[TChris]

I have a little humility before making blanket pronouncements. For example, our side is fond of saying that tax cuts advance prosperity. That is a government intervention that we think works. You agree? Do you want to amend the blanket assertion that interventions never work?

I suppose you could refer to a tax cut as an intervention. I see it as a decrease in government intervention. That is to say, a tax cut is government getting out of the way, lightening the load, loosening its grip, etc., whereas the usual meaning of "intervention" is the opposite: Government tightening its grip, centralizing decisions, etc..

[nathanbedford]

I have always been bothered by the apparent contradiction about what actually brought the United States out of the Great Depression. Even if one accepts, and I do, that much of what Hoover and Roosevelt did deepened and prolonged the recession, we still must come up with an ideologically satisfactory answer about what brought us out of the Great Depression. Was it not massive government spending arming the nation to fight World War II? Is that not the equivalent of a massive works program? Does that not show that massive federal spending will move the economy?

Similarly, is it not widely accepted that Hitler got Germany out of its mess in 1933-34 with massive government works projects and with expenditures on rearmament?

The argument today against work projects appeals to me because it diverts money away from the private sector which would undoubtedly spend it better in terms of creating wealth and creating jobs. I suppose the counter argument is that the money otherwise would never get spent at all.

I don't know if we can measure the distortions to the economy which occur because of these government interventions. If we create jobs by building highways those jobs to some degree are measurable but the jobs which are lost because the money was diverted are not. Politicians cannot go to the people who are in extremis and say, "we think but we cannot prove that it is better not to spend because we believe we will create more jobs that way." Especially can he not say that when another politician will certainly exploit the opening and promise jobs rebuilding those roads.

But all of this public Works business is what Obama is doing and that is something different from the 11th hour decision to save the economic system which allegedly confronted Bush. Clearly Obama is not out to revive the economy but to reshape it and that it is an undeniably fraudulent and destructive objective.