Posted on 05/19/2008 7:42:53 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
| Obama's Excremental Economics | |
| by Thomas Brewton May 16, 2008 |
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As prolongation of the 1930s Depression and stagflation in the 1970s demonstrated, Senator Obama's announced policies are a prescription for economic disaster.
Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way. Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.
The key elements of Senator Obama's proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar). Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama's polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.
The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.
Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times's propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.
In practice (in the 1930s Depression and in the 1970s stagflation) Keynesian economics caused devastating harm to every citizen. In the stagflation of the 1970s not only was unemployment distressingly high, particularly in Midwestern industrial areas, which became known as the Rustbowl, but inflation wiped out roughly 57% of the purchasing power of every citizen's lifetime savings.
For an eminently readable analysis of Keynesian economics, the economic bedrock of liberal-progressive worship of the socialist religion, read Professor Murray Rothbard's 1947 critique, Spotlight on Keynesian Economics.
One caution: when Professor Rothbard speaks of liberal economists, he is using the classic terminology of 18th England that referred to true freedom: laissez-faire economics, free from government intervention, not to today's American sect of the international religion of socialism. |
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| Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He maintains a website at The View from 1776 | |
The heart of Obama’s economic plan is what he calls the creation of “Green Jobs”. Since the objective of the Green Movement is to eliminate Man’s “Carbon Footprint” these Gren Jobs must, by definition to produce anything that adds to GDP. They cannot manufacture, because that uses energy and the solid result must be shipped to the end users thus expanding the Carbon Footprint. Green Jobs’ only purpose would be the eliminatuion of Non Green Jobs. You know, the one’s that all of us in the Dreaded Private Sector work in.
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."~~Ludwig von Mises
Green Jobs with Algore’s companies.
“Excremental” = Trickle-Down?
And yet...many McCain haters...will sit by and let this man become President.
I am no fan of the monstrous federal institutions that Roosevelt created. But the way to get out of that kind of mess is not to get into it. The way you don't get into it is by the FED not inflating credit booms that lead to biblically proportioned busts. That after the bust the FED intentionally and severly contracted the money supply only depended the recession/depression.
As a consequence of the inability of the economy to get going despite a clear supply of willing labor and a clear demand for the product that could be produced by the labor, major intervention was required to grease the wheels of the economy, and at the gunpoint of the federal government. If banks and private industry don't like Rooseveltian economics, then they need to stare in a mirror and not whine about the democratic process. You cannot sustain political support for free market capitalism on the idea that at the bottom of eocnomic busts 30% of the population is going to be spending 100% of its time trying to figure out where to get its next meal.
yes, Obama has the portents of being an economic disaster, but the solution is analysis of our current situation, not wishful thinking about how it might get better all by itself based on a thoroughly flawed understanding of the world's biggest piece of economic folly, ever, and it's subsequent bust. It is pure snake oil charlatanism.
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