Randy Wuller <rwul...@freeark.com> wrote:
> In any event, the current notion of austerity is nonsense and is tied to a > tired and outdated concept that money is real or has some intrinsic real > value which it doesn't. Austerity = Stupidity . . . I know little about economics, but I agree. It seems to me that money is a counter, like a poker chip, and you should make as much as you need, except when that causes excessive inflation. In general I am suspicious of any social or economic policy that it grounded in the notion that people are not suffering enough, or that we need more misery to improve the situation. I have read a lot of history and looked carefully at the world. I have met many people in different walks of life, in different countries. I have never noted that ordinary people seem too well off, too healthy, well educated or too happy for their own good. Most people struggle to live a decent life with what I consider few luxuries. I do not see how it could help to make life even more restricted and less secure for ordinary people. I also deplore the attitude that wealth is bad for you -- or bad for other people, is how it usually goes. As I said in the book: "I despise the notion that poverty is ennobling, or that people want material things because they are greedy or decadent. Everyone on earth who wants a car should have a car. Or a dozen cars, a home movie theater, and a Jacuzzi. Cars are made of iron, and we have unlimited amounts of iron in the solar system." Paul Krugman is probably the most prominent economist who says that austerity is a bad idea, and we should go with the Keynes approach. I will grant that many conservative economists disagree, and I am not a bit qualified to judge, but Krugman's book "The Return of Depression Economics" sounds right to me. We need to increase demand. The book concludes with some eloquent paragraphs: ". . . The quintessential economic sentence is supposed to be 'There is no free lunch'; it says that there are limited resources, that to have more of one thing you must accept less of another, that there is no gain without pain. Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes’s world—and ours—was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding. We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men." - Jed
