1.ª Conferência do Liberalismo Clássico

1.ª Conferência do Liberalismo Clássico

Coimbra, 26 Novembro de 2011, 14h00-20h00

Organização: Causa Liberal – Associação para o estudo, debate e divulgação do Liberalismo Clássico e o Instituto Ludwig von Mises Portugal

[www.causaliberal.net][mises.org.pt]

PROGRAMA

14h00 – Recepção dos participantes.

14h30 – Intervenção de Lourenço Vales: Liberalismo: A abordagem consequencialista vs deontológica.

15h00 – Intervenção de Ricardo Campelo de Magalhães: Como lucrar por ser liberal.

15h30 – Intervenção de Carlos Novais: O Keynesianismo e a crise.

16h00 – 1.º Painel: Liberalismos: entre o conservadorismo e o socialismo.

Apresentação: Professor José Manuel Moreira;

Intervenções: Luís Aguiar Santos e Samuel de Paiva Pires.

17h00 – Intervalo.

17h30 – Intervenção de Filipe Teles: Praxeologia e Liderança Política.

18h00 – Intervenção de André Azevedo Alves: A Escola de Salamanca e as origens ibéricas do liberalismo clássico.

18h30 – Intervenção de Luís Aguiar Santos: Perspectiva histórica do liberalismo português - Séculos XIX e XX.

19h00 – 2.º Painel: Liberalismo e os partidos políticos.

Moderador: João Miranda;

Intervenções: Professor José Adelino Maltez, Michael Seufert e Ricardo Campelo de Magalhães.

20h00 – Encerramento dos trabalhos.

Inscrição: geral@causaliberal.net

Preço: 10€ (liquidação no local, indicar expressamente se pretende inscrever-se no jantar pós-Conferência)

20h30 Programa social: Jantar convívio no local da conferência (por inscrição separada, preço 24€)

Local: TIVOLI Hotel, Rua João Machado, N.4, 3000-226 Coimbra – Portugal

Da última vez que Banqueiros Centrais & Co salvaram o mundo

Rubin (à esquerda, aclamado académico e profissional, secretário do Tesouro durante a era Clinton) não só não conseguiu salvar o mundo como conseguiu ajudar a destruir o Citigroup. Quanto a Alan Greenspan seguiu à risco o conselho de Krugman em 2002 : "Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble", depois continuado por Bernanke, agora nomeado Salvador-do-Mundo-in-Chief. (Foto via LRCBlog)

Daniel Hannan cita Rothbard e Mises [inflação no RU 5.2%]

[Nota: Ontem saiu o Índice de Inflação em Setembro no Reino Unido: 5.2% anual. Taxa de Banco de Inglaterra 0.5%... elites académicas e políticas disfuncionais?]

Mervyn King warns against deflation. Meanwhile, in the real world…

Inflation, this morning's newspapers tell us, is higher than expected. Expected by whom, for Heaven's sake? Not, surely, by readers of this blog, which has been predicting hefty price rises for over a year. Not to readers of Fraser Nelson or Allister Heath, nor yet to anyone familiar with the works of Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises. Nor, come to that, to anyone who grasps that, when you increase the supply of something, other things being equal, you reduce its price.(...)

Their mistake is not simply academic. The reason that Britain is growing more slowly than its competitors is not that government expenditure is falling – contrary to the impression you might get from the BBC, spending and borrowing are considerably higher today than during the final demented months of Gordon Brown's premiership. No, the reason we're in such a mess is that inflation is inhibiting our recovery.(...)

Tim Price, an investment manager with an unusual grasp of Austrian economics, summarises the problem beautifully:

If you wanted to perpetuate a depression, suggests Rothbard, the very best way to do it would be to enact the policies the government is pursuing today: prevent widespread liquidation of financial assets by lending money to shaky businesses; deploy as much QE as you can, to ensure that bad banks remain in business like malodorous zombies; inflate further, which prevents a necessary fall in prices; keep wage rates up (thus ensuring permanent mass unemployment); keep prices up (which will create unsaleable surpluses); stimulate consumption and discourage saving — not least, by driving interest rates close to zero.

We are doomed. Doomed.

Primárias - Melhor presença até agora: Ron Paul GOP CNN Nevada Debate

Se o texto for longo, usar a quebra de salto abaixo. Se for curto, removê-la.

Krugman & Co - alguém se irá demitir?

Depois de saírem os números da inflação de 5.2% para o Reino Unido (e 3.9% para os EUA), Krugman escreve no seu blog em Money And Inflation, British Edition:

"Inflation numbers continue to run high in Britain, yet the Bank of England, far from tightening, seems set to do more quantitative easing. Why are they so complacent about the inflation issue? Well, for good reasons:

... [blá, blá, blá]...

Obviously there’s a test here. If people like Adam Posen and yours truly are right, UK inflation will fall off sharply in the near future. If it doesn’t, Adam says he’ll resign from the Monetary Policy Committee; and I’ll certainly have to make a major rethink."

Vamos ver se alguém se demite porque Rothbard teve essa exacta experiência com Arthur Burns, o presidente do FED que provocou a estagflação dos anos 70 (o qual ironicamente bloqueava o Phd "austríaco" de Rothbard em Columbia sobre a crise americana de 1819, só a saída de Burns para um lugar que precedeu o da ida para o FED desbloqueou o seu doutoramento).

Mas Rothbard conta algures como (fins dos anos 60, creio) depois de uma palestra com Burns o questiona: E se estiverem errados, se a expansão monetária conduzir a inflação e recessão simultâneamente? Burns respondeu-lhe que nesse caso tinha de se demitir.

Isso conduziu a uma das máximas de Rothbard: "Ninguém se demite."

Sobre Arthur Burns diz Tom DiLorenzo:

"Arthur Burns, was such a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon that he abandoned his professional credibility by endorsing wage and price controls. Even though Burns's staff advised him that the money supply was forecast to grow by 10.5 percent by the third quarter of 1972, he advocated even faster money creation. The growth rate of the money supply in 1972 was the fastest for any one year since the end of World War II and helped assure Nixon's reelection- and the stagflation that followed."

E Lewrockwell recorda uma pérola da história de banqueiros centrais:

"Arthur Burns, who had blocked Murray Rothbard's hard-money PhD at Columbia until Ike made Burns chairman of the council of economic advisors, also engineered Nixon's great inflation. After his term as Fed chairman, Burns was rewarded by Nixon with the ambassadorship to Germany (...)

Burns--whom Murray described as sounding like W.C. Fields without the humor--answered, the Fed chairman has to do what the president wants, or "the central bank would lose its independence."

How to silence a Nobel Prize winning economist: Ask him about the economy.

Sobre os laureados com o Prémio Nobel da Economia

Robert Murphy:

This year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics goes to two Americans, Thomas Sargent (NYU) and Christopher Sims (Princeton). Officially the award is for "their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy."

There is no doubt that these two guys are really sharp, and free-market economists can find a lot to like in much of the work of Sargent in particular. Yet to update what I said of last year's recipients — who studied labor markets — it's a bit odd for the economics profession right now to be celebrating two scientists for their work in helping policymakers steer the macroeconomy.

(...)

As I said in the beginning, there is no doubt that Sargent and Sims are really sharp guys. Given that you wanted to approach macroeconomics in the way the mainstream has done it over the past few decades, then yes Sargent and Sims made seminal contributions and should be congratulated for their important work. For example, there is a poll for visitors at the official site, asking, "Did you know that Sargent and Sims's work is used by policymakers worldwide?"

Yet hold on a second. We ironically seem to be in the midst of one of the causation-correlation traps that I just explained above. Just about everyone is celebrating the work of Sargent and Sims, in effect saying, "Thank goodness you gave policymakers such guidance, especially when they need it now in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s! We can only imagine how awful the world economy would be today, were it not for your seminal papers."

Yet things might well be just the opposite. The "data" is just as consistent with the opposite conclusion, namely that Sargent and Sims steered the macroeconomics profession along a trajectory that led policymakers to do things that blew up the global financial system, such that we are currently worried about the collapse of an entire continent and its currency. What would things have to look like, in order for us to fine all of the most-influential macroeconomists, rather than giving them a $1.5 million award?

Startling Unpublished Keynes Equations Discovered (Friday Afternoon Humor)

via Zerohedge

"LONDON | Friday Sep 30, 2011 3:26pm EDT

(Routers) – A remarkable discovery reveals equations that economists say could end the business cycle - forever.

Ian Macallum, spokesman for the Royal & Ancient Historical Society of London, told Routers that the equations were contained in an unpublished manuscript which was found in the attic of an 18th century flat in Soho.

...

“It’s pure Keynesian genius” said former Fed Governor Fred Mishkin. “There is a strong consensus among economists, at least within the Federal Reserve, that liquidity is the answer to the age-old question ‘what is the meaning of life?’” So, it makes perfect sense that someone as brilliant as Keynes would adapt these equations to a framework for fiscal and monetary policy.”

Although very technical in original form, Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi said the final derivation of the equations can be simplified to the following:

“Unless you’re a PhD economist, I think it’s impossible to appreciate the elegance of the final derivation: by raising every stimulus factor to the power of infinity, you immediately move the probability of future recessions to zero. It’s brilliant. The notion that ‘risk’ is a necessary component of free market capitalism will finally be discredited.”..."

Nobel da Economia: Unpleasant monetarist arithmetic

Comentário: a dívida pública resulta de défices orçamentais acumulados, a conclusão nesta citação de que "In other words, a budget deficit implies some combination of bond finance and inflationary finance" deve também ser complementada com a realidade de que os bancos centrais compram dívida pública (e também dívida privada) e financiam as compras efectuadas pelos Bancos (cuja diferença entre as taxas constitui uma autêntica renda inflacionista a favor do sistema bancário), ambas as operações resultam de emissão de moeda.

A tendência histórica observada para a auto-destruição progressiva (ainda que o prazo seja longo) das moedas-papel [ver: Paper Money Collapse] assenta na evidência que os regimes políticos preferem sempre arranjar desculpas para sucessivas fugas para a frente de inflacionismo a ter que enfrentar uma combinação de falências bancárias, empresas e de Estados. Lembrar os comentários de Cavaco Silva, ou hoje de De Grauwe: "Medo infundado" da inflação está a condicionar o BCE., e a contínua compra de dívida pública pelo BCE, FED e BoE.

Via FreeBanking

"Unpleasant monetarist arithmetic

During the early 1980s a group of economists then at the University of Minnesota
and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Thomas J. Sargent, Neil Wallace,
and Preston Miller, spelled out a worrisome potential connection between the
growth of government debt and the resort to inflationary finance. Their basic
message was that the ability to finance government spending with borrowing will
eventually hit a ceiling, leaving money-creation the only method left for
covering continued budget deficits. The resulting inflation cannot then be
stopped, because money-creation cannot be stopped, unless there is a fiscal
reform: “the monetary authority is forced to create money” to satisfy a
need for seigniorage revenue.

In a much-discussed 1981 article entitled “Some Unpleasant Monetarist
Arithmetic,” Sargent and Wallace asked their readers to consider a fiscal and
monetary regime in which the fiscal authority (say, the Congress) first
announces the path of future budget deficits. By rearranging the budget
constraint, we see that the size of a budget deficit (G – T) must be matched
by the sum of new borrowing and monetary expansion:

G - T = ΔD + ΔM.

In other words, a budget deficit implies some combination of bond finance and
inflationary finance."

The Ethics of Money Production | Jörg Guido Hülsmann

Incredible [Libertarian] Speech By Wall Street Protester "End The Fed" 2011

"Do Conceito de Liberdade em Friedrich A. Hayek: Um Contributo para o Estudo do Liberalismo Clássico em Portugal", por Samuel de Paiva Pires

Resumo

Este trabalho tem como objectivo entender como se articula o pensamento de Friedrich A. Hayek no que diz respeito à salvaguarda da liberdade individual. Começando por operacionalizar o conceito de liberdade, pretende-se demonstrar que há uma clara linha no pensamento de Hayek que articula a ordem espontânea, a cataláxia e o estado liberal de forma a gerar uma dinâmica que tem como objectivo garantir o maior grau de liberdade individual possível. Neste trabalho fica também patente a demonstração de que o socialismo e o planeamento centralizado são epistemologicamente impossíveis, e que o conceito de justiça social é o responsável pelo descrédito da política nas modernas democracias liberais. Desta forma, procura-se efectuar uma reflexão crítica, recorrendo tanto à descrição como à análise do pensamento de Hayek, que, por estar parcamente traduzido em português, carece de ser estudado como forma de o divulgar à generalidade dos portugueses.

Palavras-chave: Friedrich A. Hayek, liberalismo, teoria política, economia política, liberdade individual, democracia.