Home » Posts tagged 'Robert E. Wright'
Tag Archives: Robert E. Wright
We Need to Shut Them Down
We Need to Shut Them Down
We need to shut them down. Governments that is. At least the ones that cannot pay their bills because of unnecessary economic lockdown orders.
I have tried just about everything in these pages to induce politicians to see that they are pushing the worst policies since at least the New Deal and are not going to get reelected if they continue their lockdown policies, which could end in bloody revolt if the power or another essential system goes out.
I’ve also tried to induce Americans to sue for their freedom on both civil and Constitutional grounds. I’ve tried to stir their patriotism, and to shame them into rising above the status of mindless test subjects or medieval peasants. I’ve tried to get “Progressives” to see that they can’t have both Social Security and government health insurance simultaneously without increasing the probability of future fiascos.
I have also proffered two separate ways out of this mess, one recently implicitly endorsed by Elon Musk, and another that no self-respecting social scientist could dispute. And I suggested that COVID-19 life insurance would help Americans to face death more like their brave ancestors, or younger selves, did at Woodstock.
But oh the powers that be, be a mighty whale some doth call Leviathan, with the magical power of creating something out of nothing, or rather, like the Wizard of Oz, appearing to create something out of nothing! So the money doth spew forth from the whale’s blow hole in mighty bursts to assuage and calm those who might wish it ill. And worked so far it has.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
MMT Is a Recipe for Revolution
MMT Is a Recipe for Revolution
Historian Stephen Mihm recently argued that based on his reading of the monetary system of colonial Massachusetts, modern monetary theory (MMT), which he cheekily referred to as PMT (Puritan monetary theory), “worked — up to a point.”
One can forgive him for misunderstanding America’s colonial monetary system, which was so much more complex than our current arrangements that scholars are still fighting over some basic details.
Clearly, though, America’s colonial monetary experience exposes the fallacy at the heart of MMT (which might be better called postmodern monetary theory): the best monetary policy for the government is not necessarily the best monetary policy for the economy. As Samuel Sewall noted in his diary, “I was at the making of the first Bills of Credit in the year 1690: they were not Made for want of Money, but for want of Money in the Treasury.”
While true that colonial governments controlled the money supply by directly issuing (or lendin) and then retiring pieces of paper, their macroeconomic track record was abysmal, except when they carefully obeyed the market signals created by sterling exchange rates and the price of gold and silver in terms of paper money.
MMT in the colonial period often led to periods of ruinous inflation and, less well-understood, revolution-inducing deflation.
South Carolina and New England were the poster colonies for inflation, in part because they bore the brunt of colonial wars against their rival Spanish and French empires. Relative peace and following market signals eventually stabilized prices in South Carolina.
In New England, however, Rhode Island for decades was able to act as a “money pump” that forced inflation on other New England colonies until they abandoned MMT entirely in the early 1750s.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The First New Deal Ruined Energy Innovation
The First New Deal Ruined Energy Innovation
About the only disappointing aspect of Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal is that it doesn’t go far enough in its critique of FDR’s rural electrification program.
The Roosevelt Institute claims, in all seriousness, that “while 90% of urban dwellers had electricity by the 1930s, only 10% of rural dwellers did and roughly 9 out of 10 farms had none,” as if electrons magically stopped flowing in the presence of barnyard animals and corn cribs.
But farmers used electricity before Roosevelt took office; they just produced or procured it themselves instead of taking it off a federally subsidized grid.
Strangely, pundits on the left continue to laud FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration even though it increased demand for electricity created largely by “dirty” sources, especially coal, while squelching demand for electricity generated by local, often green, means.
To this day, South Dakota’s prairie remains dotted with the skeletons of farm windmills abandoned long ago thanks to the Rural Electrification Administration.
This is not to say that all electricity from the grid was dirty, as some of it came from hydroelectric plants, like those along the Missouri and Niagara rivers, nor that all locally generated electricity came from green sources, as some of it came from fossil fuel–powered generators and flatulent mules. But the point here isn’t to count kilowatts; it is to point out what the New Deal cost us in terms of green-energy innovation.
Although, since the New Deal, farms in the United States decreased in relative terms and absolute numbers, they still number in the millions. And although farmers are notoriously “cash poor,” only a small number are “dirt poor.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
