Can Austrian Theory Explain Construction Employment? - Robert P. Murphy

Can Austrian Theory Explain Construction Employment? - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

the foreign money was looking for 30-year debt to buy most, the Fed has some influence on the 30-year rate but not an absolute or automatic one, and in this case Greenspan's efforts in 04 and 05 to budge the rate upwards failed, revealing the fallacy of the "omnipotent Fed"; bondholders simply look at the Fed as ONE of their considerations even at the best of times - the "irrational exuberance" for indecipherable derivatives is best dealt with by markets, by letting the chips fall, letting companies die, letting banks die, letting gamblers burn, the last thing one would want is to institutionalize a grotesque concept like "too big to fail" and its' incestuous sister "systemic risk" - that is what Greenspan would not have bought, the whole TBTF argument, preferring to treat the whole thing as another bigger S&L or LTCM type issue, with a mechanism, a time frame, a projection of numbers, and as clear a roadmap for interest rates as possible, thereby not permitting uncertainty to descend like a heavy pall

I would place the greater proportion of the blame for "real resource misallocation" on Fannie, Freddie and the gamut of political weightage placed on single family home ownership, whereas the free market may have directed more of the capital into affordable apartment buildings, easing labor mobility, making realty more liquid and lowering the price bar of real ownership - a quite salutory result for workers, thus also from a political perspective I would think

can we imagine for a minute, just for a fun exercise, the result if the political weightage were placed on school ownership instead of home ownership? if parents had an economic interest in their schools they would suddenly begin to perform the quality control function the founding fathers wished to place in their hands, and which they have been persuaded to abdicate to the teachers' unions instead

it is quite pointless to speak of the unemployment without taking in context the colossal vanity inherent in attempting to central plan a society's labor requirements 50 years into the future, which is our infamous 'Brock Model'; it simply cannot be done without severe distortions resulting in the economy, and now the price is being paid in altogether needless pain by workers - the tragedy is not in the flight of manufacturing jobs to China, or the flight of clerical jobs to India (which I heard Dr. Kissinger call "strategic failure" today, perhaps from the conservative instinct to protect 'yesterday' against the uncertainty of 'tomorrow', one will have to wait and listen to the full interview on WSJ's friday night feature, "The Big Interview") - the tragedy is our inability to do the better jobs we are creating here and now, the sub-market speed of adaptation and innovation in education resulting from faulty fundamentals, I mean, does Apple have to open a college to teach people how to use iPads?