With the excitement surrounding yesterday’s release of J.J. Abram’s new Star Wars trailer, it is worth taking a look back to one of the best pieces of economic satire since Frédéric Bastiat’s famed Candlemakers’ Petition.
I speak, of course, of ZeroHedge’s “A Modest Proposal To Boost US GDP By $852 Quadrillion: Build The Imperial Death Star.” Only Paul Krugman has done a better job of using science fiction to highlight the absurdity of the Keynesian notion that it’s good for the economy to have government dump a ton of money into projects that bring no value to daily lives of individuals.
But it is not only Keynesians who are appropriately lampooned:
Now naturally since this entire amount would have to be debt funded, and since MMT tells us that America can issue any amount of debt without a hitch, it would only make sense that the US Treasury should sell $852 quadrillion in bonds at a few basis points in interest (negative rates if possible) post haste, and use the proceeds to construct said engineering marvel. Since modern economic theory tells us that every dollar in incremental debt is roughly equivalent to a dollar in GDP (as idiotic as that sounds), this would result in what can only be called the greatest golden age in the history of America, whose GDP would rise by over 56,000 times overnight to a little over $852,000,000,000,000,000, and all American citizens would be the richest (nominally of course, after all that is all that matters) not only in the world, but potentially in the known galaxy, overnight.
What makes the joke all the more entertaining is that Keynesians were forced to admit that, well – this idea isn’t really all that crazy.
In fact, my only concern with the article is that between Washington’s love of building impractical death machines that even the Pentagon doesn’t want, and the growing desperation of economic central planners to stimulate the economy – there is a chance this could actually become policy!
After all, Darth Vader recently received a key endorsement in a potential Presidential bid.
Death Star image source: Wookiepedia.
