Monday, August 15, 2011

Krugman - 'We Need The Threat of an Alien Incvasion to Get Out of The Recession'

If the Keynesians' have to resort to 'we need an alien invasion to prove our theory', it is well past time to throw in the towel.

Video embedded below.



"I love the war analogies. Doesn’t the Left keep blaming our current economic malaise on the two wars that George Bush started? If war was all it took to create economic growth, we’d be peaking now, wouldn’t we? And didn’t Barack Obama start a new war with Libya this year? How is the economic growth from that conflict working out?

The rest of this is just sheer idiocy. Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, somehow forgets to tell Zakaria that seizing capital from productive enterprises in taxes (or worse, borrowing against future legitimate production in deficit spending) to fund the “ditch cycle” has opportunity costs — namely, the opportunity to produce something other than pre-filled ditches, which have a real value of zero. That’s actually a significant part of what’s wrong now. Government spending doesn’t create economic growth; it takes money from actual production, and so should be used sparingly and only for necessities.

Krugman then takes Zakaria’s reductio ad absurdum and makes it more absurd by postulating that a mistaken alarm of a space invasion would create vast economic growth, which would just remain even after the Emily Litella moment when the space aliens didn’t invade. Unfortunately, the Nobel Prize-winning economist doesn’t explain what would happen when all of the assets built to meet the threat turn out to be useless and can’t be converted into productive assets for a non-space-war economy. Thanks to the massive seizure of capital it would take to create the defensive and offensive assets to meet that threat, we’d be left with little to power our economy, especially in a highly regulatory (and rationed) total-war economy.
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