Austro-Punk

Professor Caplan,

In "Why I Am Not an Austrian" you criticize Murray Rothbard's perspective when he states that any supply of money is "optimal" in a free market, despite saying in America's Great Depression that wages can be rigid downward in a free market and thus "the quantity of money could affect employment given wage rigidity."

Would you consider your position on deflation and monetary theory to be similar to George Selgin and Steve Horwitz's? In other words, do you find free banking to be an optimal monetary regime given the tendency for monetary disequilibrium?

Is this the answer to the gaping hole in Austrian monetary theory?

Professor Caplan,

Thank you for your time. In the introduction of your book The Myth of the Rational Voter, you give advice to your fellow economists to write more books and less articles on the grounds of conveying more complete ideas to the reader instead of a piecemeal approach in a shorter work that may miss certain nuances of a given topic. I have attempted to do this in my new book on economics I just published.

My question to you is, what can the informed layperson, student, or non-expert do to propose original ideas or quality research to the economics field? is higher education and peer reviewed papers the only route?

Thank you for the reply.

And I'm convinced by Keynesian macroeconomists who say that it's best to have inflation of 2-4%

Where in that range is optimal? How would it be measured? What leads you to believe this?