Power & Market

“In the long run we are all dead.”

This famous retort of the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, was meant as a rebuttal to the views of the classical or free market economists. The entire quote reads:

But the long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again. [A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 80]

Unfortunately, most rejoinders to this quote from Keynes have focused on the value of long-term thinking in economic analysis, when in fact; the issue is just as surely the nature of the analogy itself. And since most casual readers of Keynes’s quote will be taken with the clever and telling point regarding the thought of economists, it has persuasive power.

But if we are to stop would-be Keynesian propagandists from scoring points with the phrase we must reveal the sleight of hand concealed therein. The nature of this sleight of hand is to take an event occurring in nature, a storm, and treating a depression as if it, too, were an equally and randomly occurring event of nature.

So, while a storm may be a natural occurrence, this is not the case with an economic depression. A depression is caused by intervention into the economy in the form of monetary expansion — hence the boom preceding the bust. With this kept closely in mind we can rephrase Keynes’ quote using an act of human shortsightedness that will render Keynes’ cleverness the thinking of fools:

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in the case of an extensive drinking binge they can only tell us that once the alcohol’s effect is long past the drinker will feel better again.

It becomes very evident why Keynes chose his particular example for ridiculing long-run thinking economists. By rendering the depression as analogous to a storm at sea, Keynes has taken all focus off the act — artificially increasing the money supply and thus lowering interest rates so that malinvestments accumulate — leading up to the consequences of that act, and thus is relieved of any analysis of the activity which would result in an economic depression.

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is a dubious thing at best.

First, it's not a "real" Nobel Prize in the sense the Nobel Foundation neither chooses nor pays the recipient(s). Technically, it's the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." The award itself is of checkered provenance, created by Swedish central bankers hoping to bolster the scientific image of economics. It's chosen by committee members who purposely apply the same principles used to determine winners in medicine, physics, and chemistry, thereby hoping the public won't much notice its lack of connection to the late Alfred Nobel (or his surviving family, one of whom blasted the prize as a PR effort designed to improve the bad reputation of economists). 

More importantly, though, the "Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess," as none other than Friedrich Hayek exclaimed in his own remarkable acceptance speech upon receiving the award in 1974. 

In Hayek's view, the Prize threatened to create an aura of hard science certainty around the decidedly social science of economics. This veneer, he worried, would influence both government officials and the public to view economic theory more like laws of physics or properties of molecules. 

This was dangerous, in the view of a man who had seen Europe and Russia collapse under "scientific" socialism and written extensively about political economy in The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty. He understood the deadly combination of hubris and certainty, and hoped to impress upon the audience that economics remained a discipline that studied humans, with all their irrationalities and frailties. In this sense he demonstrated the degree of respect he still had for the praxeological foundation of his then recently-departed old mentor Ludwig von Mises.

Murray Rothbard, writing in Human Events, had fulsome praise for Hayek as the surprise winner who eschewed the mathematical orientation of previous recipients:

The Nobel award comes as a surprise on two counts. Not only because all the previous Nobel Prizes in economics have gone to left-liberals and opponents of the free market, but also because they have gone uniformly to economists who have transformed the discipline into a supposed "science" filled with mathematical jargon and unrealistic "models" which are then used to criticize the free-enterprise system and to attempt to plan the economy by the central government.

F.A. Hayek is not only the leading free-market economist; he has also led the way in attacking the mathematical models and the planning pretensions of the would-be "scientists," and in integrating economics into a wider libertarian social philosophy. Both concepts have so far been anathema to the Nobel establishment.

Rothbard saw Hayek's achievement not only as a refutation of the Keynesian orthodoxy regarding stumulative monetary policy, but also as a demolition of the whole socialist political program flowing from Keynes's followers:

The political prescription that flows from the Hayekian theory is, of course, the diametric opposite of the Keynesian: stop the artificial inflationary boom, and allow the recession to proceed as fast as possible with its work of readjustment. Postponement and government attempts to stop or interfere with the recession process will only drag out and intensify the agony and lead to our current and probably future turmoil of inflation combined with lengthy recession and depression. The Mises-Hayek analysis is not only the only cogent theory of the business cycle; it is the only comprehensive free-market answer to the Keynesian morass of government planning and "fine tuning" that we are suffering from today.

But F.A. Hayek did not stop with this monumental contribution to economics. In the 1940s he widened his approach to the entire area of political economy. In his best-selling Road to Serfdom (1944) he challenged the prosocialist and pro-Communist intellectual climate of the day, showing how socialist planning must inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and demonstrating examples in the way in which the socialistic Weimar Republic paved the way for Hitler. He also showed how the "worst always get to the top" in a statist society.

So today let us celebrate Friedrich Hayek, the reluctant  and worthy Nobel winner—rather than an economist who once wrote this, in a textbook no less:

The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

After more than a year of Washington being crippled by evidence-free claims that the Russians have influenced our elections, we have a senior US Administration official openly calling for the overturning of elections overseas.

Imagine if President Putin’s national security advisor had grabbed a megaphone in New York and called for the people of the United States to overthrow their government by force!

At the UN, Venezuela’s President Maduro accused the Western media of hyping up the crisis in his country to push the cause for another “humanitarian intervention.” Some may laugh at such a claim, but recent history shows that interventionists lie to push regime change, and the media goes right along with the lies.

Remember the lies about Gaddafi giving Viagra to his troops to help them rape their way through Libya? Remember the “babies thrown from incubators” and “mobile chemical labs” in Iraq? Judging from past practice, there is probably some truth in Maduro’s claims.

We know socialism does not work. It is an economic system based on the use of force rather than economic freedom of choice. But while many Americans seem to be in a panic over the failures of socialism in Venezuela, they don’t seem all that concerned that right here at home President Trump just signed a massive $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill that delivers socialism on a scale that Venezuelans couldn’t even imagine. In fact this one spending bill is three times Venezuela’s entire gross domestic product!

Did I miss all the Americans protesting this warfare-welfare state socialism?

Why all the neocon and humanitarian-interventionist “concern” for the people of Venezuela? One clue might be the fact that Venezuela happens to be sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. More even than Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of countries pursuing dumb economic policies that result in plenty of suffering, but Nikki and the neocons are nowhere to be found when it comes to “concern” for these people. Might it be a bit about this oil?

Don’t believe this feigned interest in helping the Venezuelan people. If Washington really cared about Venezuelans they would not be plotting regime change for the country, considering that each such “liberation” elsewhere has ended with the people being worse off than before!

After last week’s explosive congressional hearing, the Senate and the Trump administration agreed to reopen the FBI background check into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Former FBI chief James Comey wrote Sunday that “the F.B.I. is up for this” because it is “full” of "people who just want to figure out what’s true." 

But truth has often been a scarce commodity in FBI investigations. Consider these cases stretching back decades:

Click here for the full article at USA Today.