The New Deal and Prohibition
Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic.
Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic.
Our health and living standards have virtually nothing to do with charity and virtually everything to do with entrepreneurs solving problems. Had we depended on only alms and goodwill to elevate our living standards, we would still be squatting in mud huts.
Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic. We are judged incapable of setting up an adequate social defense against vicious rum-sellers and malefactors of great wealth.
Paul Krugman took a macro forecast from Mark Zandi, and then after the fact compared it to the actual trajectory of GDP. Krugman concluded that Keynesian theory was vindicated, when in fact the results are more in line with what the critics predicted would happen.
As a developer, I do not hire an employee before I have conceived of a construction activity that will earn me a decent return. I hire an employee when I have a productive need for his services.
When I vote for the candidate who promises me betterment in my economic condition, I am condoning and encouraging some form of robbery. That does not square with my moral values.
If we are going to look at the current, dismal economy and blame somebody's policies for it, surely we can acquit Ron Paul. That doesn't by itself prove that Ron Paul's views are correct, but it certainly casts doubt on Krugman's constant claims.
Just before the beginning of the crisis, work produced by a variety of leading economists was very positive on the state of macroeconomics; it concluded that the field had made big advances in the last decades. A sample of their comments is offered below.
The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the "bourgeois" concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise that the socialist leaders promise them.