Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939) is an American economist and author. He formerly held a sub-cabinet office in the United States federal government as well as teaching positions at several U.S. universities. He is a promoter of supply-side economics and an opponent of recent U.S. foreign policy.

Roberts received a doctorate from the University of Virginia where he studied under G. Warren Nutter. He worked as an analyst and adviser at the United States Congress where he was credited as the primary author of the original draft of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. He was the United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan and – after leaving government – held the William E. Simon chair in economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies for ten years and served on several corporate boards. A former associate editor at The Wall Street Journal, his articles have also appeared in The New York Times and Harper's, and he is the author of more than a dozen books and a number of peer-reviewed papers.

Since retiring, he has been accused of conspiracy theorizing.

Early life and education

Paul Craig Roberts III was born in Atlanta, Georgia on April 3, 1939,

Roberts received a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial management from the Georgia Institute of Technology where he was initiated into the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. After university, in 1961, he was awarded a Lisle Fellowship to undertake a tour of the Soviet Union.

On completion of his doctoral studies, Roberts spent a year on a research fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he was a member of Merton College.

Career

Early career

Roberts began his career with teaching assignments at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the University of New Mexico, Stanford University, and Tulane University.

During this time, he also contributed columns to Harper's and The New York Times and served as associate editor of The Wall Street Journals opinion page.

Later career

In December 1980, along with Alan Greenspan and Herbert Stein, Roberts was one of the three speakers at the two-day National Forum on Jobs, Money and People at the Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Palm Harbor, Florida. Two months later, in 1981, he was appointed by President of the United States Ronald Reagan as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. He was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, from 1983 to 1993 was the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and, from 1993 to 1996, a distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute.

From 1983 to 2019, Roberts served as a board director of nine different Value Line investment funds. Between 1992 and 2006 he sat on the board of directors of A. Schulman and, according to the company, was its longest-serving independent director at the time of his retirement.

Post-retirement writing and media

In the 2000s, Roberts wrote columns for Creators Syndicate. Later, he contributed to CounterPunch, becoming one of its most popular writers. He has been a regular guest on programs broadcast by RT. As of 2008, he was part of the editorial collective of the far right website VDARE. He has been funded by the Unz Foundation. His writings are published by Veterans Today, InfoWars, PressTV and GlobalResearch, and he is frequently a guest on the podcasts, radio shows and video channels of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Max Keiser and 9/11 truther Kevin Barrett.

Ron Hira of the Economic Policy Institute has described Roberts as one of the first prominent economists to "break from the orthodoxy" by opposing offshoring; Roberts believes that the practice is "lethal for America's future". According to him, "a country that doesn't make anything doesn’t need a financial sector as there is nothing to finance". In 2004, Paul Blustein in The Washington Post described him as heretical in relation to mainstream US economics for challenging the positive impact of free trade.

Roberts is also a critic of the Federal Reserve System and central banking in general. In an opinion column for Scripps Howard News Service in 1997, Roberts opposed gender integration aboard U.S. Navy vessels, opining that gender integration would destroy the "ethos of comradeship" which, in his view, motivated wartime sacrifice more than "abstract concepts such as honor and country".

In The New Color Line (1995), Roberts and co-author Lawrence M. Stratton argue that the Civil Rights Act was subverted by the bureaucrats who applied it.

He believes the US is a police state. In The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), Roberts and co-author Lawrence Stratton argued that the opposition of some American conservatives to drug-policy reform was an example of "the right's myopia".

Foreign policy

He is a strong opponent of neoconservatism, saying, "the neocons are the worst thing that ever happened to the United States. (They’re) really the scum of the earth… They should all be picked up and shipped out of the country. They all belong in Israel. That’s where they should be. Pick ’em up, ship ’em to Israel, revoke their passports." Roberts has rejected the label and, in turn, described Jonathan Chait and Amy Knight as conspiracy theorists.

Roberts has described himself as a "9/11 skeptic" and spoken at 9/11 Truth movement events. Regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Roberts has written that "all evidence pointed to a plot by the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and Secret Service whose right-wing leaders had concluded that President Kennedy was too 'soft on communism'". He has also stated that the Charlie Hebdo shooting has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation" motivated in part “to stifle the growing European sympathy for the Palestinians and to realign Europe with Israel”. The Washington Post noted that in 2014 Roberts speculated on his blog that Ebola originated as a US bioweapon and this was picked up by North Korea's state media. In 2003, the Southern Poverty Law Center criticized Roberts for promoting the antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory in a review of Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West.

Views on World War II and the Holocaust

In 2019, Roberts wrote in support of the views of Holocaust denier David Irving, asserting that "Irving, without any doubt the best historian of the European part of World War II, learned at his great expense that challenging myths does not go unpunished... I will avoid the story of how this came to be, but, yes, you guessed it, it was the Zionists". Roberts added that "No German plans, or orders from Hitler, or from Himmler or anyone else have ever been found for an organized holocaust by gas and cremation of Jews... The "death camps" were in fact work camps. Auschwitz, for example, today a Holocaust museum, was the site of Germany's essential artificial rubber factory. Germany was desperate for a work force."

In 1987, he was invested into the French Legion of Honour at the rank of chevalier (knight) for his services to economics.

In 2015, Roberts received the International Journalism Award for Political Analysis from Club de Periodistas de Mexico.

In 2017, Roberts received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who's Who.

Works

Books

  • Alienation and the Soviet Economy: Toward a General Theory of Marxian Alienation, Organizational Principles, and the Soviet Economy (University of New Mexico Press, 1971)
  • Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis (Hoover Institution Press, 1973; 1983) (Spanish language edition: 1974)
  • The Supply Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington (Harvard University Press, 1984) (Chinese language edition: 2012)
  • Warren Nutter, an Economist for All Time (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984)
  • Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy (Cato Institute, 1990)
  • The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 1997) (Spanish language edition: 1999)
  • Alienation and the Soviet Economy: The Collapse of the Socialist Era (Independent Institute, 1999: 2nd edition)
  • The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (Regnery Publishing, 1997)
  • The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice (2000) (Broadway Books, 2008: new edition)
  • Chile: Dos Visiones La Era Allende-Pinochet (Universidad Andres Bello, 2000). Joint author: Karen LaFollette Araujo. Spanish language.
  • How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds (AK Press, 2010)
  • Wirtschaft Am Abgrund: Der Zusammenbruch der Volkswirtschaften und das Scheitern der Globalisierung (Weltbuch Verlag GmbH, 2012) . German language.
  • Chile: Dos Visiones, La era Allende-Pinochet (2000)
  • The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West (Clarity Press, 2013)
  • How America was Lost. From 9/11 to the Police/Warfare State (Clarity Press, 2014)
  • The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: Washington's Perilous War for Hegemony (Clarity Press, 2015)
  • Amerikas Krieg gegen die Welt... und gegen seine eigenen Ideale (Kopp Verlag, 2015)

Journal articles

References

  • Column archive (2006–2010) at Creators Syndicate