The View From 1776
§ American Traditions
§ People and Ideas
§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot
§ Books to Read
§ BUY MY BOOK
Monday, January 31, 2011
Once Again Stimulus Spending Doesn’t Work
Why did Keynesian economics fail to produce advertised results?
New York Times propagandist Paul Krugman and other liberal-progressives are still beating the drums for more and bigger Federal deficit spending. Unhappily, the fact is that the Democrat/Socialist Party’s $862 billion stimulus, the largest in world history, failed to revive the economy.
That failure is shared by every such effort, from Franklin Roosevelt’s “pump priming” in the 1930s through the present day. Results of the latest stimulus program are just as they have been in the past: a failure at reviving business and employment, but a big pay-off for unions and other special interest groups. John F. Cogan’s and John B. Taylor’s Where Did the Stimulus Go? gives us the numerical particulars.
No one can say there was no forewarning of this fiasco. See Another Cautionary Report on Stimulus Plans, posted on this website the week before President Obama’s inauguration in January, 2009. In the same vein, see Government Stimulus Spending: Differing Perspectives.
See also Stimulus Is Vote-Buying, Not Job Creating and Stimulus, Or Squealing Pork?
Small business owners, who cannot mobilize campaign workers and contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democrat/Socialist candidates, are on the losing end (see Stimulus Disincentives).
Back to summary...
Sunday, January 30, 2011
QE2 In Tones Of Gray
James Pethokoukis’s analysis on the Commentary website of the Fed’s QE2 monetary policy, The Problem with Printing Money, is a fairly evenhanded discussion.
A couple of quibbles:
One, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is not “the foremost academic expert of his generation on the causes of the Great Depression.”
Two, Bernanke is completely wrong. Tightening of the money supply by the Fed in 1927 did not cause the Great Depression. The cause was the Fed’s six-fold expansion of the money supply in the preceding five or six years, which led to the same sort of boom misallocation of economic resources as occurred in the recent housing bubble. The housing bubble was equally the result of massive over-exapnsion of the money supply by the Fed to support the stock market.
Obamacare Is Bad For Labor Unions
Where’s Our Waiver?
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Socialist Daily Worker - January 29, 2011
A “War on Demand” or a War on Reason?
What Is Investment?
Liberal-progressives employ a special definition.
The dictionary’s primary definition of investment is to save money from earnings and to put it to use in a property or project that offers a prospect of returning all of the invested funds, together with a profit commensurate with the involved degree of risk and with prevailing interest rates.
Liberal-progressives, however, employ the term to denote deficit spending to benefit special interest groups that are their political allies or are speculative boondoggles such as green energy and green automobiles that cannot survive without massive governmental subsidies. Another such liberal-progressive investment is showering labor unions, particularly public employees unions, with government privileges or deficit spending cash.
Money lavished upon teachers’ unions, for example, repays no benefits at all. The more money applied to special education and to teachers’ medical and retirement benefits, the poorer the educational results.
If private individuals were to use the liberal-progressive definition of investment, the result would be spending every penny of wages and salaries, then borrowing to the hilt and spending all of it. As are becoming the Federal, state, and local governments that have pursued this investment course, all private citizens would be destitute at the time of retirement from the workforce.
Back to summary...
Obama Seems Tone-Deaf On The Budget Deficit
Charles Krauthammer’s reactions to the State of the Union address.
Ship Of State’s Helmsman Out In Left Field
The Washington Post’s liberal-progressive columnist Ruth Marcus writes that the state of the union is ... leaderless.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Obama State Of Mind Address
Despite rhetorical gestures in the direction of American individualism, the statist paradigm of government permeated the president’s State of the Union address.
President Clinton, hammered by mid-term elections in his first administration, sought the middle policy road, triangulating between extreme left and right positions. President Obama clings to his liberal-progressive-socialist world vision while offering a few feints in the direction of the individualism that characterized the founding generations and nothing in the direction of individual freedom from arbitrary government power that gave birth to the Bill of Rights.
In the president’s world vision, there is, of necessity, little scope for individualism. People’s standards of living, their jobs, their personal acquisitions all are subject to control by the political state. Wisdom and efficiency are thought to be the domain of the collectivized, powerful political state. Individuals unrestrained by regulations are too likely to do things or to head in directions that the government does not approve.
Bill Clinton said in his first term that he might support a tax cut, but people would just use the money for the wrong kinds of things. Clinton’s press secretary Dee Dee Myers told reporters that only the government has the power to improve people’s lives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opined that people would come to love Big Brother’s Obamacare, once they had been shackled with it.
The economy is seen by Democrat/Socialist Party leaders, not as the product of millions of individuals pursuing their own aims, but as the property of government to be organized as state planners see fit.
Quote from the President’s State of the Union Address:
...The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.
...Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it
Back to summary...
The Python’s Coils
The Federal Trade Commission vows an aggressive expansion of its control over the US economy.. Competitiveness, for Obama, means killing private enterprise and converting economic activity into replicas of Government Motors under labor union control.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Learn To Love Big Brother
Having Obama in the presidency is like sleeping with a hungry python in your bed.
He’s cold and deadly, but increasingly you will have no choice.
