Steven Horwitz
I just came across a talk by Niall Ferguson from last May, given at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, that is worth your time to peruse. You can find the audio and video as well as a transcript in PDF here. The title is "Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments," and he provides an overview of the sorry state of fiscal policy and debt in the Western world. His argument is that we are on a track of severely unsustainable debt and that by some measures the US is worse off than even the European countries. (Canada, I might note, is the exception to almost all of this.)
I recommend this highly and it is worth reading/watching/listening through the lens of Buchanan and Wagner's work and Pete's language of debt, debasement, and default. If there's a punchline, it's that Ferguson seems convinced we don't have the stomach to go the austerity route, especially because it would require us to be quite austere. Inflation is unlikely to work because bondholders are not as easily fooled as years ago. That pretty much leaves only default and it sure seems like that's what he sees coming.
Well worth at the very least reading the transcript.
