginning, an investment boom gets out of hand. Maybe excessive money creation or reckless bank lending drives it, maybe it is simply a matter of irrational exuberance on the part of entrepreneurs. Whatever the reason, all that investment leads to the creation of too much capacity—of factories that cannot find markets, of office buildings that cannot find tenants. Since construction projects take time to complete, however, the boom can proceed for a while before its unsoundness becomes apparent. Eventually, however, reality strikes—investors go bust and investment spending collapses. The result is a slump whose depth is in proportion to the previous excesses. Moreover, that slump is part of the necessary healing process: The excess capacity gets worked off, prices and wages fall from their excessive boom levels, and only then is the economy ready to recover.

This is simply another twisted paragraph . Now it appears that Krugman has slyly changed the debate. He is no longer discussing ABCT, but all "hangover theories", and whatever happened to discussing ABCT's "worldview"?

Paragraph 5:

Except for that last bit about the virtues of recessions, this is not a bad story about investment cycles. Anyone who has watched the ups and downs of, say, Boston's real estate market over the past 20 years can tell you that episodes in which overoptimism and overbuilding are followed by a bleary-eyed morning after are very much a part of real life. But let's ask a seemingly silly question: Why should the ups and downs of investment demand lead to ups and downs in the economy as a whole? Don't say that it's obvious—although investment cycles clearly are associated with economywide recessions and recoveries in practice, a theory is supposed to explain observed correlations, not just assume them. And in fact the key to the Keynesian revolution in economic thought—a revolution that made hangover theory in general and Austrian theory in particular as obsolete as epicycles—was John Maynard Keynes' realization that the crucial question was not why investment demand sometimes declines, but why such declines because(sic)the whole economy to slump.

Again we have Krugman using a loaded term, the supposed ABCT view of the "virtue" of recessions. ABCT theorists see recession as the readjustment period necessary from a previous central bank inspired boom. Krugman wants to keep his near-religious “morality play” going, so he uses the word “virtue". As for arguing that Keynes has made ABCT theory obsolete, by simply stating such, that’s as strong an argument as my saying, Henry Hazlitt made Keynes obsolete. But at least there is a book by Hazlitt, The Failure of the New Economics, that did make Keynes obsolete.

Paragraph 6:

Here's the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?

So much for not discussing ABCT, and to just look at some worldview. Of course, the person that gets laid off does not automatically find a job the next hour, a search for a new job must take place. Further, Keynesian unemployment programs extend the unemployment! Since why should anyone rush to find a job when they are being paid not to work?

Paragraph 7:

Most modern hangover theorists probably don't even realize this is a problem for their story. Nor did those supposedly deep Austrian theorists answer the riddle. The best that von Hayek or Schumpeter could come up with was the vague suggestion that unemployment was a frictional problem created as the economy transferred workers from a bloated investment goods sector back to the production of consumer goods. (Hence their opposition to any attempt to increase demand: This would leave "part of the work of depression undone," since mass unemployment was part of the process of "adapting the structure of production.") But in that case, why doesn't the investment boom—which presumably requires a transfer of workers in the opposite direction—also generate mass unemployment? And anyway, this story bears little resemblance to what actually happens in a recession, when every industry—not just the investment sector—normally contracts.

Notice the viciousness, “supposedly deep Austrian theorists “.

As for as Krugman’s question as to why there isn’t a rise in unemployment during the boom part of the cycle , this clearly demonstrates his lack of a deep understanding of ABCT. Before a boom starts, the economy can be said to be in equilibrium between the consumer goods production and capital goods production. When a central bank then pumps in new money, new demand is created for labor in the capital goods sector causing bidding for labor away from the consumer goods sector. Thus, there is no point where rising unemployment would be a factor in this part of the cycle. However, during the downturn part of the cycle, it is not a case that the central bank is pumping money into the consumer sector. What is occurring, instead, is that a transfer of money is taking place from the capital goods sector to the consumer goods sector. It is this money drain from the capital goods sector that causes the unemployment. During the central bank induced boom, money isn’t being drained from anywhere.

As for every industry being impacted by a recession, Krugman just doesn’t get what a capital good is. What I have identified as Wenzel’s Observation # 2 states that you need to know the purpose a good is being put to, to know if it is a capital good or consumer good, as I explained recently with regard to NBA tickets and how some purchases are consumer good purchases and other purchases are capital good purchases. Likewise, a hot dog sold on a summer day in a park is different from a hot dog sold at a construction site.

Thus , the “supposedly deep Austrian theorists” are much deeper on this topic than Krugman.

Paragraph 8:

As is so often the case in economics (or for that matter in any intellectual endeavor), the explanation of how recessions can happen, though arrived at only after an epic intellectual journey, turns out to be extremely simple. A recession happens when, for whatever reason, a large part of the private sector tries to increase its cash reserves at the same time. Yet, for all its simplicity, the insight that a slump is about an excess demand for money makes nonsense of the whole hangover theory. For if the problem is that collectively people want to hold more money than there is in circulation, why not simply increase the supply of money? You may tell me that it's not that simple, that during the previous boom businessmen made bad investments and banks made bad loans. Well, fine. Junk the bad investments and write off the bad loans. Why should this require that perfectly good productive capacity be left idle?

Here Krugman wants to become an inflationist. He decries an economy wide demand for cash, but wants to pump money through the banking sector, which benefits debtors at the expense of savers. If it is an economy wide increase in the demand for cash, why not just let the new lower price structure settle on the economy? Why would an increase in the demand for cash cause “good productive capacity to be left idle” unless ABCT is correct?

Paragraph 9:

The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can't stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors. But moderates and liberals are not immune to the theory's seductive charms—especially when it gives them a chance to lecture others on their failings.

“The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent,” writes Krugman, This again from a man who says at the start of this article that he is not gong to examine the theory but the “worldview”. It is not the ABCT that is incoherent, it is Krugman’s article.

Then , he is back to the “emotional” appeal of ABCT. He then goes on to tell us the reasons that “some” are attracted to ABCT. This is very close to a Marxian view of class logic, again all subtlety slipped in.

Paragraph 10:

Few Western commentators have resisted the temptation to turn Asia's economic woes into an occasion for moralizing on the region's past sins. How many articles have you read blaming Japan's current malaise on the excesses of the "bubble economy" of the 1980s—even though that bubble burst almost a decade ago? How many editorials have you seen warning that credit expansion in Korea or Malaysia is a terrible idea, because after all it was excessive credit expansion that created the problem in the first place?

“Moralizing on the region’s past sins”? Again another attempt to make ABCT sound as though it is a religious moral theory , and not a theory based on sound principles and reasoning.

Paragraph 11:

And the Asians—the Japanese in particular—take such strictures seriously. One often hears that Japan is adrift because its politicians refuse to make hard choices, to take on vested interests. The truth is that the Japanese have been remarkably willing to make hard choices, such as raising taxes sharply in 1997. Indeed, they are in trouble partly because they insist on making hard choices, when what the economy really needs is to take the easy way out. The Great Depression happened largely because policy-makers imagined that austerity was the way to fight a
recession; the not-so-great depression that has enveloped much of Asia has been worsened by the same instinct. Keynes had it right: Often, if not always, "it is ideas, not vested interests, that are dangerous for good or evil."

Raising taxes in the middle of a recession was a hardly smart move by the Japanese. Keynes was right, though, about ideas that can be dangerous for good or evil. And as can be seen in this article, Krugman’s ideas are evil in their tone and they attack ABCT in a twisted, and deceiving manner. But, at this point, the Austrian economic analysis must stop and the other Austrians, lead by the foundational thinking of Sigmund Freud, must take over to explain what would cause a mind to write the twisted deceiving article that Krugman did.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of  EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Ban .and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on  iphone and stitcher.