| badgenome said: In this case, I don't think we're talking about wanting anarchy vs. the belief in the need for government. I'm not an anarchist because anarchy simply can't work. If nature hates a vacuum, it hates a power vacuum even more, so anarchy will almost immediately become some sort of totalitarian system as those most capable of applying force come into power. I'm specifically objecting to the Keynesian idea that a guy who earned his money has too much of it and is just going to stick it under the mattress, so the government should confiscate it and give it to some indolent soul because he'll immediately spend it and inject it back into the economy. Even if that were correct, it's still abhorrent to me. More generally, I don't like the assumption that the government spending the people's money is just the way things should be. I really wish that those in government felt there was some sort of sacred trust that they dare not break by spending recklessly and that they actually felt a little bad about spending it at all. Taxation may or may not be theft on its own merits, but there's a point when government spending becomes so institutionally and maliciously wanton that it becomes so. That's what drives me up a wall about the Krugmans of the world. Here's a guy who railed against Bush every day because he was going to take us over a cliff, and ooh, the big debt is scary, and shit, I'd better get a fixed-rate mortgage because interest rates are gonna be sky high, etc. Now that the debt is even larger and there's no end in sight to trillion dollar deficits, he's as unbothered as he can be because Blue Team is in the White House and all we need to set this economy right is for the government to drop money on people from helicopters or maybe a good old fashioned alien invasion, and by the way, wasn't 9/11 a wonderful stimulus? All those broken windows! And this guy is supposed to be an intellectual, not a mindless and increasingly demented partisan hack who thinks that government can best decide who can more efficiently use money regardless of who earned to to begin with. It seems to me that this practice is also hugely corrupting, and when politicians figure out they can bribe the people with public money, and people figure out they can get politicians to lavish other people's money on them, that's when democracies generally die. If we're not there yet, I think we're getting damned close. You can't have a successful society when you demonize success. Assuming you're talking about a loosening of IP laws (you're against SOPA and PIPA, IIRC), then I agree. |
This explains my more moderate (or what supply-side true believers would call egregiously liberal) view of international macroeconomics. Paul Krugman is the principle author of the book i've utilized in International Econ classes thus far.
And there is a certain wisdom in Keynesian economics, just that it is dangerous like any tool of economic policy to overuse, or as we have done, to abuse. While the wealthy certainly aren't stuffing their excess money under a mattress, neither are they putting it to immediate use. Given America's reliance on the consumption sector, Keynesian ideas are all the more important: people with less income buy things, whereas excess income is saved or invested. High levels of savings and investment are good, the former to create liquidity and the latter to promote real growth, but when the chips are down and a lot of people out of work and a lot of productive capacity lies idle, a sudden injection of money at the bottom of the income bracket is going to fix things quickly in the short term, though this is sustainable in the long term only if the country was at or under full employment before the initial downturn.
The trick with supply side vs Keynesian economics is that it's easy to tell where money injected broadly into the bottom will go, but much harder to tell where excess money in the top will go: will the wealthy invest correctly (and this isn't a morally normative "correct" but rather "will they really make the right long-term investment choices for production)? Money at the very bottom will go to consumption. Money at the middle might go for bigger-ticket consumption (spend your extra $5k as down payment on a car), or at the worst go to savings and increase banks' lending power. Money to the 1% will go ???
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
