The left’s embrace of Keynes was never about the economics, which they haven’t the knowledge, intelligence, or willingness to make the effort to understand. All they care about is that an over-simple reading of his General Theory justifies what they want to do, anyway, which is grow the government.

You can’t use logic and facts to argue someone out of a position they didn’t use logic and facts to get into.

that’s why the libs never learn.

The present monetary and fiscal strategy is right out of the ending of Thelma and Louise: smile and laugh while driving all of us over a cliff.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it would be so wonderful if it *did* work that people just can’t help but want to try it.

And people seem to invariably follow this reasoning process:

1) Those other guys tried it and it didn’t work, but
2) I’m smarter than those guys, so
3) When *I* try, it *will* work.

Boy, I thought Dave Kansas was going to have to wait a few months before eating crow.

The Wall Street Journal: “Why the Doomsayers are Wrong”:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127880219326915593.html

I believe the standard figure is that you need new job creation of about 300K to keep even. Over 300K, you start to reduce the u/e rate.

RSM–

But it’s just frustrating that, 30 years after the Keynesian debacle, these idiots still can’t seem to recognize the glaring flaw in their theory:

They recognize the flaw alright; they simply deny its existence. This is mental contortion of every liberal/progressive alive: They reify fantasies that then become, through a sort of secular transubstantiation, reality.

There are mountains of evidence now of the Soviet Gulags. But who on the left except for Anne Applebaum even cares? Zero was and is a complete non-entity and a nitwit, a Chauncey Gardner-like figure on the world stage. But to the absorbed lefty a revisitation of Christ or something.

Leftism is a brain disease. It can be cured, but first the suffer must be aware of its existence in order to fight it.

RSM–

But it’s just frustrating that, 30 years after the Keynesian debacle, these idiots still can’t seem to recognize the glaring flaw in their theory:

They recognize the flaw alright; they simply deny its existence. This is mental contortion of every liberal/progressive alive: They reify fantasies that then become, through a sort of secular transubstantiation, reality.

There are mountains of evidence now of the Soviet Gulags. But who on the left except for Anne Applebaum even cares? Zero was and is a complete non-entity and a nitwit, a Chauncey Gardner-like figure on the world stage. But to the absorbed lefty a revisitation of Christ or something.

Leftism is a brain disease. It can be cured, but first the suffer must be aware of its existence in order to fight it.

P.S. Did you just a receive a visit for the esteemed Charles Johnson? Must have gotten his prescription refilled.

But think of the bike paths, Stacy!

How’d the wedding go? Well I hope.

You said it in #4. Ain’t no easy way out.

doubleplus ungood because Ezra didn’t vet this through Journolist first.

Six Years? Well, that’s pretty predictable, as the ultimate Keynsian, FDR, sank the US economy for six extra years, and was set for another six when Dolph and Hideki stimulated the supply side, as it were, and encouraged increased American savings — of the world, but be that as it may.

Say now! Anybody thinking that this six year hole in the road is going to end badly, too?

The Wall Street Journal: “Why the Doomsayers are Wrong”

In fairness to Dave Kansas, it’s hard to judge long-term prognostications in the short term. Just about every time I pronounce that we’re finally sliding into the ultimate double-dip meltdown, the next day the Dow gains 100 points. So I feel his pain. But the fact we haven’t gotten back to the late-April level of Dow 11,200+ after nearly three months is the real telling argument against the optimists. We still haven’t felt the full impact of the commercial real-estate crunch, and there are all kinds of government-policy bummmers coming down the pike over the next year, including expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

WSJ, like nearly all financial journalism, has a built-in bullish bias. Now matter how bad things really are, bearish gloom-and-doom is never popular on Wall Street. Go back and read WSJ from early 2007 (i.e., the eve of the housing decline) and you’ll find almost zero pessimism about the future — certainly no indication of the near-catastrophe that hit in October 2008. If we’re now six months or a year away from another disastrous meltdown, you can’t expect to find those warnings on the front page of the WSJ.

The general lot of mankind has been poverty and endless toil, a condition ameliorated only in a few fortunate nations that embraced free-market capitalism and the Rule of Law.

“Fortunate”? What, you mean that nobody knew for a fact that free markets were good, but just kind of blundered into them?

How’d the wedding go? Well I hope.

The Darling Daughter’s wedding was wonderful, although enormously stressful to Mrs. Other McCain and myself. The newlyweds seem just as happy as newlyweds should be. Of course, no wedding can be pronounced entirely successful until we get some grandchildren out of the deal, but . . .

“Fortunate”? What, you mean that nobody knew for a fact that free markets were good, but just kind of blundered into them?

Well, the influence of English common law, and Adam Smith’s refutation of mercantilist fallacies, put the English-speaking world at a distinct advantage. Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution also helped inoculate the English-speaking world against the radicalism that had such a disastrous influence elsewhere. So, yes, America and a few other nations have been fortunate — “blessed,” if you prefer — in avoiding the worst effects of anti-capitalist ideas that blighted so much of mankind’s history.

We need another war. That should do it.

Because abolishing the Federal Reserve is clearly not going to happen.

A Haiku…..

Obama has failed
The worst President ever
Jimmy Carter grins!

It’s a fact that in all these wingnut blogs people have not much original stuff to say nowadays.

We don’t need originality. We need grasp of economics, something sorely lacking on the left.

Isn’t time to consider selling off assets? Start with the Post Office and all of its real estate. Slash budgets, and eliminate departments. Get rid of the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and so forth. http://tinyurl.com/29u3vsr

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as “bad luck.” Robert A. Heinlein

We spent trillions but we did get a few thousand temporary census jobs out of the deal. So who says Obamanomics doesn’t work?

What do you mean ” 30 years after the Keynesian debacle …”? Don’t forget the ’30s – Keynesian policies PROLONGED the Great Depression in America, according to liberal economists at UC-Berkeley, of all places. Amity Schlaes delivered an excellent accounting of the details and the whys in her book, “The Forgotten Man.”

The fact is that “Keynesian economics” isn’t really a coherent “theory” in the academic sense anyway. Keynes set out to present justifications for central planning – coincidentally the very idea of which Western governments were becoming enamored anyway around the turn of the 20th Century. His formulae have never been born out in the real world except for the occasional short-term success (which might just as likely be due to random variation than concrete policies).

Keynesian economics is popular among the government crowd for the same reason as global warming panic: it provides an excuse for high taxes, high spending, aggrandizement and aggregation of unaccountable governmental power, and most importantly, huge numbers of handsomely paid government sinecures for useless shit-head parasite social science graduates to dole it all out and lord it over the people in this country who actually do the productive work. If Keynes never lived, some other parasite government fellator would have invented him. These morons couldn’t change a tire, much less do anything that puts food in a single mouth. They are the enemies of all that our forefathers shed their blood for.

Soon the whole scheme collapses. I hope we end up with sovereign state militias hunting down these worthless government bastards with packs of dogs for crimes against humanity. America is over.