Charlie Quimby and the gang have broken out the silly graphics as evidence I doth protest too much about the evils of government spending. As noted in my comment to Quimby’s post, when one’s opposition spends time creating animated gifs and searching for photos of cereal boxes, one knows their arguments are lacking. Quimby’s post is here; my comment to it is reposted below. Taste them both, and determine for yourself which one stays crunchy… even in milk.
Update: See “Potholes on the Road to Serfdom.“
*****
C’mon, Charlie. Vigilance, the price of freedom and all that. When a principle is being constantly violated, why is it a sin to constantly remind people? And really, Charlie, if progressives don’t recognize the difference between the public good of education and non-essential government services, do they really have the wherewithal to govern? Is it any wonder that government intervention is virtually unrestrained?
And while you grant government the delusion of adequacy, you hold the free market to the standard of perfection. Of course, the free market is not the perfect engine of wealth creation. It is simply the best. When private companies lose money, they are effectively destroying wealth. No question. Here is the difference.
First, the wealth they are destroying is private wealth freely invested in anticipation of profit. The penalty for bad investment is paid by those making the bad decisions. (If fraud is involved, that is another story, but there is legal recourse for that, as there should be.) No one is coerced into making a private investment, as one is “forced” to invest in more costly, less efficient sources of energy production when government “invests,” or forced to invest in a failing automobile company as when government “invests.”
Second, a failing company ultimately goes out of business (baring, surprise, government intervention!) and ceases its drain on the wealth of the community. Government “rewards” programs that fail with more funding and more authority. Case in point, the Treasury Department has failed miserably to come up with a plan to “fix” the economy, so now it wants more money and more authority; GM is “too big to fail.”
Finally let’s address this point, not with an animated gif, but with some logic: “We’ve just been through a couple decades in which the objective of the smart money was not to create jobs, but to exploit the fault lines, chinks and timing of complex financial markets.”
I happen to agree with that, but rather than a problem with free markets, it is a problem of too much government intervention. A long recognized characteristic of human nature, and principle of economics, is that human beings acquire property in one of two ways – through their own efforts or through plunder, whichever is easier. Government, the rule of law, serves the legitimate function of making plunder the more difficult by enforcing force and fraud laws and increasing regulation that enhances the probability contracts will be honored. Laws preventing the use of force and fraud in voluntary contractual agreements may be overly burdensome in some cases, but they are always legitimate.
The situation of recent years, and the Enron et al scandals are also examples, government has intervened in the process, not to protect the process, but to manipulate the process with noble but misplaced intent to direct the outcome of voluntary agreements. Government regulation mandating how money must be loaned, government tweaking unequally the supply of money and the demand for credit, government micromanaging every transaction that went awry with a broad-based law (think mark-to-market) created those chinks and timing opportunities that made legal plunder more attractive than actually creating wealth. Had government kept to its proper role of preventing force and fraud, and done that job as thoroughly as it should, money would have flowed to its most efficient use, no housing bubble, and the economy would have made numerous self-corrections – minor pain for some, to be sure, but overall aggregate growth and opportunity.
As Milton Friedman noted, Charlie, “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” And that, Charlie, is what is ultimately frightening about the progressive world view.
Sorry I could not contain this comment to a silly graphic.
Sorry Charlie, You’re Still Wrong on Government Spending
Charlie Quimby and the gang have broken out the silly graphics as evidence I doth protest too much about the evils of government spending. As noted in my comment to Quimby’s post, when one’s opposition spends time creating animated gifs and searching for photos of cereal boxes, one knows their arguments are lacking. Quimby’s post is here; my comment to it is reposted below. Taste them both, and determine for yourself which one stays crunchy… even in milk.
Update: See “Potholes on the Road to Serfdom.“
*****
C’mon, Charlie. Vigilance, the price of freedom and all that. When a principle is being constantly violated, why is it a sin to constantly remind people? And really, Charlie, if progressives don’t recognize the difference between the public good of education and non-essential government services, do they really have the wherewithal to govern? Is it any wonder that government intervention is virtually unrestrained?
And while you grant government the delusion of adequacy, you hold the free market to the standard of perfection. Of course, the free market is not the perfect engine of wealth creation. It is simply the best. When private companies lose money, they are effectively destroying wealth. No question. Here is the difference.
First, the wealth they are destroying is private wealth freely invested in anticipation of profit. The penalty for bad investment is paid by those making the bad decisions. (If fraud is involved, that is another story, but there is legal recourse for that, as there should be.) No one is coerced into making a private investment, as one is “forced” to invest in more costly, less efficient sources of energy production when government “invests,” or forced to invest in a failing automobile company as when government “invests.”
Second, a failing company ultimately goes out of business (baring, surprise, government intervention!) and ceases its drain on the wealth of the community. Government “rewards” programs that fail with more funding and more authority. Case in point, the Treasury Department has failed miserably to come up with a plan to “fix” the economy, so now it wants more money and more authority; GM is “too big to fail.”
Finally let’s address this point, not with an animated gif, but with some logic: “We’ve just been through a couple decades in which the objective of the smart money was not to create jobs, but to exploit the fault lines, chinks and timing of complex financial markets.”
I happen to agree with that, but rather than a problem with free markets, it is a problem of too much government intervention. A long recognized characteristic of human nature, and principle of economics, is that human beings acquire property in one of two ways – through their own efforts or through plunder, whichever is easier. Government, the rule of law, serves the legitimate function of making plunder the more difficult by enforcing force and fraud laws and increasing regulation that enhances the probability contracts will be honored. Laws preventing the use of force and fraud in voluntary contractual agreements may be overly burdensome in some cases, but they are always legitimate.
The situation of recent years, and the Enron et al scandals are also examples, government has intervened in the process, not to protect the process, but to manipulate the process with noble but misplaced intent to direct the outcome of voluntary agreements. Government regulation mandating how money must be loaned, government tweaking unequally the supply of money and the demand for credit, government micromanaging every transaction that went awry with a broad-based law (think mark-to-market) created those chinks and timing opportunities that made legal plunder more attractive than actually creating wealth. Had government kept to its proper role of preventing force and fraud, and done that job as thoroughly as it should, money would have flowed to its most efficient use, no housing bubble, and the economy would have made numerous self-corrections – minor pain for some, to be sure, but overall aggregate growth and opportunity.
As Milton Friedman noted, Charlie, “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” And that, Charlie, is what is ultimately frightening about the progressive world view.
Sorry I could not contain this comment to a silly graphic.