May 11, 2012 Reading Time: < 1 minute

Reuters reports that employers cut back on hiring, again, in the month of April. Certainly this is a very important outcome in an election year. The perceived health of the economy can play in favor or against the candidate – in the opposite direction. A perceived healthy economic outlook favors the incumbent President, but works against the challenger. If the economy is doing fine, why change the policy? But if it is not, the necessity for change seems obvious.

Unemployment has been a central aspect of the economic recovery plan. Employment, it was promised, will increase and the American economy will take off to recovery again. Worried by the effect of employment figures on the electorate, Obama is urging the Congress to take “common sense ideas” to accelerate job creation. Luckily, common sense ideas are easy to find. Classic works as old as the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith could reveal the common-sense that seems to be lacking in the recent economic policies. Unluckily, this is not the common sense that will most likely be discussed.

It won’t come as a surprise if the new “common sense ideas” are the same old failed ones but with a different semantics or frameworks. Spain followed similar policies to those of the United States, with fiscal stimulus as a central player. Today, Spain poses a great danger to the European Union. A comparison should be done with Germany, which despite no absence of fiscal stimulus, followed a more conservative policy and is in a better shape than other countries. Some common sense can sometimes be found looking beyond the political frontiers.

Nicolas Cachanosky is a doctoral student in economics at Suffolk University, as well as a previous Sound Money Essay Contest winner.

image: pongaparty.com

Nicolás Cachanosky

Dr. Cachanosky is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Free Enterprise at The University of Texas at El Paso Woody L. Hunt College of Business. He is also Fellow of the UCEMA Friedman-Hayek Center for the Study of a Free Society. He served as President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE, 2021-2022) and in the Board of Directors at the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS, 2018-2022).

He earned a Licentiate in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, a M.A. in Economics and Political Sciences from the Escuela Superior de Economía y Administración de Empresas (ESEADE), and his Ph.D. in Economics from Suffolk University, Boston, MA.

Dr. Cachanosky is author of Reflexiones Sobre la Economía Argentina (Instituto Acton Argentina, 2017), Monetary Equilibrium and Nominal Income Targeting (Routledge, 2019), and co-author of Austrian Capital Theory: A Modern Survey of the Essentials (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Capital and Finance: Theory and History (Routledge, 2020), and Dolarización: Una Solución para la Argentina (Editorial Claridad, 2022).

Dr. Cachanosky’s research has been published in outlets such as Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Public Choice, Journal of Institutional Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and Journal of the History of Economic Thought among other outlets.

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