"Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the Left over to neoconservatism on the Right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. "
Whether or not the US economy is "turning Japanese" is still an open question, but is becoming ever more likely as fake fixes are delaying painful economic adjustments.
Bubbles, as we have seen, result from deliberate "expansionary" policies by government authorities, yet Krugman always seems to treat them as being solely the products of private enterprise.
"Since credit expansion is made possible by state action, the business cycle — so far from being a natural consequence of the free market and a heavy debit against it — is ultimately traceable to government…"
There is no "socially desirable" level of work or of saving and investment other than what individuals freely choose as desirable. And unless the case for "supply-side" economic reform is modified to reflect an argument for individual freedom, it may very well serve as a means for even greater state control over the economy and not less.
Those who want to wage "humanitarian" wars need to persuade us that they know the future, and that some people's lives are less valuable than others.
Abuse of the GDP equation leads economists and pundits to blame savings and praise reckless consumption, to hate imports and love exports, and (in principle) to attribute a doubling in the flow of goods coming out of factories to a nonchange in the level of a nonexistent stock of inventory.
Recorded at Jekyll Island, Georgia; 26 February 2010.
Recorded at Jekyll Island, Georgia; 27 February 2010.
In order to make it easier for the central banks to embark upon credit expansion, the European governments aimed long ago at a concentration of their countries' gold reserves with the central banks.
