Saturday, January 25, 2014
The British Disease
"The problem with the welfare state was not that it wanted to distribute goods to the people of England. The problem was that a society bent on questions of distribution, bent on questions of consumption, was not a society that was going to deal with the underlying economic problems of how you produce enough, how you produce efficiently, how you compete in a global market and that is the imbalance." Charles Dellheim (on the basket-case that was the British economy in the late 1970s after 30 years of socialism), Boston University, author of "The Disenchanted Isle".................................................................................The professor nailed it and that is exactly how I feel about Keynesianism; the fact that these folks just assume the existence of the entrepreneur and everything, EVERYTHING (savings is bad, we are led to believe), is entirely dependent upon spending and consumption (how the consumer knows what he desires when it doesn't even exist yet is never adequately explained, in my opinion). I mean, I know that the supply-siders can be a little nutty, too, but this is ludicrous.
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7 comments:
In the first paragraph: are you saying that they are focusing on how the pie is divided instead of focusing on baking more pie... ?
Yep, that's it. It's all about managing scarcity with these people. If one person makes more money it has to come out at the expense of somebody else (win-win apparently not in their vocabulary).
Will said: "It's all about managing scarcity with these people"
And their solutions always involve stealing other people's pie and giving it to others. Well, being a socialist government, they take huge bites for themselves while giving some of the pie (sometimes just crumbs) to others.
Then again, always the naysayers .
I read that guy in the link. The commenters cut him to ribbons. I also went to a few of his other columns, and he was laughed at to kingdom come.
Even PBS in their '90s special, "Heaven on Earth" conceded that socialism had gone WAY too far in Great Britain and that when the unions refused a 5% raise in 1979 it was literally rotting on the vine.
The "how the consumer knows what he desires when it doesn't even exist yet" reminds me of the Amazon threat to send you stuff before you order. (what do I know, being probably the sole
inhabitant who has never purchased anything from them?)
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