Those favoring an ever-increasing role for the state in our society never cease to remind us how much smarter they are those of us preferring freedom and smaller government. They note how a supermajority of university professors favor their ideology and that how voters with postgraduate degrees overwhelmingly went for Obama last fall.
If they’re so smart, why can’t they learn from history?
I mean, here are these very smart people are, with lots and lots of college degrees (so very much education) among them, yet they insist bigger government will help solve our economic woes. Problem is they can’t come up with many examples of that working.
Socialism failed overwhelmingly in Europe where nations with welfare-state economies having unemployment rates that makes our number seem tiny in comparison.
And those very smart people who actually do study the results of statist policies, find, for example, that New Deal, a program of massive state intervention in the American economy, “thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.”
Another one of those smart people who trust to empirical observation rather than trendy theories, Anna Schwartz, an economist at National Bureau of Economic Research wonders at the
mystical belief in . . . fiscal stimulus as the solution to the current recession. . . . Fiscal stimulus did not end the great contraction from ’29 to ’33 and it didn’t end the slump in Japan. If you make this kind of comment to a true believer you get an anti-intellectual kind of response.
. . . . [the Japanese] paid lavishly for the fiscal stimulus projects that they promoted, and as a result Japan had the biggest fiscal deficit of any advanced country during that period. And the answer to the program for fiscal stimulus that is lacking is an economic explanation of why fiscal stimulus would work, and we do not have such an explanation.
(H/t: Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary–available by subscription.)
An explanation we may not have, but Democratic rhetoric we do.
Note Dr. Schwartz’s observation about pointing out the failure of various government stimuli to stimulate economic growth. Those true believers, many of them with a multitude of college degrees offer an anti-intellectual response. Interesting how intellectuals often respond in such a manner to critics who challenge their conclusions with facts.
Seems like instead of engaging us, they’re just telling us to shut up. Why, I wonder do some very smart people peddle ideas which can be easily discredited and respond to their intellectual adversaries not with counterarguments, but instead with angry rebuttals or pleas for silence?
I was entertaining similar thoughts yesterday. Short version, leftists define reality by what works in the faculty lounge. Conservatives define reality in terms of what works in the real world.
#1 – And again, I tip my hat to V for his prescient analysis.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Regards,
Peter H.
Neo Neocon made a very good observation a few weeks ago. Our collective memory is very short. Those of us who are willing to learn from history have taken the lessons of the great depression and the failed new deal to heart.
We are a tiny minority, most people would rather retry failed policies than learn from history.
they’re telling you to shut up? who are you talking to? the ideas are out there, and they aren’t difficult to find. start by reading something other than pj media.
this post is unusually sanctimonious, even for you, gpw. i can’t speak for your other critics, but i’ve attempted to engage you on rather specious economic assertions in the past. like when you assert that a reduction in capital gains taxes is a magic pill for economic growth (not true). and your revisionist argument that the new deal had no effect on unemployment or economic growth during the great depression (also not true).
but if you want to talk about bad economic ideas, let’s talk about trickle down economics. has any economic idea been more widely disproven in the past 20 years? the problem with all these highly educated people–for conservatives anyway–is that they’re smart enough to know that tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy aren’t the solution for every problem. maybe they don’t know (the conservative spin on) history as well as you do, but they know when people are bull-shitting them.
Capitalism Equals Freedom
Simply put:
Capitalism is each individual making choices for himself.
Socialism is those who claim to know best, making your choices for you.
The former is freedom. The latter is anything but.
If they are so smart, why cant they make it in the real world?
Whenever someone tries to argue, as they often do, that liberals are so much smarter because these perma-students and pseudo intellectuals preferred Democrats, I point out that high school dropouts preferred Obama by an even larger margin — 63 percent — and the true geniuses of our society: actors, supermodels, rappers, rockers, and porn stars are almost exclusively Democrats.
But the idea that liberal academics are indeed smart was pretty thoroughly eviscerated by Alan Sokal, who, in an experiment testing just such a notion, got a paper published in a very prestigious and exclusive liberal academic journal. The problem? His paper was intentionally written as a combination of sycophantic ideological flattery and nonsensical babble. It was received with much praise for its brilliance.
These are people who are hiding from reality and they support liberalism because it allows and encourages them to do so.
Yes! Socialism! Which got us in the mess we are in right now!
Only by lame-brained bastards who firmly believe in the redistribution of wealth. The same bullshitters who tax the people into oblivion, drive up unemployment, force them to become dependent on the State, piss on their backs and tell them to be thankful. THAT’S been disproven.
Maybe you could be the ONE liberal who can explain to me how spending trillions of dollars, quadrupling the debt, spending trillions on pork projects etc. etc. etc. will?
Can you explain how letting people keep more of the money THEY earn isn’t better? Can you explain how letting people keep more of the dividends they receive so they can re-invest it isn’t better?
If you have to lay off employees so you can afford to pay Chairman Obama his protection money, how is that better?
And how do you uber-educated assholes explain how the “tax cuts for the rich” shifted a higher burden on the top earners in this country?
We know because the bullshit is seeping from every pore of your body.
I look forward to your super educated response, arrogant asshole.
Further, thanks for demonstrating #5 in John Hawkins list of liberal lying tactics:
Emphasis added.
Good job, Chump.
As a matter of fact and contrary to what American Elephant implies, socialism, or more specifically socialistic policies, is exactly what got us into the current financial mess. The seed was planted by James Earl Carter and nurtured by William Jefferson Clinton and his cronies. It was Pres. Carter who managed to get the Community ReInvestment Act passed, and it was Pres. Clinton who expanded it. His cronies then were appointed to head such GSE’s as FANNIE MAE which contributed to the whole mess. The Community ReInvestment Act, in conjunction with the free money policy of the Federal Reserve, brought about the housing bubble and and the high number of home loans which were beyond the borrower’s ability to repay. Add in that most Democrats were running around and assuring us that Fannie and Freddie were in great shape until long after everyone else recognized that they were in trouble and you have the current mess. Of course those responsible will never admit it and instead will attempt to blame it on those evil Republicans, or George Bush, or deregulation when, in fact Pres. Bush tried to get more regulation and oversight of Fannie and Freddie and those claiming deregulation cannot point to one single appropriate law that was overturned. Oh they can point to some laws that were changed, but not laws that were responsible for the housing meltdown.
Now this is not to say that the Republicans are totally blameless. They lacked the guts to insist on better oversight of Fannie and Freddie,but they are not the ones who set it up and lied about Fannie’s and Freddie’s health.
Chad, first, thanks for commenting.
As to your point on “Shut up,” do you understand the rhetorical nature of some of my posts? Yes, I know the ideas are out there, but you do have to acknowledge that a large number of those on the left, including sometimes even the the president, seek to dismiss conservative ideas without acknowledging our points.
I never once asserted that a reduction in the capital gains tax was a magic pill for economic growth. I see it as one factor among many which contributed to economic growth. As I recall, when we did review those statistics in a comment thread, I pointed out the correlation between cuts in the capital gains tax rate and economic growth. Magic pill, perhaps not. Contributing factor, definitely.
I do recall our last exchange on the New Deal and unemployment. It seems we were looking at two different charts. I saw one which saw no signifcant decline. I recently finished Amity Shlaes’s book on the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. It seems that there was a dip in unemployment in the mid-1930s, so I erred. It did decline to 13.9% in November 1936. (When I read that, I had meant to e-mail you and apologize for not having done so.) But, it started climbing soon after that. And it was that climb was not due to deregulation, but due to a new Fed law creating “stricter reserve requirements for banks” and the Wagner Act “making business more expensive for employers.” In short, there was greater regulation at the conclusion of FDR’s first term and beginning of his second. As a result, unemployment started climbing again.
And,as the UCLA economists cited above concluded, the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression.
1936’s low unemployment figures were the lowest since 1931–after Hoover’s interventionist policies, including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff went into effect.
So, yes, I did make one mistake in my previous post, but you make even more in your short comment, including misrepresenting something else I said.
And pray tell, how has trickle-down economics been disproven? You seem to favor New Deal type economics, fine then, look at the record. The economy may have improved slightly in the 1930s, but it didn’t recover. There’s a reason we call it the Great Depression.
By contrast, we saw an unprecedented level of economic growth from the time the Reagan tax cuts took effect in 1982-3 and 2007. Unemployment drifted downward in the 1980s and remained low in the 1990s and early 2000s. Bill Clinton never repudiated Reagan’s basic economic ideas, indeed, together with Republican Congresses from 1994-98, built on them.
And no, we never said tax breaks for corporations are the solution for every problem. Indeed, no Republican ever did, no serious, elected one at least.
But, tax cuts for corporations do work. Just look what happened in Ireland when they cut their corporate tax rate. From one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of its strongest economies.
Sanctimonous I may be (I was trying to be jocular), but incorrect you are if you assume the New Deal helped spur economic growth. You have yet to show me how the New Deal ended the Great Depression and how Reaganomics has been disproven.
Um, Fritz, how is that contrary to what I imply when I flat out said that socialism got us into this mess? I think you misread what I wrote.
Sorry American Elephant, but your comment came across as sarcastic. Perhaps had not used so many exclamation points I might have viewed it differently, but I owe you an apology for miss-reading your intent. So I apologize.
No apology necessary
TGC and GPW, well-done on refuting Chad’s empty talking points. People with a working knowledge of history and economics understand the points you made so very well. I don’t think they will be persuasive on people like Chad who are not interested in the reality that an economy with a capitalist orientation makes more prosperity for more people. That is not his goal, his goal is to prop up the Dear Teleprompter and the Neo-Marxist Democrat Party.
Why did you phrase it as “many”? Can they come up with *any* examples of Big Government solving a country’s economic woes? (As you go on to point out, the Great Depression is an example of the opposite: Big Government prolonging the woes.)
The wife and I were having a quiet lunch in La Paz, Mexico when an ex-pat sat down with us and started blabbering about the beauty of Obama as president. He actually started to cry as he talked about the inauguration. I did not tell him that his uninvited intrusion was doubly offensive because my political opinions are in stark contrast to his. I decided to play him out.
He has moved to Mexico to escape the costs of the US and to dodge taxes. He has not given up his citizenship. He has a Ph.D in history. His wife works as a nurse, he wonders around looking for Americans to chat up.
“We need to go through a period of rugged socialism before we can get it right.” That is his assessment. So I asked him what getting it “right” would be like. “Justice, fairness, equality, dumping materialism, appreciating each other, blah, blah, blah.”
I was doing my lecture gig on a cruise and I really wanted to drag this puppy along as a prop to bring out in the Q&A sessions.
While he is clearly the worst of the syndrome I have encountered, the cult of Obama is not insignificant. He has the lemmings to lead.
I just read that Turbo-Tax Tim HAS learned from history. He states that the problem with the New Deal and Japan’s failed attempts to spend themselves into recovery was that in neither case did they spend enough for long enough. WE won’t make the mistake of slowing our spending too soon.
Are you reassured?
but if you want to talk about bad economic ideas, let’s talk about trickle down economics. has any economic idea been more widely disproven in the past 20 years?
I always am entertained by leftists when they throw out this one.
The basic theory of trickle-down economics is that, by giving more money to those with more, we encourage them to spend, which then benefits those with less by providing jobs and business activity.
When the “those with more” is businesses and people who are wealthy, liberals scream about how awful this is and how it “never works”. But if the “those with more” is the government, then liberals insist that this is the ultimate expression of goodness.
Think about it. Socialism as practiced by Oblahblah is nothing more than trickle-down economics as routed through the government, versus private industry and capitalism. But it is forever doomed to fail, because the only way the government can get more money is to take it away from the productive, which increases the drag on the economy. When you apply trickle-down using the private sector, the government takes less away from them, which decreases the drag on the economy.
#17 – Helio, you are a better man than I am. Had I been lunching with Hubby in a quiet Mexican seaside resort and some wingnut had started prattling on – uninvited – about how bad the USA was and how The Snob was The Messiah, he would not only have gotten a strong lecture about hypocrisy and liberalism, but also a polite invitation to go play with the fishes. Permanently.
Regards,
Peter H.
OT: Obama’s latest tax cheat. But we already knew that. Statism for thee but not for me.
I think its is because they believe there is something better than capitalism out there, that will result in a more fair accumilation of wealth. We can’t ignore that imbalances do come from Capitalism and I believe they are good intentioned in trying to find solutions. We might one day find it but so far not really happened…
And we can’t forgot, that the state is reacting to the people. The recession threatens a lot of people and people want the government to protect them. The state’s role as just defender of the country from foriegn enemies has now expanded to economic enemies. Politicans are just reacting right now, which is unforunate but expected. They will keep doing anything it takes to revive the economy, faster they hope than if they had left it alone.
What might that be?
“Fair” – by what standard? They need to be asked. To me, nothing could be more fair than the idea that a person gets to keep what they earn.
Of course, we *are not* living under the idea that a person gets to keep what they earn – which is to say, we have not been living under capitalism. We haven’t been living under capitalism for a long time; what we’ve been living under is sort of a quasi-fascist mix of corporatism and socialism. There is a reason that some refer to capitalism “The Unknown Ideal”.
Fixed it for ya 😉
I believe they aren’t.
Up next at 5: The State expands its own role as “defender” to defending “us” from domestic political, social and religious “enemies”.
Aargh, sorry, I didn’t QUITE fix it, here is what I meant:
The clear evidence shows that they are doing anything it takes to make it WORSE.
And to add insult to injury, you have brain dead lemmings, like Chump there, prattling on about how smart and brilliant these SOBs are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/economy/01leonhardt.html?scp=2&sq=nazi&st=cse
So…
Bob is arguing that Hitler had a good idea?
To elaborate more, after a so so nights’ sleep.
All the money for the spending on infrastructure had to come from somewhere, and required capital, seized from the free people of the Weimar republic. As the need for ‘things to spend on’ and sources to finance the spending increased, the government then turned to ages old resentment and still smouldering hatred of foes from WW II.
This forced the government to use those nice shiny roads and troops to build a ‘Greater Germany’ and then, needing more resouces, plan to expand into Russia and the rest of Europe.
So unless bob honestly believes a centralized economy can stop spending without imploding (which has never happened in the history of the world), he’s arguing for an expanding American Empire, more powerful and more consuming than the worst of the Bush-Cheney-Haliburton fantasies.
But I’ll bet more people know Anoop got voted off American Idol last night than President Obama reaffirmed our special realtionship with ‘England’ or that he thanked the ‘Queen of the U.K.’ with an I pod.
Edit, WW I not II
Exactly, TL. A leftie on this blog offers an article about stimulus “working” – and the article’s lead example turns out to be… Adolf Hitler. How fitting! Yup, Hitler’s economic stimulus package sure added to humanity’s wealth and standard of living… not.
The article also blithely papers over the fact that Roosevelt’s stimulus *did not* work – by claimed that it worked “haltingly”. How lame.
With (1) fascism and (2) evasion thus at the base of the article’s argument, it then makes claims that are misleading if not false, such as “When Roosevelt stuck to a stimulus program, unemployment fell markedly”. Let’s see what Roosevelt’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had to say in an address to Congressional Democrats in 1939:
Emphasis added.
Meanwhile, the article goes on to say:
First of all, that’s false. But more to my point here: it’s fascism, that is, worship of the State. (In this case, worship of the State’s alleged powers to heal the ‘animal spirits’ of humanity.)