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Economic Policy Treats Symptoms, Not Underlying Causes
Submitted by Logan Albright via Mises Canada,
Take a look at the breathtaking array of government policies designed to fix every conceivable problem citizens might encounter. Look at the laws governing labor unions, minimum wage laws, occupational licensure, unemployment insurance, stimulus spending; look at the endless efforts to improve education through government standards, mandatory testing, earlier and earlier induction of children in schools against the will of their parents, student loan refinancing; look at health care policy. No, wait. Don’t look at health care policy. It’s too depressing. The point is, all of these rules and regulations and programs go on and on for thousands and thousands of pages, each of which tries to slap a band-aid on a particular, identified problem that the workers in government believe can be fixed by printing some ink onto some paper.
Does any of it work? One could argue that some of it does, but even when the results are not a complete disaster, there is always a great deal of expense, of inefficiency, of waste, of corruption, and always, always of violations of liberty.
The sad thing is that the multitude of problems that government programs are so desperately trying to fix are not actually real problems at all: they are symptoms. Unemployment is a symptom; lack of educational success is a symptom; low wages are a symptom; unaffordable health care is a symptom. And as any doctor who is not a complete fraud (which rules out a fair few of them, I’m sad to say) will tell you, it is foolish and counterproductive to treat a symptom while ignoring the underlying disease.
The disease, in this case, is a stagnant economy. Lack of growth, of entrepreneurship, of saving, of production, of general vibrancy is to blame for practically every problem that government, in the depths of its ignorance, tries ineffectually to solve. With strong economic growth there is nearly full employment, there are higher wages, the workers have greater equality with their employers, so labor regulations are not needed. Everyone has more money in their pockets, and more money in their bank accounts – real value, mind you, not simply the empty promise offered by a central bank’s inflationary tactics.
Since everyone has a good job, employers are less able to be picky about their employees. They will need all hands on deck to supply the increasing demand. This limits their ability to screen out people without advanced degrees, causing the demand for higher education to drop, resulting in lower prices and better quality. Conversely, workers will have the ability for more leisure time due to their increased wages, and that means a chance to improve their education either through lessons or private intellectual pursuits. Parents become more educated, which results in children becoming more educated, to say nothing of the higher income’s ability to purchase better schooling for children.
With better education, lighter workload, and more money comes better health. Higher quality food can be purchased, more leisure time is available for exercise, more precautions can be taken against disease. The reduced demand on physicians will result in lower prices, and the fact that more people will have the time and money to study medicine means that competition will be rigorous.
It sounds Utopian, but economic growth really is a panacea that improves standards of living for everyone in nearly every way. But instead of pursuing economic growth, the government wastes its time with piecemeal patches, trying to plug a hole whose cause remains unabated.
But what can government do, you ask, to achieve strong economic growth? It’s simple, really. As John Galt once said: Get out of the way. Let business be free to make profits, and they will hire all the workers they can get their hands on. Stop erecting roadblocks that prevent individuals from making money, and make money they will. Leave people alone, and they will come together to do great things.
The economy we have now is like a mental patient, drugged up with so many antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers that the root of his problems has become undetectable. Get the young man out in the sunlight, get him some exercise, provide some meaning and purpose for him. In short, teach him how to live, and the amount of improvement will be remarkable.
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When you look to or allow the same group of idiots that screwed it up in the first place to try and fix it, it will always look like band-aids. But the elite has vast wisdom beyond our comprehension, so stop complaining and get on board.
(do I need the /sarc for the second statement?)
In the past I would have said no, but lately.....
</sarc>
There is no profit in a cure. Only a communist would stand against churning and burning your fellow man in the capitalist game of wits and strategy.
Anyone who is against the solutions presented by our greatest economic minds in the Federal Reserve is a communist who stands against capitalism and the free market.
Can these bullshit articles on Zero stop? Can we stop criticizing the Fed et al. as if they are trying to help us or that they don't know what they are doing? Economic policy from the Fed et al. is only meant to steal wealth and assert control. In that respect, they know exactly what they are doing and they are doing a great job.
For real.
The global limits to growth have been reached. The tide is no longer rising for all. If you want your big ass boat to go up, you've got to be cramming lots of little boats underneath to support it. Those in power know this, either conciously or unconciously. It no longer pays to help the lower classes because growth is dead.
They know what they are doing and who that effort will benefit.
Correct, Hacker!
The validity of your points is why this article above was a double dose of deliberate stupidity, as another articulation of obsolete ideals, which can never work in the real world anymore. The double whammy is that governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangsters, the banksters. Their systems of being able to strip-mine planet Earth are reaching real limits. There are no realistic ways to resolve those problems, other than runaway debt insanities provoking death insanities during the next Century or so.
http://www.paulchefurka.com/Population.html
Anyone advocating any return to growth is deliberately ignoring the limits to exponential growth on a finite planet. Of course, that has been the dominate ideology for thousands of years, and the only apparently pragmatic ways that the frequency of those ideas can be changed is through the mass murder of the majority of the human population ... IF it was possible to have any rational public debates about these issues, then MAYBE we could work out better death controls, as the central feature to a more sustainable integration of human ecology, industrial ecology and natural ecology. However, in practice, the only possible changes are for the established systems to continue going mad, and destroy themselves.
Another recent article, which was similarly silly was:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-16/what-might-have-been
What Might Have Been"... we have completely papered over the problem, performing the equivalent of covering a cancer patient with band-aids."
The debt cancer in the USA, which is the heart of the globalized beast, has been on a 99% perfect match to an exponential function since the 1970s. That has become a totally metastasized cancer, because the monetary system spread everywhere, controlling everything, whereby every social institution became infected by the same fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system. The established systems have driven debt slavery to generate numbers which became debt insanity.
The banksters' "solutions" are more genocidal world war, and democidal martial law, within an all around mass murder of the majority of people.
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/silent_weapons_quiet_wars.htm
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
"Energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping. ... In this structure, credit, presented as a pure element called "currency," has the appearance of capital, but is in effect negative capital. Hence, it has the appearance of service, but is in fact, indebtedness or debt. ... if balanced in no other way, will be balanced by the negation of population (war, genocide)... They must eventually resort to war to balance the account, because war ultimately is merely the act of destroying the creditor ... War is therefore the balancing of the system by killing the true creditors (the public ...)"
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE ANY RATIONAL PUBLIC DEBATES, SINCE THOSE WOULD HAVE TO FOCUS ON THE SOCIAL FACTS THAT OUR HUMAN ECOLOGY OPERATES THROUGH THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE DECEITS, WHILE OUR POLITICAL ECONOMY OPERATES THROUGH THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE FRAUDS.
The underlying problems are how and why that happened. A better understanding does not allow any impossible ideals to be the basis for realistic solutions. There is no way around the problem that the human murder systems were central to causing everything else to be the way it is now, and therefore, nothing less than changing the human murder systems is sufficient. Of course, in the real world that necessarily means that the runaway debt insanities are going to drive death insanities, since it is NOT possible to have any saner public resolutions of the problems created by the history of successful warfare being based upon deceits, which sustained a money system based on the maximum frauds.
The only thing I disagreed with, Hacker, was your last line. I think that the banksters have become criminally insane. They only "know what they are doing" through the habits of history. HOWEVER' NOTHING IN HUMAN HISTORY IS COMPARABLE TO THE PROGRESS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ENABLING THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF THE PLANET TO BE HIGH-GRADED TO HELL!
Only people who continue to believe in goofy old-fashioned ideologies could think we could grow ourselves out of the problems that there are now globalized systems of electronic frauds, backed by the threat of the force of atomic bombs! Theoretically, human beings could develop better evolutionary ecologies, which included new sciences and technologies. However, realistically, the only way that could happen is PERHAPS some human beings surviving through most of the rest committing mad collective suicides, through mutual mass murders.
Social pyramid systems based on being able to back up legalized lies with legalized violence, pumped up with technologies that are trillions of times more powerful, can NOT now be the subject of any rational public debates, in order for those problems to be better resolved.
Instead, it is clear when one reads Zero Hedge articles and comments how utterly impractical, to point of impossibility, any saner resolutions of the runaway problems are. Social systems based on a long, long history of social success being based on backing up lies with violence can not be fixed by anything within those systems. Only their mad self-destruction can "fix" their problems: the political economy is a metastasizing cancer, of a terminally sick and insane society. In theory, human beings could understand themselves as general energy systems better. However, in order to do that would result in reversing the meaning of social "success" based on the history of warfare and economics, being achieved through deceits and frauds. THOSE REVERSALS OF MEANING WOULD HAVE TO TRAVEL THROUGH ALMOST INFINITE TUNNELS OF THE ESTABLISHED SYSTEMS OF DECEITS AND FRAUDS, WHICH ARE CONTROLLING CIVILIZATION AT THE PRESENT TIME ...
The paradigm shifts required in political science make all the previous paradigm shifts accomplished in the history of physical sciences appear trivial child's play by comparison. Since the human murder/money systems have developed on the basis of successful deceits/frauds for thousands of years, working through those contradictions in any better ways seems extremely difficult and dangerous. I would not expect that to be possible without A LOT MORE DEATH INSANITIES TO BE THE REAL SELECTION PRESSURES.
Staying with the Ayn Rand theme, "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality".
Unless, perhaps, you preside over a sinking ship?
this deserves it's own page
quite simply the best video in a long long time
classic
Ukraine's finance minister gets thrown into a skip!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMf2_RQWdUQ
tony the tiger jewboy. get outta jewtown tony. zh is for jews by jews. go back to williamsburg.
And people wonder why I have this user name. "As John Galt once said...." Nothing like fashioning one's philosophy on a fictional character in a novel written by someone who never produced anything but paper. Remember, don't pay attention to what she did. Pay attention to what her fictional characters said.
+1 We were 2 seconds apart brother ;-)
I always tell the libertarian statists that I can show them historical Anarchist societies that prospered and were about as free and fair as the current human condition allows. They can never show me one instance of a Randian, Free Market Utopia in the history of ever. Here's what modern libertarianisim has devolved to. Government to protect property, patents, and the rights of the Oligarchs top expllouit everyone else.
Murray Rothbard looks on from the afterlife disgusted...
Um, The United States? Previously...
So let's forget slavery, abuse of factory workers, insanely unequal income distribution that allowed the powerful to buy politicians since the beginning, etc. Yeah I guess if you take away all that it was a libertarian utopiaq indeed :-)
Actually your contention was:
"They can never show me one instance of a Randian, Free Market Utopia in the history of ever".
My contention is that the US betweeen the late 1940's through the early 1970's (When Nixon cancelled the Gold standard) was just such an instance. And it was actually achieved as a result of the good Goernance and the overthow of slavery and injustice. Now making a comeback.....
if USA was such a sweet awsome place to live in during the 1950s why did blacks have to fight for more rights in the 1960s?
You real don't know how the 1950s in USA were, do you? Go find some old guys that are 80s and over and ask them how it was to live in the "factory towns" in the 1950s and be forced to shop at the town's "factory store". You have a really romantized view of how USA was in the 1940s-1970s that has very little to do with reality. At least look at Robert Crumb and read his comix how the 60s were. He will set your straight.
Thanks, actually I have an extensive collection of Crumb comix which I bought in SF in the summer of'69 (Mr Natural et al).
I understand they are now quite valuable. Damn, gave myself away again.......Keep on truckin!
As John Galt once said: Get out of the way. Let business be free to make profits, and they will hire all the workers they can get their hands on.
More Randian bullshit. Government has gotten out of the way of corporate profiteering and to no one's surprise those profits DID NOT make it into labor's hands. Further more those same corps are a ll to happy for .gov to get in the way of labor and their competitors. More libertarian utopia bullshit. As long as .gov exists in ANY form this "capitalism in decay" is the end result.
You would think that after Greenspan -- her trusted friend and co-author -- demonstrated objectively (pun intended) that her philosophy is just cover for self-enrichment at the expense of anyone and everyone that people would start to see through it all.
The programming has become so much a part of American culture it's hard to think of how things were before 1980. I've argued many times on this site that we should have used QE (since they were gonna do it anyway) as a cash payout to raise the national income to stimulate demand. Everyone argued that a fry cook shouldn't make enough to have a decent living, even though up until Reagan and the Greenspan inflation of the late 80's he could. Government destroyed this mans earnings, yet if he seeks recompense he's a "free shit army" member??? Gimme a break.
A fry cook has an actual skill. Day traders would not exist in the absence of .gov. If our system can create conditions to make them rich it can surely make sure this man has the same standard of living he had before the great Regan robbery.
Though to be honest i think Regan was a good dude who was suffering from Alzheimer by '84 and got used.
If Reagan were alive today he would not make it through the primary process. Same for Kennedy, IMO. Since Bush the Elder...it has been a puppet show. OK....it was a puppet show before...but just not as obvious or as blatant.
Yes, but again you are looking at symptoms. The fascist State has put up a regulatory maze to stifle any SME competition. The cause is a corrupt and broken political system. In this system, protection of IP for the big Corporations has become essential because the US doesn't actually manufacture anything any longer. The cause is offshoring and Globalisation. Go back to point 1, rinse, repeat........
I bet you will get a lot more downvotes than upvotes. People at ZH like to fantasy see themselves as self-reliant individuals who are all for free market.
Agreed. What/where are these "Free Markets" to which you refer?
Wrong, wrong, wrong! The disease is the federal reserve and it's debt based money whose sole purpose is to siphon wealth from the nation into the hands of a few. The federal reserve is a cancer that has been eating away at this country for 100 years and it must go. Get rid of the fed and many of our problems go away.
I disagree in this good Doctor, .gov is the disease, the FED is only it's strongest strain. The sanction and legitimization of the use of force through our so called rule of law is the biggest joke in history. It exists to deprive the majority of natural right while confering benefits on the minority oligarchy.
This was ever any and all governments purpose.
What, then, would you advocate as a replacement for the disease of government?
Free people making decisions and living with the consequences. IE, you kill your neighbors daughter he's likely going to whack you. If you run a factory where the employees work 16 hour days and are working themselves to death .gov isn't there to protect you from being lynched.
Sounds pretty sweet right?
So you are actually a closet Libertarian, then?
I'm not in the closet at all. Murray Rothbard's libertarianisim is no longer tge standard. Instead it's an amalgamation of freedom and protection drom the state dor tge powerful that is more akin to fascisim than anything. Anarcho Capitalism isn't on the menu for modern libertarians.
That's about as far from reality as Pluto is from Uranus.
Who arbitrates when your neighbor wants to kill you for running over her prized poodle? Stepping on her grass? What rules govern the magnitude of loss or compensation? What happens when your neighbor IS the arbiter but she's a rabid bitch on steroids? Or some bug-eyed meth head with an attitude?
If men were unfailingly moral and responsible (per the Founder's admonitions) and acted honorably in their everyday dealings, there would be no need for much governnance at all. But the more men fail in our day-to-day pursuits, the heavier the hand of government gets.
It is a big problem but a bigger problem would be created by its elimination.
The disease is the 16th and 17th amendments, without which, the Fed would be a mere shadow of itself.
Vile intent created the three "tools of tyranny" simultaneously.
Getting rid of the Fed would only be slight inconvenience for the PTB, as they would use, and/or create other institutions (Congress, POTUS, the Treasury Dept, or the existing major banks) to achieve their goals.
Our debt-ridden, crony, statist system is the result of many factors. In my view, the biggest factor is our something-for-nothing mentality that results in the makeup of the Congress, govt bureaucracies, and boardrooms accross the country.
"something-for-nothing mentality" = sound bite from an echo chamber. Unless you are talking about corporate welfare.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20140909_Let_the_Ex-Im_Ban...
Practice your self, reduce your dependence, repeat.
Give me a fucking break. We've been on the deregulation, free-trade train since Reagan, and the monopolists who own our economy and our legislature and pay no taxes with the help of lobbyists and lawyers, have no interest in sharing their growing claim on the nation's wealth with labor. They will outsource and automate to boost profits as they hollow out capital by issuing debt and buying back shares to boost their own stock holdings. This self reliance stuff is the propaganda they feed us to make us think its our fault, that we just don't work hard enough, or get the right degree. I say bullshit.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/09/us-corporate-executives-workers-d...
What poor writing...."The disease is...a stagnant economy". No, you fool, the stagnant economy is one major symptom of bad policy from the government and central banking. the "lack of savings, production...entreprenureship.." are also symptoms, not problems. The article's solution? Get out of the way, government. WTF does that mean? He's on the right track, but far, far short of offering anything actionable.
The stagnant economy is a result of the limits to growth on a finite planet.
The economy has been stagnating since the 1970's growing worse by year, until now it is impossible to prop it up without the federal reserve and the Treasury injecting massive capital into the stock and bond markets.
you might disagree with my premise but you cannot disagree we are in dire times when the government purchases stock and everyone closes their eyes and pretends the stench of death is roses.
Ongoing recovery my ass
I see them more as results then symptoms.
Symtoms implies there is a "one size fits all" solution to individual problems.
The major problem is government itself, but it is the agencies that are the cancers.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FBN2Z3yTKPo
Derivatives are the hidden issues in seaming up the upcoming financial implosion.
The people are being severely deceived:
http://patrick.net/forum/?p=1223928
So MISdirection is the status quo, and that is INEFFICIENT, TO SAY THE LEAST!
No further comment needed, other than LMAO...
http://www.alternet.org/books/what-happened-when-some-libertarians-went-...
We should understand that demand drives investment, confidence is not the real driver. Lack of real growth is about lack of real demand. Much of the demand we see today is driven by artificially low interest rates and QE that distorts the markets.
We must differentiate the kinds of economic growth and understand that all growth is not created equal. If you spend money but afterwards have little to show for it you have wasted it. Sadly, much of the money America "invests in itself" each year through government spending and programs falls into this category. More on the kind of growth we need in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/01/false-demand-fuels-wrong-kind-of-...
We should understand that resources drive development and demand. We can all desire water yet the desert remains dry, despite all that demand for water.
A basic income guarantee (BIG) would create the velocity that money needs to get the economy moving again. Subsidizing multinationals is how the national wealth gets sucked up by globalist looters.
It should be introduced, imo, as one part of major monetary reform, based on The Chicago Plan (TCP. The two important parts of TCP are debt free fiat issued through the Treasury and an end to fractional reserve lending.
In my estimation, the latter would create a great implosion of wealth that would narrow the widening inequality. The BIG would help to provide liquidity in the transition while the focus becomes subsidizing small businesses that create jobs.
We should make small businesses illegal. That will fix the economy for sure.
Small businesses that actually provide most of the jobs should be getting all the subsidies. Multinationals don't need subsidies.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-welfare-tax-breaks-subsidies/
The main problem is criminal government, bankers, wall streeters, the FED, etc. If we enforced the laws we would solve a lot of problems. Instead, we have total corruption.