He completely ignores the fact that the US dollar became a completely fiat currency at the time of this change he blames the current crisis on and the central bank is not even mentioned. If it were not for the Fed pumping in all of this credit there is no way that the credit market could have become as inflated as it did. Too many borrowers would have pushed up the interest rates and sustained trade imbalances would have increased the price of imported goods.
What I find most amusing about this is that at the end he tries to claim that entrepreneurs in silicon valley who went off to start their own buisness are triumphs of communism.
Earlier though, he makes the claim that capitalism has a contradiction because the motivation is to depress wages so no one has the money to buy the produced goods. It seems to me that the correct resolution is that in the absence of a state-enforced monopoly a business who keeps wages too low will lose the most productive workers and in the absence of consumers willing or capable of paying for the produced good prices will have to fall (cutting into those evil profits the buisness owners have).
The best part about this one was the analysis of consumption, and the discrediting of the idea that consumption is the most important thing of all. This IMO is a huge leagcy of Keynesianism, which stipulates that it is consumption that “drives the economy”.
I got through the first 20 minutes of his thesis and stopped. I was suprised when he pointed out the year c.1970 as a starting point for all this. Unfortunately, not a single time did he ever mention the Federal Reserve and Nixon “closing the gold window”, which finally allowed the government to steal from people via inflation (to an even greater extent). From 1971 the money supply rises steadily and hence savings are eroded and real wages stagnate. That I beleive is the primary cause of the flatlining of wages.
But other fallacies are
Use of the labour theory of value and subsequent belief that profit = “stolen” wages.
Belief that cycles are endogenous and reliance on psychological explanations of economic phenomena, similar to what Keynes beleived.
Constant value judgements (like referring to consumer goods as “crap”)
And it goes without saying that the economic history of 1820-1970 has nothing to do with what’s going on now.
Every little thing like this depresses me so I try not to listen to/read/watch them. I just fear that all these people are convincing “normal people” from their positions of authority. It depresses me because we have so much work to do, and because people are indoctrinated into a fallacious theory which allows rationalisation of so many immoral acts.
It really depresses me that Rothbard never held an academic position that allowed him to direct dissertations, and yet this fellow has held such a position for decades.