It is not just an economic policy – it is a world view. This is how it works, in practice – from Victor Davis Hanson:
…In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street…
Part of an excellent look at what Hanson is calling “our new sophists”, but that bit there is just too perfect in describing the sort of leadership we have. Its not that Orszag, et al didn’t believe in what they were peddling in 2009 – all their life and all their experiences taught them that massive government spending was the sure-fire cure for a down economy. The only problem with such thinking is that it wasn’t – and isn’t, and never will be – based upon reality. Keynes got it wrong – you can’t borrow and spend your way to prosperity via inflation. Such views are the creation of people who never worked at a real job, who have a great deal of wealth readily at their disposal and never spend any time just talking to the regular folks who actually make the country work.
But, they believed it – and still believe it. Its just that now its come a cropper, they don’t want to be confronted with their failure. So, they retreat to the universities and the corporate board rooms where they can continue to believe and never have any evidence come before them which questions their views. They’ll write articles and give interviews and expound their Keynesian views and retain the awed respect of their fellow sophists…people, after all, who can rationalize anything, be it unpatriotic behavior or butchering an unborn child.
Its really rather sad, when you think about it – but among the many banes of modern life is to have a class of people who don’t know, but think they do and, worse, have power to give effect to their bogus ideas. At the end of the day, our real problem is how to cut such people out of the equation – how to take these counter-productive sophists out of positions of authority.
This is both difficult and rather easy – difficult because the positions they hold allow them to make a lot of noise in defense of their views and position, but easy because almost all of them are in one way or another dependent upon government. Either in the form of direct employment or by government subsidy/regulation insulating them from real life. Cut government out from underneath them, and they’ll disappear…that is, they’ll be forced to actually do something worthwhile, and that will knock the nonsense clean out of their heads. In the end, we’d be doing them a service.
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