You're crude, Mr. Krugman

And ignorant. And most importantly, demonstrably and provably wrong.

I’m Gonna Haul Out The Next Guy Who Calls Me “Crude” And Punch Him In The Kisser....

All through this debate, a recurring theme among anti-Keynesians has been that Keynesians like me or Brad are ignorant primitives who don’t know anything about modern macro. It’s really hard to see where that comes from, since I’ve done plenty of intertemporal optimizing in my time

Bring it on, Internet tough guy. Tell you what. I won't even duck. And then, in the immortal words of one River Tam, my turn.

Oh, and as for why people think you are an ignorant primitive, this display certainly belongs on the list.

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You're not part of the solution

If you want to know why there is no hope for America, it is because "conservatives" like Roger Simon have successfully managed to put themselves forward as the Right when in fact they are, and have always been, nothing more than the right side of the Left:

When I was young, early twenties, I felt tremendous guilt about what happened to black people in this country, even though my family arrived here fifty years after the freeing of the slaves and were themselves escaping the pogroms of Europe. Those feelings — and a sense of what was right, of course — propelled me into the civil rights movement and I am very proud to have participated. When I moved to Los Angeles and began making money in Hollywood, I still wanted to do something and started to help finance the Black Panther Breakfast Program. The Panthers did seem a bit on the tough side, but somehow I thought it was the right thing to do. Those kids in Watts were hungry, weren’t they? The “black supremacy thing” was just a “phase.”

Well, soon enough it became obvious that I was wrong. The supremacy thing was the least of it. Or a charade. The Panthers were thugs. Even worse, they were murderers and drug dealers. Worst of all, they were a horrible example to their community, a straight line ticket to oblivion.

And when I look at the videos of the New Black Panthers menacing voters in front of the polling place, I see the same thing, the same guys. Any African-American who really cared about his people would want those thugs prosecuted. He wouldn’t want them on the street as am example to the children of the community.

Mr. Simon, you are as wrong today as you were wrong then. You clearly haven't learned anything about tribal loyalties since you were so magnanimously attempting to structurally alter the very place that offered your family a place of refuge. The easily verifiable fact is that despite your totally irrelevant opinion about what African-Americans should care about or think, no African-American wants to see a few Black Panthers prosecuted for voter intimidation any more than he wanted to see OJ found guilty of murder.

Mr. Simon's personal history offers a very clear case against the immigration he supports. Notice that he is actually proud of having worked to increase Federal power while successfully weakening individual property rights and the Constitutional right to free association. As Hayek pointed out regarding "social justice", "civil rights" are not and cannot be unalienable rights endowed by a Creator. They are nothing more than politically inspired, government-granted privileges. While a small amount of immigration can certainly strengthen a society, mass immigration does nothing but alter, weaken, and eventually destroy it. There is no "strength through diversity", only "conquest through division" a fact that most of history's great conquerors have known and utilized. You will note that the diversity and immigration advocates never cite any historical examples for the obvious reason that migration, as mass immigration is more accurately labled, has long been the death knell of the societies inundated by it.

For those who missed it before, I note that "the melting pot" is ahistorical fiction written by a hypocritical Zionist and no one who cites it as some sort of societal ideal should be taken any more seriously than a guy wearing a red Star Trek uniform and calling for the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Moreover, the melting pot ideal is at its core nothing more than the usual utopian Marxist transnationalism: "Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man."

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Kicking the Krugster

David Brooks is ever so polite as he expresses his doubts about the Neo-Keynesians call for a Third Stimulus, but there's no question as to whom he is putting his genteel, moderate boot:

These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years. Are you really willing to risk national insolvency on the basis of a model?

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.

No, they don't. Nor will they have one for the next ten years. They'll have an explanation all right - the bitter-end liquidationists didn't let us spend enough money - but it won't be a good one or a correct one.

UPDATE - And Krugman is forced to immediately start lying in response. "Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world."

Krugman hopes we've all forgotten that he calculated a $600 billion stimulus was needed before the Obama administration championed the $787 billion stimulus passed by Congress.

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Cue Derbyshire

Don't hold your breath waiting for the next revolution:

As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.

In fairness, there's not much reason an immigrant from Honduras, Egypt, or Somalia should either know or care about who declared what regarding whom. And one can't reasonably expect natural-born Americans to have time to learn anything about the Revolution of 1776 in only 12 years of public school when there is so much to learn about Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, the Mayans, and all the other important figures of history who made America what it is today.

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The myth of Deist America

I suppose we can't be surprised that atheists so often get Christian "mythology" factually incorrect when they can't even keep their own myths straight:

The thinkers who formulated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists, not theists, and were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in England and Europe.

Pure.. Unadulterated.. Poppycock. This flies completely in the face of serious scholarship on the subject by Dr. Miles Bradford (University of Dallas) in which he careflully examined the religious beliefs of 55 of the framers of the Constituional Convention and found only 3 whose religious leanings were a bit unclear.

For crying out loud, there were nearly as many MINISTERS signing the Declaration of Independence as there were deists. The lesson is to always treat atheists spouting "facts" like Jehovah's Witnesses "quoting" the Bible. Always, always, always, ask them for their source. Most of the time, when you force them to trace it back, it will turn out to be pure fiction.

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The danger of white knighting

It is always heroic to rescue a child. But to "rescue" a woman from "violence against women"? Sometimes, but by no means always. Even the police know that intervening in a domestic situation is dangerously stupid given the roughly 50/50 chance that the woman initiated the violence:

A Good Samaritan who tried to help a stranger being hit by her husband was badly beaten after the man turned on him. Matthew Leone has a broken jaw and one third of his skull has been removed because his brain is swollen after he was beaten earlier this week.

I am totally opposed to the "chivalrous" notions that "you should never hit a woman" and "violence against women is absolutely disgusting". What does that make violence against men, peachy keen? Either violence is acceptable or it isn't, and I firmly believe that the Dragon motto of "start nothing, finish everything" applies universally. If a woman is dumb enough to escalate conflict to a physical level with a larger, stronger, and faster opponent, then she absolutely merits any subsequent beating that she takes. People always focus on the "finish everything" half, but the more important one is "start nothing". Now, if I am attacked, I may choose not to retaliate on the basis of my Christian principles, but that has nothing to do with the sex of the attacker. A decision to let a physical assault pass is my choice and that choice doesn't negate my absolute self-defense right to respond to the initiation of violence with incapacitating violence.

This doesn't mean that one should never intervene in a violent situation, but that if one is going to intervene, one must do so in precisely the same manner that one would intervene if two men were fighting. That's precisely why the police usually handcuff both parties involved first, then attempt to sort the matter out once everyone has been incapacitated. As I have mentioned before, you should never intervene in any violent situation unless you are absolutely certain that an even greater level of violence is justified in stopping it. If one man is stabbing another, then go ahead and blow his head off. If one woman is smashing another woman's face against the floor, then go ahead and break her wrists. But if all you're going to do is demand the bigger party - which isn't necessarily the guilty party - relax while you strike a moral pose at them, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when you wind up in the hospital.

And given the fact that the woman wasn't injured and the husband was only charged with a misdemeanor, it's pretty obvious that the white knight's intervention not only wasn't necessary in this case, but actually made a bad situation worse. I tend to doubt that the woman is going to appreciate her husband being needlessly put away in prison for 3-5 years.

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WND column

What Are You Celebrating?

The fourth of July is the day to celebrate American independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. But what is the significance of independence from Great Britain when America is kept in dependence by Washington, D.C., and in the case of 11* once-sovereign states, forcibly so?


*This should have been 12. I had forgotten about the forcible seizure and illegal occupation of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii. Mea culpa.

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Go Cops

This is the greatest song about the police since NWA's epic anthem and actually serves to justify Kesha's existence on the planet. There has never been a police state without police.

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Flipping the flipped script

A fair amount of what this woman writes about is wrong and even the title of this post is misleading, but she grasps the important issues better than most and her core message here is correct. A woman can "tame" even the most hard core player if he is genuinely ready to settle down and raise a family:

The secret to flipping a player is finding one who wants to be flipped. A pretend asshole. A guy who’s gone from beta to bastard and back again. The truth is, a very high percentage of males understand that assholes get laid. Many don’t know what to do about it. Others work hard to acquire skills with women via Game. But many, many young men just flip into acting like jerks. When in doubt, insult her. Walk away. Never show you care. This is surprisingly effective, and it really doesn’t require a bootcamp to role-play this way. Some of these guys will like the action so much, they won’t ever come back from the Dark side. Some will. You gotta figure about 20% of guys getting laid are jerks. The rest are just acting like jerks. That doesn’t make them fun to be around, but it does mean they are susceptible to being poached.

This strikes me as somewhat of a statement of the obvious; since Game concerns the simulation of Alpha behavior, there is going to be a clear difference between the natural Game player and the simulated one. And, of course, it's true that the simulated Alpha is less likely to be a complete and unrepentant bastard. Now, I do believe even complete bastards can change from ruthless and cold-hearted cad to faithful family man because that's precisely what happened to me. However, this only came about through the transformative power of Jesus Christ; a woman can enable such a transformation, but I don't see how she could possibly bring it about on her own.

I think the problem with the beta to bastard and back concept is that as you act, so you eventually become. Few whores start out thinking to earn crack money on the street; they are more likely to embark upon their descent as a low-rent model or fully-clothed cigarette girl at the strip club. (I once placed a bet with a club owner on how long it would take his new cigarette girl to graduate to the stage. I said a month and lost. Two weeks, or more precisely, eight working evenings.) Experience leaves its mark on men too, even if we don't tend to get that "ridden hard, put away wet" look that is so easy to see on women with a history of promiscuity. (By the way, women, you may wish to note that observant men can usually estimate how many men have had you with a surprising degree of accuracy. It's a fun party trick, although not one recommended for dinner parties with married couples.) Once a man ceases to put women on pedestals, he is very unlikely to ever do so again, much less become a shield-brandishing White Knight ever ready to defend a mythical honor.

It's a dangerous game both ways, of course. On the one hand, even Hugh Hefner wanted to settle down and raise a family for a while, but the sentiment passed and soon he was collecting larger and more visible harems than ever before. On the other, a relapsed Game player whose behavior has been tamed into delta or even gamma behavior is going to generate contempt and disgust in the very woman who tamed him... so she will go off and seek another faux alpha to tame or a real one to entertain her. The irony, of course, being that not long after she leaves the relapsed Game player due to his contemptible gammadom, he'll be back to his old ways with a bitter vengeance, leaving a trail of women half her age strewn behind him in broken-hearted adoration.

This is why I think it is a massive mistake for women to attempt to play alpha-tamer. A real man only does things for his own reasons, (which should not be confused with his self-interest), and unless he is motivated to change his ways by a higher power, any other externally induced change, be it for reasons of romance, fear, familial pressure, or even boredom, is unlikely to last over time.

And it's even possible that change for all the right reasons could lead a woman to develop some degree of contempt for even the strongest, most attractive man. There is a saying, after all, that no man is a hero to his valet and the intimate familiarity of family life can't help but breed the occasional eye-rolling, and perhaps even disgust. I doubt that it's much sexier to clean up after George Clooney's vomit than anyone else's. But it's always important to remember that men are not monkeys, women are not weasels, and both sexes are at least capable of surmounting our biological instincts in our own long-term best interests. That's why it is wise to recall that love is a choice and it should never be confused with the short-lived chemical cloudburst that sometimes passes for it.

But in the end, if you want a good man, then stop chasing bad ones.

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Independence

I find it remarkable that so many Americans still believe they live in a Constitutional democratic republic when it's quite clear that it is neither Constitutional nor democratic, nor is it even a republic any longer.

Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that "deemed as passed" a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the "deeming" document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget. The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.

Never before -- since the creation of the Congressional budget process -- has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money.

I mean, Congress isn't even seriously trying to make things look legitimate anymore. They're barely bothering to go through the motions and they're certainly not concerned about whatever the will of the People might happen to be. But please don't let that get in the way of enjoying your Department of Public Safety-regulated, Division of Fire Safety-approved, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms-licensed pyrotechnics celebrating liberty today.

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Don't cry for me, Maradona

Germany 4
Argentina 0

Germany underlined that their demolition of England was no fluke. They also showed that a world class team needs world class strikers who can actually finish; Miroslav Klose is at the forefront of a powerful and speedy attack that includes Podolski, Özil, and Schweinsteiger. Messi, on the other hand, demonstrated that he's more of a ball-controlling midfielder than a true striker capable of finishing.

I have to say that the contrast between Maradona and Italy's Lippi couldn't have been greater. He was magnanimous in victory against Greece, prompting Spacebunny to wonder if he would be as sporting in defeat. But unlike the fraudulent Lippi, who disappeared into the locker room without a word of consolation to his players or a word of congratulations to the other team, no sooner did the whistle blow than Maradona was out on the field again hugging his players and offering a sincere hand to the other team, this time in congratulations. He is a deeply troubled man, but it's heartening to see that on the field, he is still a champion.

As for the Ghana game, I am not surprised that the Black Stars found a way to lose it. Uruguay is mentally tough, very mentally tough, as was exemplified by Suarez watching the penalty as he walked backwards towards the locker room after his red card. A forward on the goal line, kicked out of the game, and he still hadn't given up hope. Like the Americans, Uruguay doesn't just play to the 90th minute, they fight and scrap and claw until the final whistle blows. I still can't see them shutting down the high-speed Dutch attack, but the contrast between their relentless spirit and the inexcusable lapse in Dutch effort at the end of the Brazil game does make me think that an upset is not quite as impossible as I would have thought. I still expect the Netherlands to claim the cup, as I predicted at the beginning, but the Dutch should not make the mistake of looking ahead to Germanythe final.

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Mailvox: Game and the Neophyte

BM is new to the concept of mechanistic socio-sexual science:

I have read a few of your blogs concerning game and found them rather interesting. I'm quite new to the concept of game and have a few questions concerning it. Just to start, I am a Christian and I am aware that the Christian worldview and game do conflict. However, considering the fact that I have only gone on a couple of dates in my life so far and I am often quite introverted, especially around women, I feel that at least a basic knowledge of game can serve to my advantage in meeting women.

My first question concerns a post you had titled "Exiting Omega." In the post you mention that showing a certain level of "contempt" may serve to your advantage in talking to women. Just to make sure I understand you correctly, contempt in this context could mean a sort of indifference, right? How may I apply this "contempt" in a situation of meeting a woman?

My second and final question concerns my introversion around people. I was never a socially outgoing person, as social events tend to make me rather nervous and uneasy. This has played a huge role in my lack of ability to talk to people, particularly women. Applying game, how may I overcome this obstacle? Could being introverted actually be a plus, in light of "contempt," as far as meeting women is concerned?

This is partially incorrect. The Christian perspective and Game perspective are not only NOT in conflict, they are virtually identical. This should be immediately obvious even to the neophyte observer, given that secular femininists actively loathe and fear both Christianity and Game, and for very similar reasons. There are only two substantive differences worth noting with regards to the areas where the two perspectives overlap, keeping in mind that Game has very little to say about the greater part of Christian theology and Christianity has very little to say about the details of applied Game.

Difference #1: Christianity describes the character of the fallen species of Man. Game describes the character of the fallen sex of women.

Difference #2: Christianity's practical application is directed towards a specific goal, the continued santification and eventual union of the individual soul with the Creator through the medium of Jesus Christ. Game's practical application is not directed towards any specific goal, the development and initial use of it by male pick-up artists notwithstanding.

Therefore, Game is merely a tool, which like every tool can be wielded for purposes both good and evil. Game is good when it helps a man establish and maintain his Divinely-appointed position as the head of his household. It is good when it helps a woman find contentment in her Biblically-defined role as a submissive wife. And it is evil when it is used for the purposes of fornication, adultery, or cruelty.

As for your questions, the indifference of which you speak derives from the form of contempt I mentioned. One may be very fond of a golden retriever, but one does not base one's actions on the dog's opinion. Introversion need not be even the slightest barrier to women feeling attracted to you; I fall into the INTJ category myself. What matters is how you behave towards them when they approach you, and how you behave on those occasions when you can be bothered to approach them. There are few things that intrigue a woman more than a man who looks at her as if she is an insect to be swatted because he is reflexively displaying higher value than her, therefore, only introverts can truly utilize the higher levels of indifference Game because they genuinely do not desire normal social interaction.

Here is a practical application. Indifference Game often plays out as some variant of this:

Two pairs of eyes meet. Woman's eyes are calculating and tentatively dismissive, as per usual. The man rolls his eyes at the obvious signs of her hypergamous female nature, he laughs to himself, shakes his head and turns away. The shock of this "rejection", which is in reality nothing more than a failure to provide an appreciative homage, inspires the woman to confront him. How dare he reject her! She is supposed to be the rejector, not the rejectee!

"Who do you think you are anyway?"
"I think I am someone who has no desire to engage in tedious small talk with vapid and uninteresting people."

Now, even if the woman is a vapid and uninteresting person who has nothing more to offer than tedious small talk, it would harm her self-regard to accept the lower value that has been assigned to her. This inspires her to prove to the introvert, who has really done nothing more than fail to grant her higher value status, that she is worthy of his attention.

The reason Game is inherently complicated is that social value is both objective and subjective. Everyone understands the objective value of wealth, power and fame. But few understand the greater significance of subjective value, either in terms of economics or Game. And subjective value always trumps objective value.

As for talking to women in social situations, I recommend speaking slowly, clearly, and with small words of no more than three syllables. And whatever you do, don't talk about science or anyone else's beliefs. On a tangential note, this reminds me of one of my father's most amusing comments. After returning from an evening at a black tie charity dinner, during which he was seated between two of the most garrulous women in St. Paul society at the time, he summarized his evening thusly: "Now I know what Hell is like."

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Interview with Vox Day part II

UPDATED (July 2): AS PROMISED, YOUR DOUBLE DOSE OF DAY. You’ve read the first part of my Vox Day interview on WND. Now to the sequel, exclusive to Barely A Blog:

• Ilana: To mention the Fed today as anything but a hedge against inflation is to qualify as “Worst Person in the World.” Early Americans were not nearly as baffled about what the Fed did. Comment with reference to the on-and-off attempts to eradicate this Federal Frankenstein. What good would an audit of the money mafia do?

Vox: Keith Olbermann should have stuck to sports. He has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to economics. The Fed isn’t a hedge against inflation, it is the primary engine of inflation just as its three predecessors were. A genuine audit of the Fed will immediately end its political viability and probably its existence, which is why the Fed is fighting so desperately against the Ron Paul bill. But the end result is inevitable. The Fed can’t hide behind fictional statistics forever, as with the Soviet Union, people eventually begin to notice that they are not, in fact, wealthy and well fed.

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Atheism: the anti-Game

PZ Myers considers why women don't like atheists:

It's an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I'd rather not go down that road. So here's the Woman Problem, and it's not a problem with women: it's a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it's true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.

Let's me get this straight. Women don't like a group of men who are known for being socially difficult, taking every excuse to pick arguments, launching unprovoked attacks on other's beliefs, throwing hissy fits at the drop of a hat, and basically behaving like drama queens on all occasions. And on top of this, they tend to be inordinately interested in science.

This is a mystery? Seriously? All that's without even taking the high Creepy Guy factor which some of the atheist women report of the skeptic conference attendees and even atheist leaders into account.

Now, obviously not all atheists are hapless when it comes to women. Consider the examples of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins, who managed to marry seven women between them.... But I would be interested in hearing from the women here why they are disinclined to find atheist men attractive beyond the obvious desire to marry a man of like religion.

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A big win, but not a surprise

Holland 2
Brazil 1

It's a huge win for the Dutch, but since I picked them to win the Cup, I wasn't the least bit surprised. Cesar's goal-tending was shaky, as is the longstanding Brazilian tradition, and the Brazilian players simply didn't have the self-confidence of their legendary predecessors. The game should probably have finished 3-1 if the Dutch hadn't been so concerned about burning clock that they couldn't put away a three-on-zero opportunity in injury time.

In the other game, I can't see Uruguay having any trouble with Ghana.

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Interview with Vox Day

The lovely and libertarian Ilana Mercer turns it around and interviews me about The Return of the Great Depression. This is the first part of a two-part interview:

The "infamous Internet Superintelligence," Vox Day, author of "The Return of the Great Depression," needs no introduction. My WND colleague and fellow libertarian dishes it out on the impending depression, D.C. dummies (down to their position under The Bell Curve) and a dark future. As always, Vox makes this glum stuff fun.

Ilana: Republican President George Bush was as good if not better than Clinton and Carter at laying the legislative foundation for the minority mortgage meltdown. Comment with reference to the thesis of your book (and mention some other Republicans who'd like ditto-heads to forget their political pedigree).

Vox: Like Carter and Clinton, George W. Bush pushed government programs designed to boost homeownership among low-income families that couldn't afford to meet the debt obligations they were assuming. These programs were focused on minorities, particularly Hispanics, which is why the four states where the majority of defaults have been located to date are California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. However, it should be kept in mind that these inept and bipartisan housing programs were not the cause of the core problem; they were merely a consequence of the overall problem of debt chasing a dwindling pool of borrowers.

I would be remiss if I did not point out, as noted in the book, that the heavy lifting on where the home defaults happened was done by Steve Sailer.

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The parable of the wise parents

Okay, it's more of an anecdote than a parable. But it's an important one anyhow:

Our daughters are 15 and 17. Most of their friends are very concerned about their parents' financial situations and tell me their parents have too much debt. Whether their parents know it or not, these kids know exactly what is going on and they are scared.

My oldest daughter told me this week that her friend "K"'s mother is jealous of me. I asked her why, and she said her friend's mother thinks I never worry about money and seem carefree. I told my daughter that is only because we don't have debt.

I reminded her of the years when her friend K's family went on cruises while we were tent camping in a state park. I told her that her dad and I made a decision when we first got married that we weren't going to buy anything, not even a car, until we had the cash to buy it.

We previously had a mortgage, but we paid it off in 13 years. I told her we just didn't want the stress. She gave me a hug and walked away without saying anything.

What you give your kids isn't limited to the material possessions you give them. In fact, those are the least important things you can provide.

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Ignorant and slackminded

I was not at all impressed by the lunatic defense of economic credentialism by an economist employed by the very institution that is most responsible for the incoming Great Depression 2.0. But then I read this astonishingly ignorant appeal to morality by Fred Clark and I had to admit that Kartik Athreya may have had a point in insisting that at least some bloggers shouldn't write about economic matters:

I'm not an economist, but we've got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you're smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude -- regardless of your prestige or position or years of study -- that you're a moral imbecile. And knowing what I know about your inability to make moral judgments I will have no reason to trust you to make complicated macroeconomic ones.

No, Fred, it's perfectly clear that you're not an economist and you don't know a damn thing about economics. I've read a lot of nonsense since the credit crunch began in the summer of 2008, most of it written by economists, but this is remarkably stupid even by those standards. There is simply no defense for either the infantile moral posturing or the spectacular ignorance revealed by it. The misplaced Keynesian faith in animal spirits notwithstanding, economics is not magic. It is complicated, yes, and there are a few special exceptions to the law of supply and demand, but that law is not significantly more flexible than the laws of physics. What the clueless Clark doesn't recognize is that the federal government has massively and permanently distorted the signals of the labor market for a long period of time, leading to an incredible malinvestment of human capital into various industries, including the education industry. Now that the artificially extended limits of demand have been reached in that and many other industries, the education bubble is in the process of popping precisely as Austrian theory predicts, leaving hundreds of thousands of teachers, (or more accurately, hundreds of thousands of non-teaching admininstrative bureaucrats employed by the school districts), whose labor is no longer necessary or affordable at their current rates by deeply indebted communities.

Morality has nothing to do with the correct conclusion that when a glass is already full, you cannot pour more water into it. It's simply an observable matter of fact. And if a full glass happens to be shrinking, then water is going to have to come out of it. Taking exception to such basic logic does not make you a moral exemplar, rather, denying it makes you an intellectual imbecile. Based on the evidence here, logic also dictates that no economist, or even economically aware individual, need concern themselves with what Mr. Clark thinks of their moral judgments or anything else.

If Clark wishes to wax indignant over gross and destructive immorality, he should focus his ire on the Fed, on the banks, and on the politicians who constructed a fraudulent financial system that was mathematically certain to fail and inflict millions of job losses on teachers, real estate agents, government employees, Fortune 500 corporations, and small family businesses alike. The salient fact is not whether 9.7% unemployment is high enough or not, but that utilizing more government intervention to prevent that rate from rising higher is guaranteed to extend and exacerbate the trauma to the labor force.

The reason the economic contraction confounds so many political bloggers like Slacktivist regardless of their party allegiance is that the problem cannot possibly be characterized as a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is, instead, a fundamentally structural problem with the financial system that dates back to the establishment of the fourth U.S. central bank. The long run has arrived and it has rendered the conventional liberal vs conservative debate completely irrelevant. Ironically, the solution is to be found in the example set by a Democratic president, Andrew Jackson. If Democrats want to find an plausible answer, they need to look to their party roots, not their present ideology.

UPDATE: the comments are even better. This was my favorite: "If Krugman and DeLong are right (and Paul Krugman is always right) then short-term government borrowing and spending should be a high priority right now."

Paul Krugman is always right? That's an intriguing statement.

1. Paul Krugman recommended investing in real estate and stocks while making fun of gold investors in 2002.
2. Paul Krugman thought the Fed should inflate a housing bubble in 2002.
3. Paul Krugman declared a $600 billion stimulus plan was required in November 2008. In 2009, he complained that the Obama adminstration's $787 billion stimulus plan was too small.
4. And he was a bit late in recognizing the obvious.

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Attn High Geeks

Today, you must genuflect before Markku, King of the Coders. In case you are interested, we have released the source code under the LGPLv3. And for the gamers, power CAD users, and Photoshop wizards, you have three more days to score the 20% discount.

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You can't teach an old economist new models

While Thomas Sowell is generally right as to his theme of government intervention converting the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression, he is woefully incorrect with regards to the details of how and why it happened:

The widespread belief is that government intervention is the key to getting the country out of a serious economic downturn. The example often cited is Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intervention after the stock-market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its massive and long-lasting unemployment.

This is more than just a question about history. Right here and right now, there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must “do something” to get the economy moving again. FDR’s intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.

What is on that one page in Out of Work that could change people’s minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s. Those who think that the stock-market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.

Although the big stock-market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed — and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.

This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to “do something.” What the government decided to do in June 1930 — against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it — was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under Pres. Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first president of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn. Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits — and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.

While Thomas Sowell was among the economists I liked and respected most in college, I knew that he had lost his fastball when he wrote a column defending Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment that contained some factual errors regarding Pearl Harbor. When I emailed him information demonstrating that both he and Malkin were factually incorrect and her conclusions were false, he basically hemmed and hawed and said that it really didn't matter because he likes her work. After that, I pretty much ceased to pay attention to his columns. But a number of people have emailed me this column on the Great Depression, thinking that I would approve of it. And while the cited example of historical employment statistics is a really useful one that I wish I had included in RGD, I have already shown that Sowell's contention here about the root cause of the unemployment to be false there.

For many years, it was supposed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 played a major role in the economic contraction of the Great Depression. As more economists are gradually coming to realize, this was unlikely the case for several reasons. First, the 15.5 percent annual decline in exports from 1929 to 1933 was less precipitous than the pre-tariff 18.3 percent decline from 1920 to 1922. Second,
because the amount of imports also fell, the net effect of the $328 million reduction in the balance of trade on the economy amounted to only 0.3 percent of 1929 GDP. Third, the balance of trade turned negative and by 1940 had increased to nearly ten times the size of the 1929 positive balance while the economy was growing."
- The Return of the Great Depression, p. 192

Because Sowell subscribes to neo-classical economic theory, he has no idea why the Great Depression occurred and he still hasn't recognized that we are in the Great Depression 2.0. His instincts are sound enough; he knows that government intervention can't solve the problem but because his economic model doesn't account for debt, he can't figure out what the core problem is. So, like most free market-oriented mainstream economists, he casts about for something that the government did that fits his model and assumes that it must be the causal factor, even when the evidence clearly shows that it was, at most, a trivial factor.

The thing that is so patently absurd about the Smoot-Hawley tariff theory of the Great Depression is that America was not an import/export-based economy 80 years ago. The percentage of imports and exports as a percentage of GDP was so small that not even shutting them down completely could have caused such a massive contraction in the 1930s American economy. Debt was the problem then and debt is the problem now. The federal stimulus exacerbated the problem then, and the global stimulus is exacerbating the problem now. And given the relative size of historical debt+stimulus to present debt+stimulus, it should not be hard to understand why the Great Depression 2.0 will be worse than its historical predecessor.

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