I’m a bit hesitant to link to this (as I’m not an elderly right wing economist, I’m worried I might be accused of “belittling the other”), but it’s super-duper awesome! Charles Rowley, familiar to long time CT readers for his “ruminations”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/20/worldly-philosophers/ on the corruption of the profession of political science (we’re all in hock to the federal government) and his “bizarre attack”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/28/anger-and-greif/ on Avner Greif (see “here”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/e4477g1412453627/ for Greif’s reply), “now has his own blog”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/. It’s everything that one might possibly hope for. My favorite so far is the bit telling us that:

bq. the massive fist of free market ideas once again will smash through the false consciousness of Keynesian dreams, and voters will rush to elect leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

‘cos it’s a level of rhetorical styling that I haven’t seen since I used to pick up the newsletter of the Maoist International Movement (the title is a bit of a misnomer; the cadres all seem to hang out in Ann Arbor, Michigan) when I was a graduate student in statistics boot camp. But the Obama=Sykes, Larry Summers=Fagin “post”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/youve-gotta-pick-a-pocket-or-two-boys/ runs a very close second:

bq. The question that remains to be answered is whether the futures of Larry and Barack will mirror those of Fagin and Sykes. Will some fortuitous Oliver chance across the paths of these shady characters before they can fulfill their dreams while destroying the market system that created the wealth that they covet? Will both meet the dreaded drop in 2012, if not before? Or will pocket-picking accelerate to the point at which Atlas Shrugs and the wealth-creators remove themselves from the economy, leaving those who cannot create wealth to share in the economic collapse of a negative-sum game as the United States begins a long decline into economic mediocrity?

This is a man who was surely born to blog. Update your bookmarks.

Update: “The Fun Continues”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/a-great-deal-of-ruin-in-a-nation/

bq. As private investment is increasingly crowded out by government expenditures, and as entrepreneurship is dashed by national socialist policies – as indeed was the case in the US throughout the the first two administrations of FDR – the once-powerful engine of the US economy will sputter and then die. Unlike in 1945, in 2019 the United States will not bestride a shattered world economy like some hegemonic Colossus. Rather its _state capitalist,_ [HF: emphasis in original] social market economy will struggle just to maintain existing living standards, while newly-emergent, vibrant market economies demonstrate to a former master the awesome power of laissez-faire capitalism.

If Tyler Cowen hadn’t confirmed that this blog was the genuine article, I’d suspect it of being a clever fraud perpetrated by an old-school lefty – the ‘Staatsmonopolistischer Kapitalismus=Nationalsozialismus’ identity has fallen out of fashion since the collapse of the GDR, and it is rather odd to see it being revived as a defense of free markets.