Steven Horwitz to present Atwood Lecture on the Great Recession
Steven Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and department chairman at St. Lawrence University, will discuss “The Great Recession: A Failure of Government, Not Markets” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29 in the Bazarsky Lecture Hall.
Free and open to the public, Horwitz’s talk is part of the Atwood Lecture Series. Those interested in attending are asked to register at salve.edu/atwood.
The boom and bust of the last decade is often blamed on unregulated capitalism, greed run amok and/or irrational investors. With those presumed causes, it’s no surprise that the cure is often seen as more government regulation.
In his lecture, Horwitz will argue that the Great Recession is a classic example of an unsustainable boom initiated by misguided government policies, by both the Federal Reserve and Congress. Once we see how government caused the crisis, it becomes clearer why more government is not the cure. Horwitz’s lecture will conclude with a critique of stimulus spending and other activist proposals to speed recovery.
An affiliated senior scholar at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute, Horwitz completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at George Mason. He is the author of two books, “Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective” and “Monetary Evolution, Free Banking and Economic Order,” and he has written extensively on Austrian economics, monetary theory and history, macroeconomics, and the social thought of F. A. Hayek.
