How Keynes is Still Messing Up Your Life

Damocles said:
Why do you do this? It doesn't show you know anything at all.

"Heads no pikes" is not an argument, it doesn't even show your opinion as to why it was "wrong".

Come on, watermark... you used to be thoughtful, now you are just a silly "heads on pikes" troll. You may as well just be Skinhead from the first board.
Click to expand...

Watermark said:
This does not deserve the dignity of being treated to rational discussion. It's trash, intellectual garbage by a man who knows shit about economics, and Epicurus is an ignorant piece of fucking shit for posting it.
Click to expand...

you're trolling is so mentally deficient that you're incapable of seeing the irony of your response....

you've offered nothing in this thread, not one fact or bit of information
 
How has that worked? "There's just no evidence" that this ever cured a recession, Lewis told me. Keynes "wasn't particular interested in evidence."

^sounds like watermark^
 
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
-John Maynard Keynes on his profound misunderstanding of capitalism
 
"Stimulus is like curing a hangover with Thunderbird."

Whats wrong with that? I keep Thunderbird around for that very reason, and I never have a hangover. It works.

Of course, I have been drunk since 1975, but I haven't had a hangover.
 
Epicurus said:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/65310867.html

In thrall to a long-dead experiment

We are all Keynesians now, Richard Nixon is said to have said. Too true, says Hunter Lewis, who's got a new book on how the famous British economist is still messing with your life.

And he is. We are all followers of John Maynard Keynes in the sense that lab rats, learning a maze by electric shocks, are disciples of some psychologist's theory. We no more benefit from this than do the rats.

Keynes, who died in 1946, is fashionable again. Politicians pray for his blessing on their stimulus plans, since Keynes preached that the way out of a slump was for government to spend lots of money. It should borrow vastly, said Keynes, and spend it on anything. He's the guy who first suggested paying some to dig ditches and others to refill them.

Nor just in slumps, said Keynes: Governments should print money, loads of it, to drive interest rates toward zero. This would cause a permanent boom, if only we also tax away money hoarded uselessly by rich people.

Sound familiar? Of course, says Lewis, who explains the doctrine precisely in "Where Keynes Went Wrong." Washington's embrace of Keynes went uninterrupted through Clinton to Bush to Obama. Fannie Mae's loose loans, the Fed's giveaway rates, bailouts, the porkulus: all Keynes, no matter the party.

How has that worked? "There's just no evidence" that this ever cured a recession, Lewis told me. Keynes "wasn't particular interested in evidence."

History suggests he should have been. Keynes was embraced by Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression; this stalled the mid-1930s recovery. Keynes' ideas in the 1970s led to stagflation. Japan stimulated crazily in the 1990s, giving itself the Lost Decades. The cure for the 2001 slump set up the 2008 crash.

Whereas recessions without stimulus - America in 1921, Southeast Asia in the 1990s - were sharp but swiftly over.

When governments pump stimulating rivers of money, they manipulate prices, the economy's gauges. By juking interest rates, the price of money, you're messing with the most critical gauge. The ensuing unreality leads to inflation, dot-com bubbles or foreclosed subdivisions. Stimulus is like curing a hangover with Thunderbird.

Lewis feels Keynesianism, an intellectual bubble, is nearing a pop, if only because Washington is running out of willing lenders. About time, he says. It has punished thrift and encouraged profligacy. It has led government to turn swaths of the economy into federal protectorates. "That's the single thing that worries me most," he said, the way bonds between government and business make the two indistinguishable. It sickens democracy.

Keynes wasn't a clear writer, says Lewis. He was self-contradictory: The solution to bad debt is more debt, for instance. The more you spend, the more you have. Deficits are a kind of savings. Lewis becomes grimly hilarious when he compiles the Keynesian paradoxes now being spouted. You realize our leaders aren't making sense.

Keynesians argue that it does make sense, only you rabble aren't equipped to comprehend. Keynes believed the economy couldn't be left up to rabble, who were ruled by "animal spirits." It had to be run by the wise - by people like him.

"He said, 'If things go too far in the wrong direction, I'll just step in and fix it,' " said Lewis. "Then he died."

We since have learned that governments are ruled by spirits as animal as anyone's, only with bigger paws. No one is so short-term as politicians, thinking of re-election and seduced by an urge to be in charge. This is why Keynesianism has triumphed among them, said Lewis: "It's a rationalization for policies that they'd like to pursue anyway."

So we all live in a $24 trillion experiment in whether, this time, stimulus will work. Two questions from one of the rats:

First, if the government rigs reality by messing with the value of money, how can we expect any other part of the economy to not be distorted and dishonest?

Second, if we abandon simple, comprehensible rules and rely on constant tinkering by wise leaders, what happens when we instead get leaders who, having done no work but rabble-rousing among Chicago's poor, have not the least clue about running an economy?

Revered, Keynes has no answer.
Click to expand...

May we compare the effects of what appears, to some, to be the modern day alternative, 'Supply Side'?
 
Damocles said:
The quoted post above contains no information.
Click to expand...

Given the final paragraph of the piece, do you feel honest discussion is necessary? An 'unbiased', 'scientific' conclusion, supposedly, has already been made with an insult. Why should it be dignified by anybody in opposition?
 
belme1201 said:
Given the final paragraph of the piece, do you feel honest discussion is necessary? An 'unbiased', 'scientific' conclusion, supposedly, has already been made with an insult. Why should it be dignified by anybody in opposition?
Click to expand...
Because regardless of tone the only information that has been provided so far in this thread has been from the article, each person that dislikes the opinion has simply just gone directly into ad hom idiocy that means nothing.

Please describe how the analysis is wrong, don't just say, "No he's wrong and my feelings are hurt!" because it does nothing to prove your point or educate anybody at all. Are we not here to learn? Do we not come here because we love debate?
 
Damocles said:
Because regardless of tone the only information that has been provided so far in this thread has been from the article, each person that dislikes the opinion has simply just gone directly into ad hom idiocy that means nothing.

Please describe how the analysis is wrong, don't just say, "No he's wrong and my feelings are hurt!" because it does nothing to prove your point or educate anybody at all. Are we not here to learn? Do we not come here because we love debate?
Click to expand...

The piece is an editorial promoting a recent book theorizing that the Depression was extended by FDR policies, however the editorialist goes out of his way to make his own OPINIONS known in agreement with the book using the ad hominems you obect to from the other side. My feelings aren't hurt but from the author's conclusion I might ask the source of his great knowledge of economics.

I think you know I am not afraid to debate, however debate must come from a willingness ro "debate" not shown in the editorial.
Refuting this piece only requires the use of facts from a calendar which would include the result of alternative policies unmentioned by the author such as the policies that LED us into the Great Depression and the recessions since, including the mini-depression now enveloping us.

In other words the editorialist dwells upon his opinion about problems with the medicine but ignores the germs that caused the disease.
 
Last edited:
The author of the quoted piece is quite obviously an ignorant shit. An author that refused to even make passing mention to government spending for WWII and the fact that it finally brought the economy back after the Great Dperession in an op-ed claiming that there is no evidence that government spending can bring an economy out of recession should not be taken seriously by anyone anywhere.

Nor should an author that doesn't bother to look at the latter half of the 19th century when arguing that recessions that do not result in increased government spending are "sharp but swiftly over."
 
belme1201 said:
The piece is an editorial promoting a recent book theorizing that the Depression was extended by FDR policies, however the editorialist goes out of his way to make his own OPINIONS known in agreement with the book using the ad hominems you obect to from the other side. My feelings aren't hurt but from the author's conclusion I might ask the source of his great knowledge of economics.

I think you know I am not afraid to debate, however debate must come from a willingness ro "debate" not shown in the editorial.
Refuting this piece only requires the use of facts from a calendar which would include the result of alternative policies unmentioned by the author such as the policies that LED us into the Great Depression and the recessions since, including the mini-depression now enveloping us.

In other words the editoriast dwells his opinion about problems with the medicine but ignores the germs that caused the disease.
Click to expand...
I don't object to ad homs specifically, I object to the valueless posts of ad hom solely and I don't really "object" to them, I'd just like to read some analysis from the other side. Something more than "My feelings are all hurty!"
 
Damocles said:
I don't object to ad homs specifically, I object to the valueless posts of ad hom solely and I don't really "object" to them, I'd just like to read some analysis from the other side. Something more than "My feelings are all hurty!"
Click to expand...

I said the calendar does not agree with him and he ignores cause while criticizing cure. Yes, as a result, I do question his expertise, that is not "ad hom" but a response to his "ad hom". If the object of the post was for discussion, why post an editorial instead of a serious synopsis or a book review? The book itself is not well accepted by many economists for the reasons stated and for speculation beyond fact. If the alternative to unseen "facts" in the editorial is 'Supply Side', the conditions of today added to historical past performance are all the argument needed to refute the nonsense.
I find it curious he bases his unbiased conclusions on a 1 year US recession hardly recorded in history and a mysterious SE Asia recession as his proof compared to the Great Depression and the mini-depression on us today. To prove his point he says the cure used in the 2001 recession(bush) was the reason for the 2008 recession(bush), would it not follow that the cure for the 1921 recession (Harding) then must have been the cause for the 1930s Great Depression(Hoover)? Doctor, without a disease, you need no medicine.

If you have a problem with that, I'm sorry. Your quote is from whom?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top