Keynes is dead. Long live Keynes!
By JBC | February 5, 2009
President Barak Hussein Obama, and his fellow travelers Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have adopted the tried and false methods of a long-dead British economist to save our country. He notably quoted and aped Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy during his inauguration. However, he is now more closely imitating Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and James Earl Carter. As we now know, this man has not one original idea in his Blackberry. Therefore, we must find out which charlatans and ne’er-do-wells he will try to recreate. While he wishes to evoke the image of JFK and gain the stature of The Great Emancipator, his aspirations most closely resemble those of FDR and LBJ. Of course, this carries the tired old baggage of the oppressive economic theories of Keynes.
John Maynard Keynes, the English economist, dominated economic theory and governmental budget discussion in America during the mid 20th century. Keynes was hailed as a genius, the single most important intellect of the era which followed the stock market crash of 1929 and the economic malaise of the next two decades. JM Keynes, most notably in his magnum opus, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, believed that spending, especially by consumers, was the only way out of an economic slowdown. He supported government intervention into the market system as a way of stimulating economic growth. The concepts of creating government programs to put people to work, and the policy of creating a larger pool of money in the system to promote liquidity were ideas pushed by Keynesians.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt followed a Keynesian game plan for most of his many years in the White House. FDR famously created the CCC, the TVA, and less known, but relevant to our present administration, programs like Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). These programs cost millions and millions of dollars to create thousands of new GOVERNMENT positions. The FDR administration was successful in increasing the scope and power of the federal government, but did nothing to regenerate the private sector. In fact, unemployment in America remained above 15% until the onset of the Second World War. While a few useful projects were completed, most important being dams for hydroelectric power in the south, most were simple transfers of money from taxpayers to new government employees who created nothing, or more infamously, who built sidewalks to nowhere. Spending by the government, as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), DOUBLED during the massive consolidation of governmental power under FDR. But, the hope of these stimulus programs was never realized, with the exception of many more thousands sucking on the government teat. Those new dependents were supported by additional drains on hard-working entrepreneurs and businessmen who should and could have brought America’s economy back.
As Roosevelt meddled with packing the Supreme Court and stomping on the Constitution and the ideals of limited government, the American people suffered, the American economy stumbled, and liberty waned. Only after World War II, with the return of millions of American men to the workforce coinciding with the recession of government spending on the war and massive domestic government programs did our economy revive. The fiction that FDR is a saintly figure who single-handedly saved our country is a creation of the liberal nature of the media and the public school system. Illustrative of the philosophy of Roosevelt and the failure of his Keynesian spells, is a quote from his own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, in May 1939, seven years after FDR took office:
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work… I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started — and an enormous debt to boot.”
Those monies are but a drop in the bucket compared to the pork packages recently passed by the House of Representatives, with the promise of more coming in future annual budgets. Will our present executive officials be as open about failure two or three years from now, much less SEVEN YEARS from now? On January 28th, the United States House of Representatives passed a bloated and misnamed “stimulus” package with a misleading price tag of $800,000,000,000.00 (800 billion dollars), which will actually cost America somewhere between one and two TRILLION dollars. Even a bumbling sycophantic media has discovered the fact that only a very small percentage of this monster will be injected into the economy in the near future. The rest of the bill entails massive governmental spending on all sorts of public projects over the next several years. It is quite obvious that lawmakers supporting Obama have no understanding of free market processes, and it is equally clear that they are taking advantage of the uncertain economic future to lay the groundwork for the federal takeover of America’s means of production. This is nothing less than the latest and greatest power grab by socialist activists.
Even though Keynes fell out of favor in Washington, and everywhere else, during the final decades of the last century, executives and legislators have continued to employ Keynesian methods (increased governmental activism to counter economic slowdowns) to accomplish limited short-term political goals. Even Milton Friedman, the most famous advocate of monetarism and the Chicago School of Economics (and the most commonly quoted economist among GOP supporters) famously stated in 1965 (paraphrased by President Richard Nixon when he took America off the gold standard in 1971) that “we are all Keynesians now”. This was a statement of fact, similar to Irving Kristol’s (the poster boy for neo-conservatism) statement that, “The welfare state is with us, for better or worse, and…conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse.” Neither of these statements is congruent with conservatism or libertarianism of any sort. They are simply capitulations to the predominance of socialist ideology in our country.
We have a debt of around $10,000,0000,000,000.00 (10 TRILLION DOLLARS). That number will grow alarmingly fast during the Obama administration. Encroachment by government into private affairs, both personal and financial, has been stamped into the Democratic Party’s roadmap to recovery. While it may be possible to recover from the future damage of the growth of leviathan, and while it may be possible to throw off some of the new shackles which will be clasped around our liberty, we will find it very difficult to recover fully. Socialism, especially in the guise of the Keynesian recipe for economic recovery, is very akin to an anaconda. We were squeezed in the FDR years and recovered. But we were never as free from government as we were before that time. We were squeezed again during the Great Society of LBJ. We recovered, but were not even as free during the ensuing years as we were during the days of FDR. Now, we are set, and have even requested, another constriction of liberty in the name of economic stimulus, possibly the greatest yet. How much can the Republic take? It is difficult to imagine that we strenuously fought off the ideas of a German socialist for decades, to emerge victorious, only to be laid low by the disturbingly more palatable ideas of a discredited English economist.
JBC
Originally published on the Political Pirate’s Pen
Topics: Liberals, The Constitution, Political Philosophy, Democraps, Academia, Economics | No Comments »
Finding Hope in an Obama Nation
By JBC | January 27, 2009
Five days have passed since the coronation of BHO. The stock market continues to be unstable, showing few signs of upward mobility. American businesses and banks continue to lose money, beg for federal intervention, and pack escape parachutes. The housing market is still in free fall. American citizens are still losing jobs. The war in Iraq continues unabated with no end-game strategy. Fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan shows no sigs of a successful breakthrough. Jews and Palestinians still hate each other. This is the messiah prophesied by the sheeple?
But, to be fair, we knew nothing would change for the better. We knew that the only changes would be for the perverse: more abortions, more homosexual marriages, more taxes, more bailouts, more printing of worthless fiat money, more governmental regulation, more government agencies, more political correctness, more racism, more social engineering, and more leaching of sovereignty to international organizations. But, how long will it take for the hypnotized masses to understand that they were duped? There are signs that this may be the shortest honeymoon since Britney Spears got drunk and flew to Vegas.
This emperor has no clothes. He has stumbled from a bumbling and bloated inauguration to the appointment of crooked and clueless cabinet members, to executive orders which pacify pacifists and excite extremists, to support for a stimulus package which everyone knows will only stimulate discontent and plant the seed for future tax hikes and inflation. Have we ever witnessed a new executive who showed less charisma, less confidence, less leadership, or less desire in our lifetime? He makes Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton look like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
The beautiful shining silver lining around the clueless inept dark cloud is the fact that Americans are justifiably worried about the future and will, therefore, be much more cynical about gulping down the full measure of socialist kool-aid served to them by a less and less charismatic charlatan and his merry band of morons. The magnitude of the ignorance and confusion is so large that it creates a window of opportunity for traditional, small government, pro-liberty conservatism. How is that?
Much like the failure of LBJ, Nixon, and Carter provided fertile ground for a return to the rhetorical conservatism of Reagan, and much like Clinton’s eight years of lurid and clumsy mishandling of all aspects of foreign and domestic policy aided the rise of counter-revolutionary radio-fueled rebellion, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Axis of Ignorance will till the soil for a rediscovery of our historical and natural conservative roots.
Seizing this opportunity will not be easy and we must be wary of false prophets and political hacks. While the likes of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and scores of stale GOP figure-heads will sound the trumpet to rally troops to a reformed neo-conservatism or a reconditioned compassionate conservatism, the true philosophical descendants of the Sons of Liberty must reject any deviation from a principled, logical, and traditional decentralized and liberty-based approach to governmental reform. These magical points in time are rare and must not be wasted on snake-oil salesmen.
The seeds of an anti-taxation, anti-governmental growth, anti-regulation, and anti-interventionist movement are waiting to be watered and nurtured by a strong and principled defense of the Constitution and a proactive resistance to the left-wing Axis of Ignorance. We must suffer the slings and arrows of mainstream media manipulation, absorb the inevitable mathematical defeats in DC bean-counting, and preserve internal dissension to carry the message to Middle America, the great strong-hold of traditional values in our republic. While these very folks were battered and bruised by the maniacal machinations of Bush and neoconservative cabal, they still yearn for the true American Renaissance promised to them many times by the GOP, before they were then bashed on the rocks of bipartisanship and political triangulation.
In spite of mass hysteria on both coasts and leg-tingling media euphoria, the American republic remains cynical and uneasy about our present economic situation and the dangers of the proposed radical measures to heal our financial woes. This is the time for a principled and unwavering stand for smaller government and sound free market economics. We must reject the socialist plans of Obama, and the return to the failed Keynesian economics of FDR. Do we have the heart for such a fight? We may have little choice, as the failure to engage this battle at this time could prove the last chance to do so for many years.
JBC
Originally published on the Political Pirate’s Pen
Topics: Immigration, Culture Wars, Liberals, NeoCONS, The Constitution, States Rights, Foreign Policy, The Welfare State, Foreign Politics, Political Philosophy, Democraps, Republicants, Terrorists, Globalization, Economics | No Comments »
A Perfect Storm of Change
By JBC | January 9, 2009
Patrick J. Buchanan called conservatives to arms in a rousing and controversial speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. The conservative firebrand’s speech was dubbed the “culture war” speech, because he energetically ostracized liberals supporting Bill Clinton’s party’s hopes and plans to implement a radical social agenda. Unfortunately, there was no similar torch-bearer for traditional conservatives at the most recent fete of the Grand Ole Party. Even Ron Paul, a favorite of Pat Buchanan, had to fund his own podium in the Twin Cities.
The popular mantra of the President-Elect, and a chant enjoined by the bleating masses of America’s idiocracy, is “change”. While a collective sigh of relief will be exhaled across the fruited plains of our Republic as Bush is replaced, most Americans have no clue as to the true direction of the change to come. According to the mainstream media, only radicals and alarmists should fear any change proposed by the infallible savior-elect of America. What can we, the radicals, expect in the next four years?
The short answer to this question is easy - more governmental intrusion and control in all aspects of human endeavor. The longer and more complicated answer is that we will see a continuation and increased velocity of the consolidation of federal power witnessed over the last seven decades. The latter is more complicated due to the fact that every administration since the 1920s has overseen a growth in the power and abuse of our nation’s central government. While there have been presidents, primarily and perhaps singly Ronald Reagan, who have philosophically opposed the consolidation of power, they have either acquiesced to political reality or have used the accumulation of power to political advantage. No president in living memory actually quelled our slide into a European-style socialism. The incoming government of Obama-Pelosi-Reid will fully embrace the continuation and even acceleration of the transfer of private activity to the governmental sphere.
If one examines history, and all responsible Americans should, they would see a startling parallel between America in 2008 and America during the era of the Great Depression, and the coronation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. America’s, and the world’s, economic collapse in the 1920s was blamed by most on risky and unsound private financial practices, and the followers of John Maynard Keynes mandated a strong governmental response, and encroachment over Constitutional boundaries, to steady the financial ship and to save Americans from their own stupidity. (This writer will refuse, at this point, to debate the fine points of the argument that FDR’s actions actually prolonged the economic malaise.) The result was an unconstitutional leviathan government which has never ceased growing.
Our nation is now facing another “perfect storm” for a monumental increase in federal power, and the requisite increased limitations on local governmental decision-making and individual liberties. In fact, Bush and Pelosi have given the Obama Administration a head-start in his campaign to change America. The multi-trillion dollar deals to save banks, mortgage entities, and now automobile manufacturers, are nothing more than the federal government becoming part-owners of “private” firms. While no critic is under the illusion that governmental regulations, another phrase for governmental control, of private enterprise is not already in place, these moves are those of a government transitioning from a mixed economy, the “servile state” of Hellaire Belloc, to a truce socialism in which all means of production are controlled by a centralized government. Barak Obama and his allies have no moral qualms with such a government. This is the primary change which Americans chose in November, whether they were aware of this notion or not.
Buchanan said of the social policy plans of William J. Clinton:
“…it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change
America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation
we still call God’s country.”
Our present crises beg the question, is the ongoing and increasing change to a European-style socialism a change America needs? Even more so, is an Obama-styled socialism a change we can abide in our Republic, created so long ago on the ideals of limited government and individual rights?
JBC
Originally published on the Political Pirate’s Pen
Topics: Culture Wars, Liberals, The Constitution, Foreign Policy, The Welfare State, Elections, Political Philosophy, Democraps, Economics | No Comments »
