Krueger or Jobs

Which of the following events do you think will have more of an impact on the unemployment rate in the United States over the next 12 months:

• President Obama’s appointment today of Alan Krueger (a Princeton economist well known for his research into labor markets) to head the Council of Economic Advisors;
• the retirement of Steve Jobs?

Krugman: America should fight space aliens, not the Taliban

Paul Krugman appeared on a recent Sunday on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program. Mr. Krugman’s general thesis appeared to be something like the following:

If the Federal government were to cut spending now to reduce the debt and deficit, these cuts would have a negative, contractionary effect on the American economy and would increase the unemployment rate. Therefore, given that the unemployment rate is already very high, not only should the government not cut spending, it should actually increase it. Americans are misguided when they worry about the debt and deficit. Instead, they should worry about unemployment, prolonged stagnation, and another recession, and they should increase spending, even at the risk of running up the debt, to eliminate these threats.

What Mr. Krugman can’t seem to grasp is that it is precisely when he starts talking like this that Americans really start to worry about their pocketbooks. They worry that their taxes will be raised to pay for all this new government deficit spending. And they worry especially when they hear about the kind of spending that Mr. Krugman is recommending. According to Mr. Krugman, one of the best things that could happen to the United States would be if an announcement were made that the Earth was being invaded by space aliens:

“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better [off.] … There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time...we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”

Thus, an announcement that we were under attack from space aliens would spur the government to make massive increases in defense spending so that our armed forces could mobilize to ward off the invaders. Just as the massive spending of WWII put an end to the Great Depression, so Mr. Krugman argues, the new round of spending to fight imaginary space aliens would stimulate our economy and put an end to our current economic malaise.

This is the kind of amusing nonsense to which the Keynesian virus leads. We can well imagine some of the additional policy recommendations that Mr. Krugman might urge upon us. For example, space alien defense workers should be organized into unions by the SEIU, union dues collected, and these dues used to lobby the government to increase the wages and pensions of space alien defense workers.

But, what was most striking about Mr. Krugman’s space alien defense proposal was the fact that he did not even realize how utterly inconsistent it was with his position on the “Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” On the one hand, Mr. Krugman always has been and remains opposed to the Bush wars for economic reasons. For example, on Mr Zakaria’s program Mr. Krugman stated:

We came into [the current economic malaise] with more debt than I would have liked. We really in some ways are paying the costs of the Bush tax cuts and the Bush unfunded wars, which leave us with a higher starting point of debt.

On the other hand, Mr. Krugman states that he would be in favor of a massive increase in defense spending to mobilize against space aliens. According to standard Keynesian analysis, the significant increase in defense spending that resulted from the two Bush wars should have functioned as a stimulus that launched America into an era of prosperity, just as the massive spending of WWII ended the Great Depression and launched America into the prosperous decade of the 1950’s.

Mr. Krugman can’t have it both ways. If a massive increase in spending to fight off space aliens would be stimulative, then, so should have been the two Bush wars. If, on the other hand, the Bush wars were bad for the country because they were “unfunded”, then it would also be bad for the country now to engage in massive unfunded, deficit spending to fight imaginary space aliens or to promote any other Keynesian “make-work” stimulus project.

Thus, the most prominent Keynesian in the world today is revealed as nothing more than a jumble of contradictions and inconsistencies. Perhaps Mr. Krugman needs to spend a little more time thinking about the logical consistency of his positions and a little less time sitting on the couch watching old reruns of The Twilight Zone.

Nailing my theses to the door

It is said (perhaps apocryphally) that in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the corrupt state of Catholicism to the door of the Wittenberg Church. Here is my set of theses describing the corrupt state of government in California and America in general. You may consider these theses as rules of thumb for judging the statements we hear every day coming out of Sacramento and Washington.

1. Government always gets bigger and more centralized.
2. Cuts to government spending are always made "in the out years" and always prove ephemeral or non-existent. Cuts are never actual reductions, but just increases that were smaller than hoped for.
3. Increases to taxes are always made immediately and prove real and permanent.

Theses 2 and 3 may be referred to as the "Grover Norquist" theses.

4. Regulation always expands. All initiatives to sunset inefficient or outdated regulations simply spawn new bureaucracies that waste even more taxpayer money.
5. All tax increases result not in any improvement of the general welfare, but only in an expansion of waste and corruption in government.
6. All governmental bailouts are unnecessary to preserve the general welfare of the people and are done instead to protect special interest groups, whether banks or unions or bondholders.
7. Increases to government spending or programs that benefit particular special interest groups are always justified by noble-sounding, plausible arguments about promoting the general welfare:
   • when we increase teachers' pay, we are "helping the children;"
   • when we increase the pay of policemen, firefighters, and prison guards, we are "improving public safety;"
   • when we increase spending on defense contractors peddling the latest computer hardware and software, we are "keeping America safe from Muslim extremists;"
   • when Fannie Mae purchases junk loans from banks, we are "expanding homeownership;"
   • when we expand affirmative action programs for various minority groups, we are “combating racism;”
   • when we funnel billions of dollars to venture capitalists, we are “promoting green technologies.”
   In fact, the money spent does not go to promoting the general welfare, but primarily benefits only the narrow special interest groups.
8. If the government decides to spend money towards a particular noble-sounding end, there will spring up countless businesses and organizations that will "assist" the government in achieving its “noble purpose.” These businesses/organizations will be funded by the government at the general expense of the taxpayer. They will set aside a portion of their funding for two ends: a.) to produce massive amounts of "research" purporting to demonstrate that the government funding is achieving its noble ends and that "catastrophic" consequences will ensue if the funds are cut off; b.) to build a massive lobbying organization to elect and influence politicians who will continue and expand the funding.
9. When the government provides cheap credit to subsidize the purchase of certain goods or services, the price of those goods and services skyrockets, putting them further and further out of reach of those very individuals the government was seeking to help. By securitizing and guaranteeing subprime loans, the "government-sponsored enterprises" (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created a supply of cheap credit for the purchase of homes; the price of homes skyrocketed. The government provides cheap student loans to students in need; the price of a college education has skyrocketed. We can well imagine what is going to happen with Obamacare; as the government pours massive subsidies into the market to help the poor purchase health insurance, the market will soak all that money up and the cost of health insurance and health care will skyrocket.
10. Any industry or governmental entity whose workforce is highly unionized will eventually fail. We need only look at the American steel and automobile industries and the current budget deficits of so many of our states and municipalities to see the truth of this thesis. As with Thesis 6 above, the modus operandi of public service unions (teachers, firefighters, policemen, and others) is a.) gather mandatory dues from all union employees, b.) use these union dues to fund 1.) massive lobbying efforts to elect to office officials who will support the efforts of the unions to increase union pensions and benefits, or 2.) litigation to prevent pensions and benefits from being cut. In this way, the government officials who end up negotiating with the unions are bought and paid for by the unions themselves.
11. We have reached the terminal stage of democracy. Modern democracy is nothing more than a form of legalized theft, a system whereby the unproductive many, who have fewer assets, use the mechanism of universal suffrage (instead of, say, arms) to redistribute the wealth of the productive few, who have greater assets, to themselves. Alternatively, democracy is nothing more than a mechanism whereby politicians amass power for themselves by making noble-sounding promises to the masses that the government can never possibly afford to keep.

    Update [7/17/2019]: The following quotation has been attributed by various conservatives to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish advocate, judge, writer and historian who served as Professor of Universal History, and Greek and Roman Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh:

    A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
    The above quotation has also occasionally been attributed by conservatives to Alexis de Tocqueville. Both of these attributions are, apparently, incorrect and the left-wing media has ridiculed conservatives for getting the attribution wrong. The media never seems to consider, however, whether there is any truth in the assertions made in this quotation. Does it matter whose authority is attached to the quotation if it constitutes a fairly accurate description of the progress of democracies?
12. We have reached the terminal stage of Keynesianism, a situation where government spending does not stimulate, but instead government borrowing depresses the economy.
13. We have reached the terminal stage of the regulatory state, where the strictures placed on the private sector by the regulatory agencies strangle the very businesses whose operation justifies the existence of the agencies in the first place.
14. If government is always getting bigger and more centralized, all attempts to discourage lobbying will fail. Why are we always surprised by the fact that, as we concentrate more and more power in Washington, more and more lobbying of Washington occurs? Lobbyists are simply responding rationally to the continued expansion and concentration of power in a particular locus. If everything is decided in Washington, it only makes sense for interest groups to send ever more lobbyists there to influence the decision makers.
    
15. Government programs always cost more and deliver fewer benefits than forecast. Think Big Dig, east span of the Bay Bridge, high speed rail, green energy.
16. Keynesians always explain the failure of Keynesian stimulus with the following set of excuses:
    • The stimulus was too small; if only we pass new, additional stimulus (often, it seems these days, trillions of dollars in size), the outcome will be better.
    • The regime that came before us was at fault and left us with an economy that was worse than we expected (this argument fails to address the epistemological question of why their expectations were so mistaken in the first place)
    • The outcome would have been worse if we had not passed the stimulus at all.
17. Regulators explain the failure of regulation with a similar set of excuses:
    • The regulation was not extensive enough; if only we pass new, additional regulations (often, it seems these days, in legislation 1000’s of pages long), the outcome will be better.
    • The regulated entities were evil (greedy, pick a negative adjective) and circumvented our regulations (an argument that fails to explain why the regulators were so stupid that they did not anticipate the circumventions and write the regulations to preclude them).

Note the “other world,” "contrary to fact" flavor of the Keynesian and regulatory arguments in the theses 16 and 17: we are asked to believe that a world better than the current one will exist if only new regulations and stimulus are passed; or, we are asked to believe that a world worse than the current one would exist if only the preceding regulation and stimulus had not been passed; and you can be sure that we will be asked to believe that the awful economic state we almost surely will find ourselves in during President Obama's reelection campaign in 2012 would not have been so awful if only congressional Republicans had passed his new $447 billion jobs plan. Keynesians and regulators always ask us to believe that the next time around they will get things right, in spite of the fact that there is always massive evidence in the real, actual, current world that they got things so utterly wrong the last time. With Keynesians and regulators, past failure is always an argument for doing even more of the same in the future.

Note: As a confirmation of what I wrote above, I find that David Stockman, in his book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, writes:

[T]he [Obama "Making Work Pay"] tax holiday was extended again through 2012. And when the predicted hearty cyclical rebound still did not appear, Professor Summers’ heirs and assigns (he had fled the White House by then) summoned help from the contrafactual. Peering into a realm visible only to Keynesian true believers, they espied an economy that would have grown even more anemically, save for the $ 500 billion of MWP, ERP, and payroll tax handouts that had been added to the national debt over 2009– 2012 to induce citizens to buy more shoes and soda pops.
18. The Keynesian crusade to achieve full employment is inherently inflationary. Until the Fed is relieved of the bipolar mandate given to it by the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act to promote "maximum employment" and "stable prices" at the same time, the American economy is doomed to long-term inflation and the erosion of the dollar.
19. The level of taxes imposed by the Federal government and various state governments (for example, California) will become so confiscatory that residents will begin to flee and move to other countries/jursidictions with lower tax rates. At this point, the Federal and state governments will attempt to impose tax penalties on those who seek to move away, thereby creating a tax-based Berlin Wall to lock the most successful in. This will only cause our best and brightest to flow out even faster. The attempts to lock their citizens inside will be justified by the politicians with appeals to "fairness" and excuses like "we are all in this together." Progressives are very fond of the claim that we are all in this together, since they assume that our "togetherness" will always be funded with someone else's tax dollars.
20. America's most precious natural resource is nothing more than the fickle willingness of others to lend us money. Heaven help us if that resource should ever run dry.
21. The accounting for government finances is, as Niall Fergusson recently put it, simply fraudulent: "There are no regularly published and accurate official balance sheets. Huge liabilities are simply hidden from view. Not even the current income and expenditure statements can be relied upon. No legitimate business could possible carry on in this fashion." There is no hope of reforming government finances until the government is forced to adopt GAAP.
22. Progressives are always in favor of tolerance and diversity except when it comes to showing tolerance for the opinions of non-progressives.
23. In our day and age, there is no such thing as a good or bad investment per se. Rather, all our investments become good or bad insofar as the central banks manipulate the money supply to make them so. There is no such thing anymore as a product or service that is good or bad per se. Rather, a product or service is good insofar as it responds to the myriad incentives created by the vast machinery of government.
24. Income inequality does not result from greed or mean-spiritedness or a lack of fairness or any of the other canards proffered by the Left. Rather, it results from the fact that low-skill workers are becoming less and less valuable in society today and knowledge workers are becoming more and more valuable. My favorite example is: tolltakers and RFID engineers. In the not too recent past, armies of low-skill tolltakers manned tollbooths on all our bridges. These jobs were government, union jobs, so the tolltakers made a decent living. Then, along came a bunch of engineers and invented RFID technology and Fastrak. No one can dispute that Fastrak is a better system than manual tolltakers. It is cheaper and it doesn't result in automobiles lining up for miles wasting enormous amounts of fossil fuels as their drivers idle along, waiting to hand over their tolls. So, the tolltakers are out of a job and the engineers who created FastTrak are millionaires. Voila: an increase in income inequality. The next place this will happen is with BART workers. Google has already developed self-driving cars. Self-driving trains are not far behind. And when they take over, many of the BART drivers will lose their jobs. And once again a cry will go up that those damn heartless Google employees are putting government, union workers out of work.
25. Following Burke, I am guided by the following principle: as soon as a person starts talking about tearing down the entire system (private health insurance) and replacing it from the ground up (with Medicare-for-all), I know s/he is a charlatan. For, as Burke correctly observed, when you tear down the entire system, what you end up with is not a wonderful new system, but a wasteland. This is because you have destroyed the old system and then you discover that replacing it with a new system from the ground up is frighteningly more complex and expensive -- and oftentimes bloody -- than you ever could have imagined. The French and Russian Revolutions taught us this lesson. And it is with the horrors of the French and Russian Revolutions in mind, that we ought to reject the crazy, utopian, abstract, socialist theorizing of the Kamala Harrises and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world.