Today, it’s nice to know that human beings are a lot more enlightened. We know that the dimensions of someone’s skull or nose don’t matter much in the way of intelligence or integrity.
And we can wonder with absolute incredulity how anyone could have passed off such nonsense as science.
Here’s the irony, though. In the future, they’ll wonder the same thing about us. The difference is that our faux-science is economics.
In the future, they’ll wonder with utter incredulity how these ridiculous assertions about conjuring money out of thin air and borrowing your way out of debt could possibly pass as science.
They’ll be mystified at how political leaders listen to these modern day soothsayers, directing national policy and robbing wealth from hundreds of millions of people based on this faux-science.
And they’ll be completely floored when they see that we actually award our most esteemed prizes to these men who tell us that we can spend our way out of recession and tax our way into prosperity.
To give you an example, I’ve just finished Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s new book The Price of Inequality in which he writes something that may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard from an economist:
“[T]he success of [Apple and Google], and indeed the viability of our entire economy, depends heavily on a well-performing public sector. There are creative entrepreneurs all over the world. What makes a difference. . . is the government.”
Simon Black
July 17, 2012
Guest Post: Quite Possibly The Dumbest Thing I’ve Heard An Economist Say
[I’ll grant that government makes a difference. A government that enforces contracts, protects the rights of individuals to own property, and to exchange in free trade is what makes for a thriving economy. Government involvement to a greater or lesser amount may reap short term benefits for some people but the long term result is a less successful economy and society.
Or as Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, it’s both startling and revealing (H/T to son James) that the President of the United States also adheres to that philosophy:
President Obama either demonstrated profound ignorance and/or ill-intent and deserves all the ridicule he gets. He does not deserve to be president of anything in our country.—Joe]
Beyond providing a legal structure for property and some infrastructure, government only has a negative impact on productive activity. Taxes, rules, and regulations always define what we may not do. Even when “tax incentives” are enacted, they are just a reduction in the general dis-incentive of the overall tax system. Most of the interaction productive people and businesses have with government consist of various forms of asking permission to do what we already know is in our best interest to do.
I think what Stiglitz, the president, and Elizabeth Warren all have wrong is the order of cause and effect. We had a vibrant and productive private economy in this country long before we built all the wonderful infrastructure we have now. We didn’t build a vibrant economy because we had this infrastructure. We built all these roads and bridges because we had a productive economy to pay for them.
We must assume, for the sake of the Republic and our descendants’ future that the President is operating from bad faith intent. He may only be ignorant, but does that ameliorate the ill effects of his acts? No. Of course not. While it may be true that incompetence outweighs malice in the scales, but the effects are the same, regardless.
No. Arguments as to motive can be invidious. We need to be united in purpose: it doesn’t matter whether the Left has good motives. It must be defeated, soundly and once and for all.
M
Yes, but our esteemed President and the native American Elizabeth Warren have known nothing but our prosperity and our wonderful infrastructure built upon and with that wonderful prosperity, so they demonstrate they have no sense of history, which, as the late Colonel Cooper said, (or words to the effect) without the sense of history you might as well go around with a paper bag on your head.
What tribe did Elizabeth Warren say she was from? Hekawi? Chief Wild Eagle, Crazy Cat, and her.
Yeah, but if it makes anybody feel any better, that generation of hard-nosed realists who think we’re idiots will only be an aberration, a temporary correction forced to confront reality. After they’re gone, THEIR descendants will wonder why they were so stingy and mean.
The more government gets in our way and the more government takes away from us by force, the better we do? How F’d up in the head does one have to be to believe that?
No; the inequities in the world are the result of the unequal distribution of liberty, and nothing else. Bringing this country down, as is the Left’s intent, will harm the whole world, rather than lift anyone else up as they seem to believe.
I want to see just one state cut their taxes, restrictions and other government meddling to near zero. And here’s the deal; everyone on the left and the right knows what would happen– capital would flow into that state like a river, and the economy would boom. The entire U.S. was such a place, long ago. The left knows it and hates it.