Mark's Blog

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Stimulus: Not Working Worldwide

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444873204577537244225685010.html?mg=reno-wsj

The Moral Foundations of Progressivism

The reason why the ideological bubble of mainstream liberalism is so resistant to being punctured is that it is part of a moral bubble: an unchallenged belief in the morality of welfare-state altruism. In the altruist worldview, supporting yourself and providing for your own needs has no moral significance, but providing for the needs of others makes you virtuous. And the best position of all is to be the middleman distributing those handouts from the haves to the have-nots. It doesn't require you to sacrifice your own prosperity, but it still gives you the moral high ground of being the agent for the redistribution of wealth.

This is the way the welfare-state altruist "cares." He cares about you in the impersonal way he cares about a famine in Africa. It's just another excuse to raise some money and send it off to be spent on a program that may or may not work (foreign aid is another great example of money spent with very little regard for results) and to skim off a comfortable salary made all the more comfortable by a smug sense of moral superiority.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/08/16/the_washington_dc_bubble_115129.html

Monday, April 2, 2012

How Nice People Crush Freedom

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2012/03/28/obamacare-how-nice-people-crush-freedom/?singlepage=true

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Why Stimulus Spending Doesn't Stimulate

This is a pretty good article on why stimulus spending doesn’t stimulate:

http://blogs.forbes.com/charleskadlec/2011/07/11/an-unemployment-report-that-screams-spectacular-failure/

It’s something I have always wondered if there was a simple explanation for. My summary of the basic concept that the guy puts forward is this: When an individual (or company) exchanges money for a computer, wealth is created on both sides. Of course the manufacturer of the computer has determined that the money they are getting is worth more to them than the computer they made. But the other, equally important issue is that the individual has determined that the value of the computer is greater to them than the money they are exchanging for it. So both are better off.

But when government does this, they are acting only as a middleman. They take money from taxpayers and exchange it for, say, a computer. Wealth is created for the manufacturer, but does the taxpayer feel he has made a good exchange? In most cases, probably not. So the amount of wealth created is much less in this scenario than the first: certainly equal for the manufacturer, but less (or even negative) for the taxpayer.

Debt spending is merely time shifting the above scenario – taking future wealth and performing the exchange now.

If people spend their own money, it will create more wealth than having the government do it for them. Really quite simple. Probably in Adam Smith somewhere.