Minneapolis Fed President Neil Kashkari spoke on Monday and came out against the idea that infrastructure spending was going to lead to economic growth. No, this doesn’t mean he has been keeping up to date with David Stockman, or cracked open Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit. Rather, the Central Planner from Minnesota figures that it is “investment” in the education system rather than infrastructure spending, that is going to grow the economy. As if he could possibly know.
Of course, this is just a surface level skirmish between central planners about what centrally planned projects should be focused on. There is nary a hint of conviction that only market actors, guided by the market’s wondrous price mechanism, can properly allocate resources in the most productive manner. If the economy (which is in fact just a metaphor that doesn’t have an existence of its own) is to be grown at all, such growth must be driven by the market, not the academics at the Eccles Building.
