http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Given the horrible state of the economy and the idiocy coming from mainstream economists, I would have thought that nobody would win the Nobel Prize in Economics this year. Instead, the Swedish Central Bank and its minions have awarded this prize to none other than Paul Krugman.

That’s right, a man who gave up economics long ago in order to become a political operative now wears the title of “Nobel” winner.

STOCKHOLM, Oct 13 (Reuters) - American economist Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics for bringing together analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place, the prize committee said on Monday.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the prestigious 10 million crown ($1.4 million) prize recognised Krugman’s formulation of a new theory to answer questions driving world-wide urbanisation.

“He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography,” the committee said in its statement.

Just as the Nobel people committed fraud last year giving its Peace Prize to Al Gore (who advocates violence against people who burn coal), the Nobel in Economics this year goes to a person who has no understanding whatsoever of prices and markets.

Unfortunately, he now will be in an even greater position of influence, a man who has declared publicly that we need another “New Deal,” and a man who believes that FDR lifted the economy out of the Great Depression. A man who believes war is good for the economy. A man who rarely says an intelligent thing in his column.

Indeed, this is another dark episode in economics. Prepare for many more, as Krugman now is going to have a prominent place in the upcoming Obama government.

Krugman now will be on the same level as the truly deserving economist F.A. Hayek? Sad. This man needs no more influence in the world. In the long run it can only be negative.

http://campaignforliberty.com

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated. The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all. For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way. Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt. Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy. Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands. Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world. Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years. Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document. Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers. Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns. And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred. For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress. We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives. Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control. Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example? The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing. That is the bad news. The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us. Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

Will you join us?

I’m not one for spending much effort attempting to change the system from the top down. It’s mostly a waste of time. The Campaign for Liberty seems to me to be both top down and down up. You need to spend a little effort on those at the top but mostly at the bottom. Coordination and access to information are the most important aspects besides the drive to change things. It appears to me that Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is or will provide that. Even if it’s just to get the updates I recommend joining. The Ron Paul campaign for president helped spark this new movement for peace, prosperity and freedom and I think it’s an opportune time to get on board. The potential is there for real change. Even if only used as an educational tool.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/…

Thomas DiLorenzo spoke about his interests in economics and Abraham Lincoln, and his investigations into the two areas through his books, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Prima Lifestyles, 2002); and Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe (Crown Forum, 2006). He spoke about his research and methods, as well as many of the results he uncovered during the research. Professor DiLorenzo not only criticizes President Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War, he also criticizes current day historians who, he says, belong to the “church of Lincoln.” Those include James McPherson, Harold Holzer, Harry Jaffa, Eric Foner, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Professor DiLorenzo also contends that academic historians critical of Lincoln have difficulties getting university level jobs.

An hour long but pretty good.