Another Obama Speech, more Shenanigans

I have not been writing my comments on current events lately, partly because I am too busy, but also because there has not been much new. Current political events are merely elaborations on the themes of one or two years ago. For instance, see my post of August 11, 2009, Mixed-Up Economy: We Are All Blood Suckers Now. The war of ideas between the Keynesian outlook and the Free market/Small Government school rages even more today.

Another theme of this blog, which has never been as obvious as now, is the observation that generally liberals accuse conservatives of doing exactly what they do, or plan on doing soon. (Such as their accusations of "uncivil" remarks from conservatives.) Today, Obama waved a newspaper and stated that the Republicans oppose his so-called jobs bill because it is to their political advantage, without regard to the damage to the country of not going along with his latest scheme. In actuality, it would seem to me very politically courageous to oppose Obama's proposal to hand out more stimulus money. For conservatives, who believe that less government intervention in the economy will ultimately bring the best results, it could be political suicide to advocate abandonment of bailouts and other government largess.

On the other hand, it may not be difficult to make the point that the "jobs bill" would not save any jobs, and is intended primarily to save Obama's job. He asks that our congressional representatives pass the bill right away, presumably before they have time to read it, just as they passed the other masterpieces of the Harry Reid bill writing factory. Those bills are never what we are told they are. We have to pass the bill "to see what is in it," as Nancy Pelosi tells us. (For instance, we just learned that if congress does not adopt the suggestions of the super-committee of bipartisan spending cutters, we will automatically get cuts to the military and cuts to what medical providers are paid by medicare. It was advertised that there would be cuts to medicare but it was not explained how the cuts would come about. Doctor fees are already cut to the bone.) No telling what will be lurking in the hundreds of pages of the latest Obamination.

What does seem obvious is that the new bill is the same as the old bill. It is a way of looting the treasury and giving the proceeds to his constituents, i.e. to serve Obama's political ends. The primary constituents to be rewarded are, as usual, the unions, especially government unions. There was little or no economic stimulant effect the first time. The Austrian school of free market economics, as well as the Gods of the Copybook Headings, would explain that only the free market can allocate recourse's to fill our most urgent needs. Government intervention only makes things worse with unintended consequences. Bailing out state government workers, for instance, only prolongs the problem of wages and benefits being too high. A 5% cut in government salaries would be a better way to avoid government layoffs. Longterm changes in government pension systems also are needed as soon as possible.

Glenn Beck had a guess the speech segment this morning. He played cuts from Obama's speech advancing the 2009 stimulus bill and his speech the other day pushing the "jobs bill'" You had to guess which speech was which. The only difference that I heard was the new strident, almost threatening tones of the president. He seemed to be ordering congress to pass this latest bill. I guess he was desperate, and ought to be.

The Electorate not Media Matters

According to Glenn Beck, "Media Matters," a liberal blog, has launched an attack against him and the Fox news organisation. Check the following link to see that he is correct:

http://mediamatters.org/columns/201010290036

This blog has no fundamental disagreement with the issues that Media Matters raises in this article. That is, we agree that they are issues. We differ diametrically in our view of these issues. In fact, what Media Matters accuses Fox of is often exactly what this blog (and the Tea Party conservatives) say that they (and the Statist Progressive Left) are doing. For example, Media Matters says:

"They [Fox] do all of this while continuing their time-honored tradition of tearing down liberal initiatives and politicians with shameless smears, lies, misrepresentations, and fabricated stories..."

So, they are correct that Fox attempts to tear down liberal initiatives. Fox does it by telling the truth about liberals and their initiatives. It is the left, presumably with the endorsement of Media Matters, that uses shameless smears and fabricates stories. Just look at the recent statements from the left regarding conservative women candidates, which have been exposed as farcical fabrications and certainly smears and shameless too. Look at all the lies we were told about the Health Care bill with hardly a peep of objection from the mainstream media.

Media Matters' article also states:

"Right out of the gate, Fox led the charge against the stimulus, eschewing the views of economists to attack deficit spending and rewriting history to attack FDR and the New Deal.
The network was certainly "the voice of the opposition" on health care reform, spewing countless falsehoods about both our broken health care system and the proposals to fix it while promoting disruptions of health care town halls and GOP initiatives to kill reform."

Here again we have clear lines of demarcation. We believe one thing and they believe the opposite. Fox, Sarah Palin's Common Sense Conservatives, The Tea Party, me, and innumerable others did not want so called economic stimuli from government spending, which some economist believe in. We have discussed John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman (a real bearded Marxist), for example. Other economists, such as Milton Friedman and Ludvig von Mises, disagree. They do not so much eschew the opposing statist progressive views as they have study them in depth then refute and reject them. That is true of the views and initiatives of FDR and of BHO.


That Fox and the afore mentioned conservatives oppose the so called health care and wall street reforms is also no secret. [Ed Note: This blog opposes Cap-and-Trade most of all.] In a free society with a free press, the public hears both sides and decides. Media Matters would have us hear only their side. It brings to mind the bible story of David and Bathsheba. When David saw Bathsheba and desired her, even though she was married, the prophet Nathan (I think that's who it was) rebuked him. He compared King David to a rich man with many flocks who sees a poor man and wants his only lamb. The left is supported by many large media outlets, the only comparably strong voice of dissent is Fox. To Media Matters and its masters, that is too many.

William F Buckley observed that the left says they want to hear both sides, but they are shocked to hear that there is another side. We know who the other side is and what it stands for and we do not want it.

Krugman Speaks (in His Native Tongue)

In his column appearing in the Seattle Times today, Paul Krugman says that the usual suspects (i.e. conservatives) will go wild if there is progress at the Copenhagen global warming conclave. He also thinks there will be cries that this is a vast scientific conspiracy which will destroy jobs and economic growth. In fact conservatives have been a little wild and more that a little angry. They have lately been wild with enthusiasm that the recent "climate-gate" revelations show that there is indeed a vast conspiracy that is finally being exposed. They have also been angry that such a hoax continues to be perpetrated against the citizens of this country and of the world. For myself, I am somewhat numb. I have seen too much of the ignorance of those who are the willing victims of this hoax to feel much outrage anymore. I still believe that global warming ranks in the top ten in all the history of tyranny against the mind of man. Satan in the Garden being number one and Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and a few like minded others vying for the other top spots. Unfortunately, for the same reasons that Mr. Krugman is optimistic, I am growing pessimistic.

Of course, Mr. Krugman is guilty of advancing and perpetuating egregious violence against reason, but I do not blame him. He is locked into a mind set that has hopelessly befuddled his thinking (related to "Keyneseism"). He advances several arguments in favor of the economic benefits that would accrue to us if we adopted a policy of cap-and-trade to fight global warming. To be generous to him, his thesis is probably better stated as something like, "cap-and-trade would cause far less decline than has been claimed by its detractors." It is a little difficult to say if maybe he does think there could be a net gain when he states that businesses will, "be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon." Actually, he means that they will mitigate their losses under cap-and-trade by "burning" less carbon. The only ones to profit will be those in the marketing of the carbon credits, i.e. the tax collectors

In any event, in his reasoning he falls prey to one of the most pervasive economic fallacies, the fallacy of the broken window. This was named by Bastiat and referenced by Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson. The Nobel Laureate, Mr. Krugman claims that there can be economic gains by investment in development of various ways to emit less greenhouse gas. This is like the investment that Bastiat talks about to repair the broken window. The manufactures and the installer will all benefit by the "investments" made in repairing the broken window. They will spend their new gains, thus stimulation the economy. Therefore would it not be beneficial to break more, of even all windows? Especially, as claimed by Mr. K, at a time of economic downturn? The answer is: No.


The reason for this is not difficult to discern. The resources that go into the repair of the window would have been used for something else if the window had not been broken. If for some reason, no windows were broken for a year, we would experience an upsurge in the production of other economic goods. Perhaps the capitol, labor, and natural resources used in the production and installation of windows would go to the building of new houses. (The exact composition of the new goods would depend upon the what purchasers in the market demanded, for the consumer is king in the unimpeded market.) If more windows are broken, we cannot say what would be lost for we can never know what might have been. That so few can see this simple fact is what causes my pessimism.

With the case of global warming, the atmosphere is what is broken, according to Al Gore and the warmies. Much of the scarce recources of planet earth have to go to stopping the damage to the atmosphere, according to them. In the opinion of the conservative wing, we do not even get a new window, since the atmosphere is not really broken and our efforts will not fix anything.

Now Mr. K also says that to believe that Man Made Global Warming is a hoax, one would have to believe in a vast scientific conspiracy. That may be so. Yet to believe as Mr. K does, one would have to believe in a conspiracy of all the fossil fuel users around the globe. He says that we can reduce emissions at relatively low cost by, "improved insulation, more efficient appliances, more fuel efficient cars and trucks, greater use of solar, wind, and nuclear power and much, much more." All we need is the economic incentive of cap-and-trade to find and develop all these new ways. However I would point out that we already have the incentive of $70 to $100 per gallon oil. I would think that, unless there is some vast conspiracy among oil users to keep using oil, we would already be expending vast amounts of resources to use less. Yet petroleum, coal, natural gas, and firewood sill provide maybe 70% of the world energy needs. If significant use of alternatives and conservation had "a relatively low cost" why aren't they here now?

According to economists, which I now perceive Mr. K is not, the answer to that question is a little more subtle and involves the concept of economic decisions being made at the margin, and diminishing returns. Suffice it to say, that even common sense allows us to say that all decisions involve a trade-off between alternative actions. Whatever those trade-offs are, they cannot be as cost-free as the cap-and-traders want us to believe. I really don't know how much solar energy development would costs, but if there would be a great return to low cost efforts in that direction, it seems that we would have a lot more of it now.

If the schemes of the warmies come to fruition, those of us not among the elite architects of the conspiracy, will not like the result. However, if we are so ignorant as to be deceived by the likes to Al Gore and Paul Krugman, then we were literally made to be sold.

Lack of Consistancey or Just Plain Lying

Paul Krugman says: Bush deficit - bad. Obama deficit - good.

How to understand it all?

see von Mises Institute's recent article http://mises.org/story/3691

Mixed-Up Economy: We are All Bloodsuckers Now

John Maynard Keynes was an intellectual descendant of Karl Marx not of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. The policies he advocated lead, sometimes little by little and sometimes by leaps and bounds, to socialism. Socialism, once achieved, must ultimately fail and leads to the breakdown of society (via the breakdown of the division of labor, as Professor von Mises has explained). From there, who knows: military dictators, back to feudal warring states or tribes or...?

Paul Samuelson was a recent leading Keynesian, who gained prominence by writing the college economics text book that was most in fashion during the 1970's and '80's. Currently we have Nobel prize winning economist and NY Times columnist, Paul Krugman to carry the Keynesian flag. There have been and are many others, they advance the cause of socialism. (Even Richard Nixon made the famous remark, "We are all Keynesians now." He didn't know any better apparently or he was sharing the blame for his deficit spending.)

One of the many faults of Lord Keynes, was that his theories justified government deficit spending. Deficits have a few problems, the biggest being perhaps that they allows greater government intervention in the economy (not to mention inflation). Samuelson explained methods of determining the proper values of various economic parameters and how government could fiddle around to obtain the optimum results. For example, the government needs to and is able to, through taxing and spending, achieve "full employment." Now, by applying Keynes and Samuelson's methods, Mr. Krugman says that BHO's stimulus deficit spending is great, just not enough. (Mr. Krugman also advocates more regulation, which is another story.)

I have linked to a better explanation of these foolish theories that I could ever provide:

http://mises.org/story/3608
　
Economics of Oblivion; Mises Daily by George Koether

A few quotes: "Laissez-faire is dead, long live the "mixed economy!" Unfortunately it is often difficult to tell which is more mixed, the economy or the professors. They try their best to seem as sincerely opposed to "complete" socialism as they are obviously cocksure rugged individualism is gone forever. Their "mixed economy" seems to be a course midway between capitalism and socialism, with careful avoidance of the "bad" in each.
The difficulties they encounter in trying to steer between the Scylla of socialism and the Charybdis of capitalism would be amusing if the implications were not so tragic."
...
"Wrong again. Economics does have great exactitude, but it is a qualitative, not a quantitative exactitude. The economist cannot know the number or size of all the cakes in the world, or when they will be eaten, but he is dead certain that whoever eats his cake no longer has it.
That is more than the Keynesians seem to know. Their theory implies you cannot have your cake until you do eat it. You can spend your way into prosperity. The formulas say so."
...
"This "new economics" is neither new nor economics. Instead, it is a concatenation of statistics, mathematics and social philosophy used in support of the age-old sophistries of government inflationism."

A quote from John Maynard Keynes, revealing what his true wishes were regarding the socialist state: "[T]he sharp distinction, approved by custom and convention during the past two centuries, between the property and rights of a State and the property and rights of its nationals is an artificial one, which is being rapidly put out of date … and is inappropriate to modern socialistic conceptions of the relations between the State and its citizens"- Cf. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), p. 71 (quoted in above article.)
According to the author, George Koether, these teaching, because they offer an easy way to prosperity (and for politicians to reward their voters and special interests supporters) have driven out more sensible economic thinking, as debased coinage will drive out the true gold.

Do you renounce BHO and all his empty promises?