Sorry to hijack SDA, but I figured this would be priceless and worth a good laugh given President Zero’s latest “stimulus” plan.
Sorry to hijack SDA, but I figured this would be priceless and worth a good laugh given President Zero’s latest “stimulus” plan.
If only we could laugh with the same abandon and then just change the channel! Not to say the deaths in the trenches were in any way a joke.
is it at all possible that Keynes was the right man *for the time*??? would SDA admit that just might be so????
Keynes was a commie scumbag trying to take down capitalism. He like “Karl Marx” were never the right man for any time. SHEESH
According to Einstein the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
CEO – most certainly. If he were man enough to acknowledge that his ideas have failed miserably wherever they’re tried.
The same way that I can readily admit that Karl Marx was a very observant man who did a wonderful job of collecting statistics on the economy of the day. Marx made the mistake of extrapolating current trends without considering that, in the same way employers could be ruthless towards the working class, the working class could turn right around and be ruthless to the employers. If you can’t find anyone to work for you in the conditions you offer for the pay you offer, who will work well and fast enough to produce goods as well as your competitors, you go out of business. Instead Marx and Kaynes locked themselves into the narrative of their day. Or perhaps it is those who follow them who cannot abide by the fact that their plans don’t work as intended, but keep recycling them again and again because the magical stimulus faerie will make it all work next time?
Fearless Phantom prediction 1: the gold bubble pops when a Tea Party candidate wins the White House or looks likely to. And not before.
Prediction 2: The market will open down on Thursday. Barry will speak, and markets across the world will TANK while the words are coming out of his mouth.
Surprisingly for me, FREE and sasquatch were both typing at the same time as I started my missive. Odd that we all picked the same points to respond. And well stated, folks.
FREE, I assume you’ve read Keynes’ entire oeuvre, and therefore your condemnation of him is based on your learned thinking and deep understanding of his concepts, and not just the simple-minded parroting of what some rube has heard.
And Captain, thanks for this – it gave me a few minutes respite from the election commercials. I’m serious – one break it was McSquinty, Whorebath, McSquinty (a different commercial), and Whorebath with what seems to be her only missive. Every break has at least one of them. Any SDA’ers visiting Ontario in the next month – bring lots of DVD’s, because watching TV is going to be a painful experience.
On September 17th the German supreme court will rule that any further bailouts of Greece are not allowed. That is when the markets will TANK and it’s also why Obama wanted to speak that day.
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NBC Our Pollsters Are Concerned about Obama Poll Numbers
http://www.mrctv.org/videos/nbcs-chuck-todd-our-pollsters-are-concerned-about-obamas-poll-numbers
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There’s a lot Blackadder can teach us, particularly the pronunciation of the word “antidisestablishmentarianism”.
Silly question: what makes Obama think that throwing money at a problem will work?
Totally aside — Hugh Lawrie’s had a great acting career.
sasquatch
Bill W. didn’t come up with that?
Osumashi Kinyobe
Climatization…when they throw money at you based on aspirational rhetoric it isn’t surprising that tossing money around is your forte.
President zero is accomplishing an amazing feat. In record time, is his finalizing his “legacy” as being the absolute worst President in history.
An amazing accomplishment, when one considers it.
Ohhh…and the fact that his accomplishment coicides with the absolute decline of the American Empire is, I’m sure, not a worry for him. Michelle will likely still be able to spend her time on vacations.
CEO, you do understand that to balance his theory of deficit spending during recessions he advocated massive cut-backs in the good times…right?
Remember: this particular Blackadder series ending was very depressing, too. Just sayin’…
All of series IV was terribly depressing, I thought. It felt off, somehow, as if the whole cast and crew were being forced to do it against their will and were trying to kill the series so they wouldn’t have to come back.
Blackadder: Back and Forth is a marvelous tonic for this, and features Colin Firth getting punched in the face.
KevinB: I’m not being facetious: Have you read Lord Keynes’ “entire oeuvre”?
I’ve read a lot of Hayek, von Mises and Rothbard, but certainly not their entire oeuvres. I haven’t read Marx’s Communist Manifesto: would this disqualify me from criticizing marxism based merely on my understanding of human nature and how the world actually works.
At the moment I’m re-reading Hayek’s Denationalization of Money: The Argument Refined. Try it!
I wouldn’t describe Keynes as a commie. But he was certainly a Bloomsbury socialist (with a single course in economics). He certainly didn’t warm to capitalism; he distrusted markets believing they are intrinsically unstable and needing the concerned, steady, skilled hands of politicans (with 2-4 year timeframes!) for stability, whereas we Austrians believe that the business cycle is actually a product of government intervention (however well-intended) and not a naturally occuring phenomenon.
KevinB: I’ll say it again. You need to study the Austrians. Key concept: Keynesianism’s fatal flaw was its lack of a capital theory and its obsession with artifical aggregates like the “general price level”.
Keynes was a total fool for not understanding that politicans in modern liberal democracies are simply not able to “cut back during good times.” It is a TOTAL COP-OUT to defend Keynes for making this impossible suggestion!
Keynes advising politicas to run surpluses during good times is akin to telling pedophiles that they shouldn’t seek sex with children. Good advice all round but unrealistic.
Posted by: lance at September 8, 2011 4:12 AM
Somebody should have mentioned the cutting back part to Mulroney.
Regarding the 9:28 post
“NBC Our Pollsters Are Concerned about Obama Poll Numbers”
In about 2 weeks look for a similar headline-
“NBC Our Pollsters Are Concerned about Obama Poll Digit”
Yup. The Zero will open his black,muzzie yap again and everything will tank a bit more.That’s why I am selling short and making a killing.bring on the unicorns and pixie dust :):)
Oh.And the Zero’s “stimulus” plan is laying a plank across Micheles butt and trying to have sex with it!
Me No Dhimmi & KevinB (assuming KevinB is still typing to me after I expressed the opinion that Ron Paul, for all his virtues, is pragmatically unelectable) – could either or both of you, or indeed anyone, recommend just which works of Keynes and/or Hayek I should be looking at? I’m not going to read the whole library, but I am very pretentious so I should aquiaint myself with the general ideas. Road to Serfdom, obviously.
(I am not in the market for Economics for Dummies. If Barry won’t read it then neither will I.)
(Blackadder was fun, but remember that Stephen Fry and Dr. House also did Jeeves and Wooster, which is a really fantastic adaption of Wodehouse’s genius novels.)
Oh, and there’s this. Brilliant.
Thanks Black Mamba….that was great!
MND: Nope, I haven’t just, a bunch of it. And what makes you think I’m unfamiliar or unsympathetic to the Austrian school? I’ve read The Road to Serfdom, and bits and pieces of Schumpete, Von Mises,and others. I find there is much truth in their ideas
I disagree that Keynes was not “warm to capitalism”; he speculated on futures markets as a young man. One famous story, perhaps apocryphal, has him running frantically from country house to country house to find storage for the 50,000 bushels of corn he had been forced to purchase.
Keynes thought businessmen were realists, and that their biggest problem uncertainty of expectations. If businessmen were uncertain and feared deflation/recession, then they would cut back on spending – both buying goods and hiring people. You can’t deny that this is exactly what happens in our economy today. US businesses are reportedly sitting on $1.25 TRILLION in cash; they’re unwilling to invest and hire because they have no idea of what the economic climate is going to be, what Obamacare is going to cost them, if the EPA is going to shut them down, what their taxes will be etc., etc. So they sit on their hands, and unemployment sits at 9%.
Keynes coined this the “output gap”, and said it would happen less frequently if businessmen could be sure that demand could be maintained. Which is why he recommended stimulus spending in that event, but as lance pointed out above, he also recommended governments run surpluses during good times, so as to have a purse to spend out of during bad times. That modern governments have only followed the first half of the prescription isn’t Keynes’ fault. (And, in fact, if you look at the US, they actually did follow the whole deal from the end of the Korean War until the escalation in Vietnam – the overall US federal gov’t debt was virtually in balance over that period, with spending during recessions and surpluses in good times).
If there was one class Keynes was not sympathetic to it was what he called rentiers – bond holders who just clipped the coupons. He recommended that when gov’t interest payments get too high, that they implement a capital tax on the value of the bonds held. When he realized that was politically impossible, he made what I feel was his biggest mistake (while being correct). He wrote “Inflation as a method of taxation”, and governments everywhere have seized on that, since it’s silent, invisible, and remorseless.
BTW, Hayek said of Keynes “he was the one really great man I ever knew”, and Keynes said of The Road to Serfdom “In my opinion it is a grand book … Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.” I think, had Keynes lived long past the war, he and the Austrians may have moved together to find more common ground and better solutions.
I just get tired of knee-jerk criticism of Keynes by people who clearly know nothing of his work (obviously not you).
KevinB: Hope you don’t think I’m picking on you. Compliments on the excellent war posts!
I disagree that Keynes was not “warm to capitalism”; he speculated on futures markets as a young man.
– KevinB
KevinB: True, but that’s a fallacious conclusion.
Consider: Soros is very wealthy, speculates on all the markets, including currencies, but he’s not warm to capitalism is he? He’s actively against capitalism (for thee, anyway).
I’m in complete agreement with your observations about the uncertainty caused by excessive regulation (EPA, ObamaCare, etc.)
If I’m not mistaken Keynes advocated inflation as the get-around for wage rigidity, arrogantly believing that the unions wouldn’t catch on to the racket!
No, it’s not Keynes’s fault that governments don’t run surpluses in good times, but as I said, it’s naive in the extreme to base an economic theory on the virtue of vote-buying politicans.
As to businessmen wanting “demand management”, I’d say, what businessmen want is not necessarily in the general interest. Business enthusiasm for the HST in BC is a good example. As you are no doubt aware, businessmen also like easy money which is the root cause of the boom-bust business cycle due to the artifical expansion of bank credit.
I seem to remember Hayek’s praise of Keynes’s greatness as a man. But that doesn’t change my view at all of the tragic consequences of Keynesianism. But it certainly points out what a great and honourable gentlemen was Hayek considering that Keynes beat him out as the standard-bearer of economic wisdom.
It’s mathematically impossible for government to “stimulate” the economy. They can only boost certain sectors at the expense of others. See: all the road construction going on in Vancouver, and Montreal, the terminus of a recent ride.
Finally, Keynesian monetary policy creates FALSE expectations. It disrupts the stucture of capital markets causing malinvestment on a grand scale as businessmen make investments which seemed viable due to the excessive expansion of bank credit and the accompanying artificially low interest rates. Keynes paid too much attention to the “general price level” and none at all to “relative prices” which is the core of Austrian capital theory.
Fine! It’s thunderdome! My questions mean nothing.
Black Mamba:
In total agreement with you on Ron Paul. The fence is to keep Americans in!!??
WELL,
General reading to get the libertarian spirit and some very good basic economics:
Bastiat’s The Law, and Economic Sophisms.
Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
Ludwig Von Mises:
HUMAN ACTION.
Socialism.
Interventionism.
Friedrich Hayek:
Road to Serfdom
The Fatal Conceit
The Constituion of Liberty (two volumes).
Murray Rothbard:
What Has Government Done to our Money
The Origins of the Federal Reserve
The Mystery of Banking.
It’s been a few years, but I believe HUMAN ACTION is accessible to intelligent “lay persons” like yourself. I, of course, am a “lay person” too with no real academic background in economics.
I am especially enthralled with anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, von Mises successor.
Mises Institute book store.
Amazon.ca
FEE (Foundation of Economic Education).
Thank you, Me No Dhimmi.