The View From 1776

Read More...

In Human Motivation I argued that Keynesian macroeconomics fails to attain its objectives, because people are not the automatons implicitly assumed by macroeconomists and other varieties of social-engineering state planners.  In the short run of an economic recession - say two to four years - people remain individualistic to the extent that they respond or fail to respond to government stimulus programs, based on their widely disparate aims and fears at that time.

It is true, however, that inculcating society over a couple of generations with liberal-progressive-socialist ideology alters average expectations and behavior, and not for the better.  See How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden, by Per Bylund.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New-Deal welfare state damaged social mores in the United States.  Fortunately the necessity to fight against Japanese and German aggression in World War II kept enough spine in the average citizen to preserve the self-reliant individualism that had built the nation.

The 1960s’ Vietnam War, because it did not require the total mobilization of World War II, was a different matter.  Many self-centered, self-indulgent Baby Boomers, who never had experienced their parents’ hardships, became anarchic activists, determined to destroy the societal values of their parents.  The creed of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) under Tom Hayden and the Weather Underground under Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn was, “Hell no; we won’t go [to fight in Vietnam]” and “Bring the war home; kill your parents; ice the pigs [police].”  Every effort was made to stigmatize individualism and to stress communalism.  As had been true of socialism and anarchism since the 19th century, “free love,” i.e., sexual promiscuity, became the norm; monogamous marriage and marital fidelity were denigrated as anti-social selfishness.

Over the ensuing fifty years those student activists and their progeny have come to dominate education, the judiciary, and governmental bureaucracy, as well as state and Federal legislative bodies.  Young people today have been warped by activist ideology, having been instructed that free education, free housing, readily available jobs, and free medical care are their constitutionally guaranteed “rights.” 

Immediate gratification of sexual, social, and economic desires has been the general expectation since the 1960s.  Hence the almost non-existent personal savings level and massive accumulation of credit card and mortgage debt that presaged the 2007-08 housing and banking meltdown. 

This website in its statement of purpose stands in opposition to such degradation:

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Back to summary...

Read More...

Keynesian macroeconomics reintroduced and popularized in the 1930s the presumption of the 19th century’s socialist philosophers who had expected to emulate in the social sciences the methodology of Newton’s physics and mathematics. 

In their ideological vision, intellectuals were to derive laws of social action analogous to Newton’s laws of motion.  Those sociological laws would then be applied by social engineers and economic planners to implement an entirely new social and economic structure that was to resurrect the primordial Garden of Eden, a society of socialized equality, with an abundance of goods and services equally available to all citizens.

Today’s liberal-progressivism is the heir to that egalitarian, socialistic ideology.

Implicit in it is the belief that human individuals and humans in the mass react to external stimulae, and that their reactions can be conditioned and manipulated by state planners. 

That, of course, was the significance of Russian scientist Pavlov’s 1890s experiment with conditioned response in dogs.  By training dogs to expect to receive a meal shortly after hearing a bell ring, Pavlov was able to induce salivation in the dogs whenever the bell rang.  His later work involved human responses and initiated the field of behavioral psychology.

Today’s propagandists like Paul Krugman are blindly confident that humans, like Pavlov’s dogs, can be channeled by government regulation and deficit spending into the egalitarian socialism championed by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.  If the Federal Reserve System creates enough fiat money and the Federal government engages in enough deficit spending, according to Keynesian macroeconomic theory, the economic boom of the housing bubble will automatically resume and be made perpetual.  If wealth is transferred by punitive taxation from “the rich” to everybody else, unemployment will disappear and social harmony will reign.

In contradistinction, today’s school of Austrian economics, along with earlier economic studies by Classical economists such as J. B. Say and Nassau W. Senior, assert the opposite: human behavior is characterized by purposeful action.  Judging from the abject failure of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and Obamanomics today, most people are fearful of a future clouded by the Democrat/Socialist Party’s continual threats to their way of life.  People obviously don’t rush out the door and immediately recommence spending and piling on credit card debt in automatic response to a melange of government stimulus programs.

Individuals have private desires and aims, which they endeavor to attain through their actions.  Those actions often may involve temporary inaction, deferring immediate gratification to achieve greater future benefit. And those aims and actions focused by them are massively varied, lying to a considerable extent outside the parameters prescribed by Democrat/Socialist Party economic planners.

Thus, a fundamental reason for repeated, and inevitable, failures of Keynesian macroeconomics is simply that individuals and humans in the mass do not uniformly, or even generally, react like automatons to the regulations and monetary inflation prescribed by Keynesian state planners.

Back to summary...