Monthly Archives: April 2017

Cross Post: Jim Rose When two refugees from the Khmer Rouge found paradise on Earth

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Read the article to the end because it goes in a very different direction from how you might have expected from the way it begins.
__________

When a Cambodian man and his pregnant wife, having fled the Khmer Rouge, were on the bus from Sydney Airport, they quickly concluded that they were in paradise. They slept on top of the blankets of the neatly made bed at the migrant hostel in 1978 because they did not want to get into any trouble for messing up the bed and be sent back to hell. Such was their ingrained fear of arbitrary power and victimisation.

After a few weeks, they stopped stealing the sauces and other condiments from the dining hall at the hostel because they realised that the food would keep coming and there was no need to hoard. They then started to act as mentors to incoming refugees assuring them that they could sleep under the blankets, and the food would arrive three times a day, every day.

When the Salvation Army helped them and their new baby into a house in suburban Sydney, the Salvos were very embarrassed about the furniture they managed to find for them.

The Cambodian couple thought they were in paradise again. The house and furniture were better than anything they had seen in a middle-class home in their own country.

After a few years of hard work, the father saved enough to open an electrical retailing franchise store in the suburbs.

The mother went to the store one afternoon to fill in for an absent worker.

She did not come back for 7-years.

She was great at bargaining with fellow refugees. She knew that her fellow refugees only had a certain amount of money, and she bargained to find out what that was. She wrapped the goods up tightly because she knew that they took public transport home.

The word spread that her store was a good place for a bargain, and the store prospered.

Their daughter grew up to be a lawyer and wrote one of the best autobiographies I have read.

I had some Cambodian friends at graduate school in Japan in 1995 to 1997. Friendly, kind people despite growing up in hell.

They also gave me great insight into the blinding power of nationalism.

Two Cambodian friends, educated urbane people, referred to the time after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as when they were a Vietnamese colony.

Another Cambodian, who no one liked, when he annoyed his Vietnamese class mates too much, they would say, “Remember 1979.”

This taunt would throw this Cambodian into a fit of nationalist pique. He raged against the invasion.

If any country would have benefited from an invasion from hell, it would have been Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by 1979. At least, the Devil waits for you to die before he torments you.

Original posted here

Keynesian economics wrecks economies

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I picked this up at Andrew Bolt which reminds me why I tend not to read the papers any more. The article is quite accurate and important – Living standards in decline as real wage growth stagnates. The problem is that we are never told why it is, and I suspect it’s because most economists cannot work it out since they are all Keynesians.

Nothing about the deadness of our economies worldwide has surprised me since I wrote on The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics back at the start of 2009. You can either find the explanation for how badly our economies have gone since the stimulus in John Stuart Mill’s Principles first published in 1848, or my own Free Market Economics, for which the third edition is coming out in June. Where else you can find a modern classical critique of Keynesian theory I could not tell you since I don’t think any other such book exists.

MAGICAL THINKING UPDATE: This article came up in conversation this morning, by Peter Martin in The Age: The Dark Side of Harry Potter could transfer to our world. It begins:

John Maynard Keynes is one of the most important people who ever lived. His conviction that governments should spend up when things turn down saved lives and probably saved capitalism.

Aside from the fact that The General Theory was published in 1936 and the Great Depression ended in 1933 and therefore could not have saved capitalism, Keynesian economics has blighted lives endlessly across the world since it was published since for those economies that did not begin as market economies, the belief that public spending will create growth has led to a fantastic reduction in living standards wherever such demand-side policies have been applied. Same again although in a somewhat milder form where market-based systems had already been established. If you think Keynesian theory has any answers to our economic problems you are more into magical thinking than even Harry Potter himself.

A Trump partial have-done list three months in

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It does occur to me from time to time that the media keep harping on Russia and the other non-issues precisely because Trump is moving forward on so many parts of his agenda. I cannot tell you the provenance of the following list which was sent to me with no source attached, but it is only a partial list since I have been trying to keep track myself. There is even this story today – North Korea’s embarrassing missile launch failure may have been caused by US cyber attack – which whether true or not might just possibly be true and will put lots of questions into lots of minds.

Not immediately doing everything is no criticism when the alternative to Trump was Hillary. A partial Trump agenda is immensely to be preferred to any possible alternative universe in which Hillary is the president. There’s lots more than just this.

  1. In January, Trump signed an executive order that would cut two regulations for every new regulation proposed. Trump stated, “If there’s a new regulation, we have to knock out two.”
  2. President Trump signed an executive order advancing construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, previously blocked by the Obama administration. Subsequently, the Trump administration approvedthe construction of both pipelines.
  3. Trump signed an executive order in February known as “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda.” The order will create regulatory watchdogs that will find new onerous regulations to eliminate. Trump saidthat “every regulation should have to pass a simple test: Does it make life better or safer for American workers or consumers? If the answer is no, we will be getting rid of it and getting rid of it quickly.”
  4. Trump signed a bill that rescinds the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband privacy rule that many scholars argue are duplicitous and onerous. Critics of the rule, including FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, argue that the Federal Trade Commission would be better suited to protect consumer privacy than the FCC. Katie McAuliffe, executive director for Digital Liberty, said this broadband rule “was a power grab under the guise of privacy.”
  5. Trump signed J.Res. 58, which overturns the Education Department’s rule that relates to how teacher training programs are assessed. The Washington Postexplained the rule’s unpopularity: “Teachers unions said the regulations wrongly tied ratings of teacher-training programs to the performance of teachers’ students on standardized tests; colleges and states argued that the rules were onerous and expensive, and many Republicans argued that Obama’s Education Department had overstepped the bounds of executive authority.”
  6. The president signed legislation that nullifies a Department of Education rule relating to state accountability requirements. The rule concerned states’ accountability in identifying failing schools and reporting their plans for improving them to the federal government. Trump commented on rescinding both education rules, saying they “eliminate harmful burdens on state and local taxes on school systems that could have cost states hundreds of millions of dollars.”
  7. Trump signed an executive order that minimizes the burden of Obamacare. The executive order makes it harder for the IRS to enforce Obamacare’s individual mandate. Judge Andrew Napolitano called Trump’s Obamacare executive order “revolutionary.”
  8. President Trump signed an executive order killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He told Breitbart News during the campaign, “The TPP is another terrible one-sided deal that rewards offshoring and enriches other countries at our expense. I will stop Hillary’s Obamatrade in its tracks, bringing millions of new voters into the Republican Party. We will move manufacturing jobs back to the United States and we will Make America Great Again.”
  9. President Trump signed an executive order instituting a federal hiring freeze, although there is an exemption for the military. A federal hiring freeze was the second point in President Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter.” During his inaugural address, the president said, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth.”
  10. President Trump signedlegislation that repealed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule mandated under the Dodd-Frank Act that requires companies such as Exxon Mobil or Chevron to publicly disclose the taxes and fees they pay to foreign governments. Analysis shows that the regulation costs the industry$1.3 billion.
  11. President Trump instituted a freeze on all new regulations that have not been finalized.
  12. President Trump signed a resolution that overturned the “Stream Protection Rule” issued by Obama’s Department of Interior during his last weeks in office. Trump said the resolution would “eliminate another terrible job-killing rule.”
  13. President Trump signed an executive order that would review every executive agency and department to find out, as Trump says, “where money is being wasted [and] how services can be improved.”
  14. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals a Social Security Administration rule that bars Americans from their right to bear arms. Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins wrote about the rule: “Of all the regulations on the chopping block this week, the Social Security gun ban stands out as especially egregious. The Obama administration fashioned it in a way that gives the Social Security Administration the ability to bar certain beneficiaries from buying guns based on a need for help in managing their finances.”
  15. President Trump signed legislation that eliminates an onerous methane emissions rule that effectively drove energy production from federal lands.
  16. Trump signed an executive order that would review the Clean Power Plan, and possibly rescind Obama-era regulation that limits coal-fired power plants.
  17. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals a Department of Labor rule that severely limits the ability of states to implement drug testing.
  18. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals the Bureau of Land Management’s rule that would shift resource management from the states to the federal government.
  19. President Trump signed an executive order in February that scales back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul. The executive order directs the Department of the Treasury to consult with regulatory agencies and report to the president about what could be done to eliminate what the administration considers “overreaching.”
  20. President Trump signed an executive order delaying the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule that critics contend limits consumer choice for retirement account holders.White House chief strategist Steve Bannon detailed President Trump’s agenda in three parts: economic nationalism, national sovereignty, and deconstruction of the administrative state. At CPAC, Bannon said, “The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency,” he said. “That’s all going to be deconstructed.”White House estimates show that the regulations that Trump has already repealed will save approximately $10 billion over the next ten years or $1 billion per regulation.Trump has said that he wants to eliminate “a little more than 75 percent” of the regulations in the federal register. “We don’t need 97 different rules to take care of one element,” he said.

    “We’re cutting regulations massively for small business and large business,” the president added.

The fact that Steve Bannon features on the list makes me think it is actually quite old, although it cannot be more than three months old since Trump only became president in January.

Discourses on the Election of Donald Trump

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It may be absurd but this is how I look upon my The Art of the Impossible, my blog history of the election of DJT as president. You can order a copy here. The discourse were, of course, written by Niccolo Machiavelli. I naturally say “of course” in recognition to the fullest extent of its ironical intent. Our educated classes are the shallowest political generation in history.

DISCOURSES ON THE FIRST DECADE OF
TITUS LIVIUS.
BOOK I.
* * * * *
PREFACE.

Albeit the jealous temper of mankind, ever more disposed to censure than to praise the work of others, has constantly made the pursuit of new methods and systems no less perilous than the search after unknown lands and seas; nevertheless, prompted by that desire which nature has implanted in me, fearlessly to undertake whatsoever I think offers a common benefit to all, I enter on a path which, being hitherto untrodden by any, though it involve me in trouble and fatigue, may yet win me thanks from those who judge my efforts in a friendly spirit. And although my feeble discernment, my slender experience of current affairs, and imperfect knowledge of ancient events, render these efforts of mine defective and of no great utility, they may at least open the way to some other, who, with better parts and sounder reasoning and judgment, shall carry out my design; whereby, if I gain no credit, at all events I ought to incur no blame.

When I see antiquity held in such reverence, that to omit other instances, the mere fragment of some ancient statue is often bought at a great price, in order that the purchaser may keep it by him to adorn his house, or to have it copied by those who take delight in this art; and how these, again, strive with all their skill to imitate it in their various works; and when, on the other hand, I find those noble labours which history shows to have been wrought on behalf of the monarchies and republics of old times, by kings, captains, citizens, lawgivers, and others who have toiled for the good of their country, rather admired than followed, nay, so absolutely renounced by every one that not a trace of that antique worth is now left among us, I cannot but at
once marvel and grieve; at this inconsistency; and all the more because I perceive that, in civil disputes between citizens, and in the bodily disorders into which men fall, recourse is always had to the decisions and remedies, pronounced or prescribed by the ancients.

For the civil law is no more than the opinions delivered by the ancient jurisconsults, which, being reduced to a system, teach the jurisconsults of our own times how to determine; while the healing art is simply the recorded experience of the old physicians, on which our modern physicians found their practice. And yet, in giving laws to a commonwealth, in maintaining States and governing kingdoms, in organizing armies and conducting wars, in dealing with subject nations, and in extending a State’s dominions, we find no prince, no republic, no captain, and no citizen who resorts to the example of the ancients.

This I persuade myself is due, not so much to the feebleness to which the present methods of education have brought the world, or to the injury which a pervading apathy has wrought in many provinces and cities of Christendom, as to the want of a right intelligence of History, which renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning or to relish its flavour. Whence it happens that by far the greater number of those who read History, take pleasure in following the variety of incidents which it presents, without a thought to imitate them; judging such imitation to be not only difficult but impossible; as though the heavens, the sun, the elements, and man himself were no longer the same as they formerly were as regards motion, order, and power.

Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought. And although the task be arduous, still, with the help of those at whose instance I assumed the burthen, I hope to carry it forward so far, that another shall have no long way to go to bring it to its destination.

Making Marxism cool again

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There are so many different directions from which cultural Marxism comes that it is impossible to keep up. If you do not understand and wish to sustain a society of free individuals whose aim is to live in freedom and direct their own lives in their own way, and by the way to also live in prosperity, then there is almost no defence against the centralising force that are found at every turn. There was a comment on my post on Communism for Kids that has added yet another dimension to this web. I am going to quote what “Robin” has written but will slightly reconstruct the order in which he brought out his points in a way I find easier to understand. This is what he wrote in the second of his comments:

I actually dropped in from the US to alert Australians to this push from March to force a shift to Human Capability Theory [HCT] in the name of supposed preparation for work.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum seem to have created HCT to implement the Marxist Humanist view of education globally without that being appreciated. The Capability Approach and Human Development is what the global change agents call this theory and they get together now quite a lot to plan how to implement it out of our collective sight for the most part.

Communism for Kids is published by MIT Press. I’m no longer surprised to see a university engaged in such kinds of work, but it’s not because they are a publisher and publish what they think will sell along the lines of selling the rope that will be used to hang them. They do it because HCT is part of a project MIT is involved with. The background to the book was outlined in the first of his comments.

This is translated into English from German I believe and relates to what I refer to as little ‘c’ communism. It is also what Gorbachev and others call Marxist Humanism. Its ties to what Marx called the Human development Society and education are covered here.

Marxist Humanism and little c communism are what the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN and its Dignity for All by 2030 campaign are all about once we become familiar with the theory. MIT’s involvement makes far more sense once we know they are partners with the UN in its Earth Systems Science Partnership that is about the behavioral and social sciences, including education.

Also the necessary premise for the Human Development Society where “from each according to abilities and to each according to needs” would be the operating principle was that capitalism would have produced a necessary level of technological innovation. ICT [Information and Communication Technology] is regarded as that magic technology worldwide and MIT is essentially homebase. China and Russia installed Communism on an agricultural base. Therefore, unfortunately, the theorists insist that their history does not invalidate what communism might entail if the theory can be implemented on the right technological base.

This remains a dangerous theory if not correctly understood. Letting it come in as ‘systems science’ for example is just as dangerous and much harder to see.

One superficially negative review of the book however ends with this.

There were a couple of positive reviews of the book, though none of them verifier buyers. “I loved this book so much!” wrote Sophia Nachalo. “It’s not really a kid’s book, but rather a book for everyone written in a fun and easy way that uses stories, fables, and funny characters to explain everyday life. It makes marxism cool again!”

Fredrick Jameson, a Duke University Professor, endorsed the book, claiming “this delightful little book may be helpful in showing youngsters there are other forms of life and living than the one we currently ‘enjoy,’ and even some adults might learn from it as well.”

And in another negative review there was nevertheless this at the end which totally reversed whatever mild criticisms there were:

CNN’s Chris Cuomo said communism is “uplifting” as he talked fondly of Cuba. This is the state of affairs in the United States today.

“The concern was the freedom of the people,” he continued. “What is the point of this communist regime if it is not to truly make everyone equal — not at the lowest level; not by demoralizing everyone; but lifting everyone up?”

I had a friend from the far left who was overjoyed by the fall of the Soviet Union now almost three decades ago. With no negative example before us, he was sure Marxism would come back stronger than ever. It may be the only political judgement he has ever been right about, but it is one that should worry you all.

The economic views of Marriner Eccles are with us still

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I suppose the basic point is that economics remains in such a primitive state that it is impossible for anyone really to be sure what is true and what is not. Most people just make it up as they go along, with no true means to validate one version of reality in comparison with another.

These are excerpts from the Testimony of Marriner Eccles to the Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933. And who is Marriner Eccles? Other than being in his time one of the richest men in Utah, he was appointed by FDR to the Chairmanship of the Fed in 1935 where he remained until 1951. A proto-Keynesian disciple of Foster and Catchings, this is how he is described at the first link by “The London Banker (TLB):

Below are excerpts from the testimony of Marriner Eccles to the Senate Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933. It is an historic document – laying out the future terms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the management of money supply nationally through open market operations, the Bretton Woods Accord on currency stability, mortgage refinancing as monetary stimulus, and reforms of the Federal Reserve System to eradicate the excesses of untamed capitalism and financial dominance of Wall Street. He proposes higher income and inheritance taxes as essential to promote economic growth, curb inequality and forestall political instability. He encourages federal regulation of child labor, unemployment insurance, social security and other farsighted reforms. And he avows himself a capitalist throughout.

The following are excerpts from the excerpts of the testimony printed by TLB.

We have all and more of the material wealth which we had at the peak of our prosperity in the year 1929. Our people need and want everything which our abundant facilities and resources are able to provide for them. The problem of production has been solved, and we need no further capital accumulation for the present, which could only be utilised in further increasing our productive facilities or extending further foreign credits. We have a complete economic plant able to supply a superabundance of not only all the necessities of our people, but the comforts and luxuries as well. Our problem, then, becomes one purely of distribution. This can only be brought about by providing purchasing power sufficiently adequate to enable the people to obtain the consumption goods which we, as a nation, are able to produce. The economic system can serve no other purpose and expect to survive. . . .

We could do business on the basis of any dollar value as long as we have a reasonable balance between the value of all goods and services if it were not for the debt structure. The debt structure has obtained its present astronomical proportions due to an unbalanced distribution of wealth production as measured in buying power during our years of prosperity. Too much of the product of labor was diverted into capital goods, and as a result what seemed to be our prosperity was maintained on a basis of abnormal credit both at home and abroad. The time came when we seemed to reach a point of saturation in the credit structure where, generally speaking, additional credi was no longer available, with the result that debtors were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin to apply on the reduction of debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds, bringing about what appeared to be overproduction, but what in reality was underconsumption measured in terms of the real world and not the money world. . . .

What the public and the business men of this country are interested in is a revival of employment and purchasing power. This would automatically restore confidence and increase profits to a point where the Budget would automatically be balanced in just the same manner as the individual, corporation, State, and city budget would be balanced. . . .

Mr Eccles: Of course, the way I look at this matter is that we have the power to produce, just as in the period of prosperity after the war demonstrated when we had a standard of living for a period from 1921 to 1929 which, of course, was far in excess of what it is now. Yet in spite of that standard of living we saved too much a I have previously tried to show.

Senator Gore: You have got Foster in the back of your head?

Mr Eccles: I only wish there were more who had. We saved too much in this regard, that we added too much to our capital equipment. Creating overproduction in one case and underconsumption in the other because of an uneconomic distribution of wealth production. . . . Of course, we are losing $2,000,000,000 per month in unemployment. I can conceive of no greater waste than the waste of reducing our national income about half of what it was. I can not conceive of any waste as great as that. Labor, after all, is our only source of wealth. . . .

The program which I have proposed is largely of an emergency nature designed to bring rapid economic recovery. However, when recovery is restored, I believe that in order to avoid future disastrous depressions and sustain a balanced prosperity, it will be necessary during the next few years for the Government to assume a greater control and regulation of our entire economic system. There must be a more equitable distribution of wealth production in order to keep purchasing power in a more even balance with production. . . .

Such measures as I have proposed may frighten those of our people who possess wealth. However, they should feel reassured in reflecting upon the following quotation from one of our leading economists:

It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying. It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.

This was reprinted by TLB because of his full agreement with Eccles which was mirrored by all of the comments, except for one, by Ron Paul who wrote:

What a load of statist drivel and what a bunch of Roosevelt worshiping sycophants. I’ll bet Krugman and the entire Nobel prize committee would love this post too.

Statist drivel isn’t the half of it, but it is clearly not the majority view, not then and not now.

Communism for Kids v Economics for Infants

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Just like the article says, this is MIT’s new publication ‘COMMUNISM FOR KIDS’. You can pick it up at Amazon where you can find the following blurb:

Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true? This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children’s story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening.

It all unfolds like a story, with jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers–not to mention a Ouija board, a talking chair, and a big pot called “the state.” Before they know it, readers are learning about the economic history of feudalism, class struggles in capitalism, different ideas of communism, and more. Finally, competition between two factories leads to a crisis that the workers attempt to solve in six different ways (most of them borrowed from historic models of communist or socialist change). Each attempt fails, since true communism is not so easy after all. But it’s also not that hard. At last, the people take everything into their own hands and decide for themselves how to continue. Happy ending? Only the future will tell. With an epilogue that goes deeper into the theoretical issues behind the story, this book is perfect for all ages and all who desire a better world.

You would hope that it’s all intended to be ironic but given the way of the world, every word is meant just as it is written. “Happy ending?” they ask. Complete idiots which often comes with high IQ grade stupidity.

So I will just mention that I have written my own little book which is titled Economics for Infants, the first children’s book ever premised on the classical economics of Say’s Law and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

More details to come.

[The story on The Children’s Guide to the Gulag comes via Instapundit]

“We need to push back against this rubbish”

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No namby-pamby PC.

From the accompanying note that came with the vid:

Today we are launching the website: www.marklathamsoutsiders.com

Have a look at the site: hopefully it will become a handy resource for folks wanting to fight back against the loss of our institutions and Australian values.

I genuinely believe conservatives and social democrats need to unite in the fight against cultural Marxism and segregationist identity politics.

The best things about our country, many of which we had taken for granted, are now at risk.

many thanks, Mark

“The Utopia of Damned Fools”

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This is from an article on “The New Deal” written by H.L. Mencken in May, 1935 and published in A Mencken Chrestomathy [Vintage Books New York 1982: pages 424-25]. It discusses how the first application of Keynesian economics by the Roosevelt Administration came about even before The General Theory had been written. The article begins with excerpts from two articles in The New Republic and The Nation describing how FDR’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, in collaboration with three others, came up with the idea of massive increases in public spending to bring the Depression to an end. Although tentative in approaching Roosevelt about such a massive spending program without even having done the slightest bit of analysis, he expected Roosevelt to be reluctant about spending such immense amounts of money, all the more so since Roosevelt had committed himself to balancing the budget. That was not, however, how it went.

[Hopkins] expected to be told to develop the idea and come back with a fuller outline. He still expected that when he left the White House that evening. But it so happened that he had caught the New Deal Messiah in one of his periods of infatuation with the spending art, and Hopkins literally woke up the next morning to discover that Roosevelt without further ado had proclaimed the CWA* in effect.

It is now more than two years later. Mencken is here looking back on the fantastic amounts of spending and the effect such spending has had.

The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 more than 1,000,000 were on the CWA pay roll; by January, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.

What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring Hopkins had got rid of his billion, and the whole thing had blown up with a bang. More people were out of work than ever before. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year’s campaign.

Go back to the clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayer’s expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people’s money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideals. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come.

Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leapt to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you will ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way. Why higgle and temporize? We won’t be here forever, and when we are gone we’ll be gone a long while.

But the Leader? Wasn’t he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn’t it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late – that the flop of the NRA has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer’s pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for The Leader is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.

Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of Damned Fools.

We never seem to learn a thing. Not from the experience of the 1930s, the 1970’s, Japan in the 1990’s and everywhere across the world since the GFC. Keynesian economics is junk science; no public sector stimulus has ever brought an economy in recession into recovery. It would only be about one economist in a hundred who even knew an economy is not driven forward by aggregate demand, never mind could explain why the stimulus, either now or then, didn’t work. Indeed, there are probably still many who would argue the stimulus had been a great success.
__________
* The CWA was the Civil Works Administration, the stimulus program put in place by FDR in 1933 that worked as well as Obama’s stimulus program after it was put in place three-quarters of a century later.