Look, forget the Superbowl. The Argos, the beloved Toronto Argonauts, won the Grey Cup this year. OK, it was in November. They hold the game a bit earlier in Canada since if you waited for February it would be a bit frosty. But let me however point out that Canadian rules football is a more open and exciting game but why get into an argument. What American even knows the Canadian game exists.

As for the Superbowl, it was a quite extraordinary game but that is not the most notable event of the afternoon by any means. What really is of interest was the failure of the stadium lighting system in the middle of the third quarter. The United States is developing a third world infrastructure because it is wasting its capital in various government-directed forms of expenditure of which the loss of lights is merely an example of what will become a more general case in many different areas.

The maddening uselessness of modern macroeconomics, which looks almost entirely at current production, ignores the deterioration of capital stock and thinks that just because private sector inflation is low for the moment things are on the right track. It’s not inflation per se that will kill you but the public spending that the government-controlled money creation system allows to go on almost till an economy is over the cliff.

Losing the lights in the middle of a football game is the least of it. As the capital stock and infrastructure crumble the US will find itself poorer and its population less wealthy than in the past. But as I continuously try to point out, it’s economic theory that is fundamentally at fault. If the Treasury, here or in the US, keeps insisting that worthless forms of public spending are good for growth, you can be sure that politicians as economically unsophisticated as a Gillard or an Obama are not going to go against such advice since this is exactly what they believe and anyway want to hear. But it is terrible advice and we will pay for it well and truly.