Government Finally Discovers Secret Method to Defeat Natural Law of Scarcity

5-25-2008 | Steve Bachman

[Steve Bachman]

BREAKING NEWS --

Representatives of several Western governments have recently announced that an international team of bureaucrats and state-employed economists have finally uncovered a long-sought scientific formula for defeating the natural Law of Scarcity.

For hundreds of years now, politicians and bureaucrats the world over have struggled in vain to devise a form of political method to overcome what has long been known as Say's Law; named after the French classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), who was the first scholar to promulgate the very elementary concept that it is only an increase in productivity which can raise the living standards of society.

However, political economists of a certain stripe have attempted to refute Dr. Say's proposition since the day it was introduced. Most notably was John Maynard Keynes, of British Fabian Socialist fame; whose disasterous economic fallacies are still widely-held and adhered to by government officials in nearly every Western nation today. Keynes's General Theory claimed to have devised a formula by which the State could overcome natural scarcity; which prescribed a complicated combination of taxing, spending, inflating and deflating, all in close consultation with an arcane collection of mathematical and economic indexes.

However, Lord Keynes' prescriptions have proven ill-advised after several decades of having been put into practice in Europe, the United states, and most recently, Japan. As had been predicted by Austrian School economists from as far back as Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt in the 1940's and 50's, Keynesian economics has proven no match for Say's Law.

To the credit of the political and bureaucratic classes, they have never given up. Even in the face of a long series of failed government programs and interventions, agents of the State have never given up hope that the next set of interventions would not only make right the disasterous effects of the previous interventions, but would at last bring the final downfall of the stubborn natural Law of Scarcity.

With the recent discovery, the State can finally congradulate itself for having proven wrong, once and for all, all those smarmy free-marketeers who have stayed the pessimistic course all these years. It was said that the only way to increase the standard of living for the whole society was to increase productivity per capita. It was said that the only way to increase production, and thus alleviate natural scarcity, was to encourage saving and to free the creative energies of the public; which could only be brought about by a policy of sound money and by rolling back the regulatory bureaucracy of the State. It was said that the government's policies of cheap credit was the engine of inflation, which served to punish savers and thus diminish the accumulation of capital necessary to underwrite investment. It was said that the exorbitant tax rates and ridiculous regulatory burdens which government foisted upon industry only served to stifle production and chase capital overseas. But with the latest discovery, government operatives have finally forced the nay-sayers to open wide their collective mouths and insert the proverbial foot.

To be fair, it certainly did appear that the Lew Rockwell's of the world might have been on to something. But as it turns out, all their talk of free markets and limited government was unfounded, and its merits merely superficial. Whereas the inflationary policies of the past 100 years have managed to produce only illusory prosperity, which always resulted in malinvestment and the inevitable "bust" signaling the onset of recession; the newly-devised scheme discovered by the International Bureaucracy for Economic Planning and Research (IBEPR) promises to implement an inflationary boom that will never be discovered by the market, and thus will manage to evade what has otherwise proven to be the fatal aspect of all artificially-induced bubbles.

It is not clear exactly how the new formula works, or how and when it will be implemented. The bureaucrats involved are remaining rather tight-lipped concerning the details of the new method; which is par for the course where the unelected (and thus unaccountable) faction of the political class is concerned. However, some inside sources have indiciated that the new formula will utilize what is the defining aspect of all government action; that of coercion -- albeit to a greater degree than previously resorted to in prior attempts to nullify the Law of Scarcity. Some analysts have speculated that it's possible that government intends to threaten to fine or imprison natural scarcity, although, of course, this cannot be confirmed.

If so, this would be a revolutionary turn away from past methods, wherein government obviously attempted to confuse natural scarcity so that it didn't know how to react. This was clearly the logic behind such policies as tariffs, import quotas, and the like. It was apparently believed that by deliberately setting out to affect a state of scarcity, by placing obstacles in the way of greater abundance, the state would throw natural scarcity off it's game; or perhaps to fool it into believing it had already won, so that it would just walk away, believing itself victorious.

When these policies proved ineffective, governments began trying to fool natural scarcity into believing it no longer existed. Everywhere the state began to enter into partnerships with banking cartels, where it was thought that by printing more paper money, which allowed for an artifical expansion of bank credit to be circulated among the public in the form of demand deposits, natural scarcity would witness the sheer volume of receipts being circulated as proof of its absence, and would hence be fooled into believing that it must not be present, rendering it's powers impotent. But alas, this technique was doomed as well; as natural scarcity would still find ways to make its presence felt, and the purchasing power of the paper receipts being circulated always decrease in response to reality.

Most recently, government has resorted to brute force, attempting to beat back scarcity by way of impressive displays of power. For instance, the state apparently felt that it if it threatened employers with fines or jail time for failing to pay their employees an arbitrarily-determined minimum wage, then natural scarcity would become intimidated by this show of force, and perhaps consider shrinking back some. Or maybe, perhaps feeling sorry for the poor employers, who by now have seen their own costs rising because of the inflationary effects of previous government interventions, on top of now being threatened with physical violence for failing to pay a politically-determined wage rate, natural scarcity would consider cutting everyone a break, and easing up.

Governments all over the world, having been frustrated by failed attempts to defeat natural economic laws, have been frantically tinkering with all manner of combinations of the above listed methods. But with the latest discovery, we are being told that natural scarcity has seen it's last days. We are being assured that the new method is definitely not just some new variation or combination of the same old policies; but rather a new, innovative techique for putting the limitations of economic reality behind us forever.

Our sources inside the IBEPR offices at the U.N. will stay on top of this story, and we will keep you posted as news develops.

[GourmetDan]

If the governments of the world can’t pass a law that eliminates Say’s Law, what good are they?

/sarc

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

< snicker>