O Insurgente

PS – a sério que há quem enfie o barrete de “piegas” com isto que o Passos Coelho disse?

Government Cannot Create Sustainable Jobs por Arnold Kling:

Modern Keynesians claim the problem is that businesses and consumers are not doing their part. Borrowing and spending is a tough job, the Keynesians say, but somebody has to do it, and that somebody should be the government .. For Keynesians, job creation is simple. Entrepreneurs have knowledge of how and what to produce. All that is required is more demand, in order to induce them to undertake more hiring.

In contrast, in our Smith-Ricardo story, the knowledge of how and what to produce has to be discovered. Entrepreneurs have to figure out ways to utilize resources that satisfy wants in an efficient way. The market mechanism first must undertake trial and error to create production processes that exploit comparative advantage. Until these new patterns of sustainable specialization and trade are discovered, there are no job slots.

Experimenting with new patterns of specialization and trade is relatively easy. Discovering patterns of sustainable specialization and trade is much harder. Our economic well-being depends on the ability of entrepreneurs to make these discoveries.

If the Keynesian demand story is not valid today, then perhaps it was not valid during the Great Depression either. The 1920s and 1930s were, like the present, a period in which major technological changes were working their way through the economy. Economic historian Alexander Field has argued that the decade of the 1930s saw more technological progress than any other decade in American history.

The Keynesian story would lead one to expect a recovery to consist of workers returning to the jobs that they held prior to the recession. That is not what happened after the Great Depression. It is not what has happened in recent recessions in the U.S., particularly the one that ended in 2009. Regaining full employment requires significant restructuring of the economy, rather than simply returning to the pre-slump status quo.

More government spending can at best create some unsustainable jobs in the short run. In the long run, it will only distort and impede the adjustments that are needed to create patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

Why Did the South Secede?:

Most students believe that the South was fighting to keep all of the slaves in bondage, while the benevolent Yankees were fighting to free the slaves in captivity — nothing could be further from the truth.

The motivation of Lincoln was consolidating political power — not freeing the slaves. The notion that he was trying to free the slaves from the get-go is a complete fabrication. Lincoln also was a racist, even though he thought slavery was wrong ..

The notion of Lincoln being a benevolent color-blind freer of slaves is simply not true. It’s a fantasy cooked up by the men who won the war. After all, if you’re telling your grandkids that you waged a war that killed 600,000 men, that destroyed the city of Atlanta, and millions of people were wounded, it doesn’t sound good to say “we did it for political power”.

So what were the real reasons the South seceded? The following should be helpful to understand:

• Anti-South Party. The GOP was anti-southern ..
• Anti-South Tariffs. In the 1830s, the US government passed tariff essentially forcing the South to buy products from the North ..
• No Nullification .. The “strong central government” camp had become much more powerful than the state-sovereignty camp, at least in DC.
• Capping Southern Influence .. The North was soon to completely overpower the North in the federal government, leaving the South in a position where they were essentially forced to do whatever the North wanted.
• Structure of Government. The North repeatedly was trying to change the constitution to make the senate elected by popular vote rather than state legislatures .. The South wanted state sovereignty, and the North wanted the federal government to more able to regulate the internal affairs of the states — and not just in slavery.
• No Need for the North ..Since they were being politically isolated and economically exploited, they believed there was nothing keeping them to stay in the North. They also believed that leaving the Union at any time was their contractual right.

LEITURA RECOMENDADA: Lincoln

Headlines over solar cycle 25 and potential global cooling:

There’s a story about solar cycle 25, and a potential “mini ice age” in the UK Daily Mail by David Rose that is making headlines today, even hitting the Drudge Report. The headline is: Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again):

« Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years »

Science Continues to Cast Doubt on Global Warming:

Four months ago, when I published the article “Nature Journal Discredits Global Warming” at Big Government stating that the Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, had published the “definitive study” rebuking Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming, the internet exploded.

Leading climate scientists told The Daily Mail of London over the week-end that after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

According to the Meteorological Office there is a 92 per cent chance that Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830, when average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C (-3 degrees Fahrenheit).

The scientific integrity of the new research published by the Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit nicely compliments the CERN research that cosmic rays from the sun determine the temperature on Earth, rather than man. Perhaps now some of the hysteria of man-made global warming will chill out.

A propósito de Durão Barroso pede a Portugal planos para combater desemprego jovem (RTP-audio)

The Ultimate End of Social-Democratic Labor Policy:

When a country:

• Increases the minimum wage, and therefore the minimum skill / productivity needed for a job
• Adds substantially to the costs of labor through required taxes, insurance premiums, pensions, etc
• Makes employees virtually un-fireable, thus forcing companies to think twice about hiring young, unproven employees they may be saddled with, good or bad, for decades
• Puts labor policy in the hands of people who already have jobs (ie unions)
• Shift wealth via social security and medical programs from the young to the old

It gets this:

Quem não percebe que o salário mínimo ilegaliza o trabalho mais barato (prestado por quem tem produtividade baixa – adolescentes, recém-licenciados, mães solteiras, gente de média-idade sem qualificações, idosos, minorias raciais, gente com estilos de vida alternativos, incapacitados físicos ou mentais, etc) não perceberá o seguinte gráfico:

Numa altura em que muito se discute SOPAs e afins…

Na continuação de Climate Change Scare Machine Cycle

fonte: http://www.nocarbontax.com.au/

PS – é indecente terem-se esquecido dos aliens cuja invasão salvaria a economia — a sério!

Create Value, Not Jobs:

Public discourse on matters of the economy is and has always been dominated by the idea that the road to prosperity is to create jobs. In a moment of high unemployment, the “create jobs” rhetoric becomes that much more prevalent. We get a “Jobs Bill“; opponents of Obama’s reform call it “job destroying“; after a brief period of discussing deficits and debt national news outlets turned right back to talking about jobs.

The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.

This is not a matter of semantics. If you think the problem is a lack of jobs, all sorts of dangerous “solutions” may come to mind. Anything from having the government hiring en masse to do make-work, valueless jobs, to setting high tariffs and immigration restrictions so that domestic companies and labor do not have any foreign competition.

.. Yes, there would be more “work” to do if we cut off trade and immigration, but it would also impoverish just about everyone as the cost of getting anything would skyrocket. Getting a job is not an end unto itself; the whole point is to trade our labor for other things that we want. Getting a job at the cost of not being able to afford anything is an absurd proposition.

But we need to get our priorities straight; what we want to do is help people create value. Unless giving someone a job will enable them to create more value than it costs, the existence of that job is counterproductive.

The Keynesian School of Economics Leads to Violence:

We are seeing the end game played out over and over in different cultures all over the world. There is one thread of similarity. All of them have practiced Keynesian economics for decades. The belief that more government spending and bigger government to solve society ills has degenerated into a stagnant economy with no growth and in many parts of the world it’s unsafe to walk down the street.

The problem is that eventually the socialist/Keynesian school runs out of other people’s money to spend. They can’t raise taxes high enough, and the market forces them to pay ever higher interest rates to access public markets. When governments increase spending, businesses cut back ..

When governments ramp up their debt loads and ramp up the amount they spend on government programs, there is only one outcome. Eventually the merry go round stops. People get off and look at each other. Some have enjoyed the ride. They either built a business and got rich, or they used crony capitalism to insulate themselves and are well off. The rest of the poor saps are stuck with nothing. They have to survive, so basic human survival instincts take over.

That is the danger of accumulating so much debt. We are starting to see it played out in various economies throughout the world. Unless America changes it’s ways .. we are on the same miserable trail to nowhere.

In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Capitalism, Socialism, and the “Middle Way”: A Taxonomy (PDF):

Abstract- Political scientists have coined a variety of ideologically slanted terms to designate the “middle way” between the market and the command economy, including neofascism, the affirmative democratic state, and corporate liberalism. A more straightforward approach to classifying a political-economic system is by the way it treats property ownership (public vs. private) and control (public vs. private).

A fourfold political-economic classification system emerges from the dimensions of property ownership (private versus public) and control (private versus public). Capitalism is the system in which ownership and control are largely private, socialism the system in which they are largely public. The system that emerged in most Western states beginning in the late nineteenth century was one in which the ownership of the means of production was nominally private, but their control was increasingly in the hands of public officials. Feudalism, when added to this three-way taxonomy, appears as a fourth arrangement, in which the means of production are nominally public, but the actual use of productive property is largely private.

The most neutral description for the system of nominally private ownership and public control is “the third way” between capitalism and socialism. Many authors, however, have proffered far more descriptive names based on their ideological beliefs about the nature and workings of “third-way” systems. Those who believe in laissezfaire capitalism tend to coin terms stressing the negative effects resulting from the public control of productive property, for example, the hampered market and neofascism. Those who reject capitalism occasionally employ terms that connote the benefits of regulation, such as the positive state and the affirmative democratic state. Yet others, believing that third-way systems are typically captured by commercial interests who exploit them for their own gain, coin terms that emphasize a negative reading of that situation, such as corporate statism and corporate liberalism.

Trabalhador sofre com Estado gordo:

Reduzir de forma brutal a despesa do Estado, cortar a sério no monstro, despedir milhares e milhares de funcionários públicos que estão a mais no Estado. Acabar de vez com inúmeros organismos, serviços e departamentos que só existem para dificultar a vida às pessoas, às empresas, ao investimento, à economia.

Agora os mesmos que nem sequer admitem cortar a sério no monstro choram muitas lágrimas com o acordo obtido na concertação social. Gritam como bezerros contra os cortes salariais, das férias, das pontes, das folgas, dos feriados, das horas extraordinárias, do trabalho nocturno.

Esta gente, que se diz de esquerda e outra que alinha as suas posições com a doutrina social da Igreja, não admite que os custos do trabalho sejam reduzidos à custa do Estado e protestam violentamente quando esse corte é feito à custa dos trabalhadores. São hipócritas, fariseus e os verdadeiros responsáveis pelo que se está a passar no mundo do trabalho e da economia.

Enquanto o governo alinhar com esta gente não há emprego, não há salários decentes para quem trabalha e não há economia que resista. A única solução, o único caminho é atacar o monstro, a sua despesa, a sua gordura, os seus vícios. O único caminho possível para Portugal é reduzir o Estado ao mínimo e baixar de forma brutal os impostos.

É criminoso que um empresário, uma empresa, um investidor, português, estrangeiro, grande, pequeno ou médio tenha de pagar ao Estado uma brutalidade para dar trabalho a uma pessoa. É criminoso que o Estado engorde à custa da vida e da dignidade de milhões e milhões de pessoas. É tempo de dizer basta.

What’s Wrong With Gestational Surrogacy? de David D. Friedman:

Gestational surrogacy is the arrangement by which a couple arrange to fertilize the woman’s egg with the man’s sperm, then have the fertilized ovum implanted and gestated in another woman’s womb ..

I gather, however, from a conversation with someone who has been researching the subject, that in most of western Europe it is illegal ..

Which raises an obvious question: Why would anyone be against the arrangement? ..

There are, I think, a number of possible answers, although none that in my view justify the restrictions. One is that the decision to be a host mother is not freely made since it is “compelled” by poverty ..

A second possibility, following a line of argument originated (I think) in the context of prostitution .. is that by permitting a woman to rent out the use of her womb (body) we “commodify” motherhood (sex), cause people to think of it as something to be bought and sold, and so cheapen the human experience ..

A somewhat better argument that might be made against surrogacy is that permitting a couple to produce a child when they otherwise could not means that they will have no need to adopt, hence prohibiting surrogacy benefits children in need of parents. There is some logic to the argument, but its morality is questionable ..

Finally there comes what I suspect is the real reason. Natural is good, and surrogacy (like IVF before it, and many other things as well) is unnatural. Our grandparents didn’t do it, our pre-human ancestors didn’t do it, so there must be something wrong with it, something wicked, sinful. Icky.

And worse still if done for money.

The Origins of Envy:

Our egalitarian feelings were forged in the Stone Age. But the cave man ethos is not always appropriate in the context of the modern world.

Thus, the feelings that go along with that tribal interdependency—including envy—are “hardwired.” And we’ve not had enough time in civilization to rewire them. “Natural selection, the process that designed our brain,” write Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “takes a long time to design a circuit of any complexity. The time it takes to build circuits that are suited to a given environment is so slow it is hard to even imagine—it’s like a stone being sculpted by wind-blown sand. Even relatively simple changes can take tens of thousands of years.”

There are three primary egalitarian emotions—envy, guilt, and indignation. I call these the “Stone Age Trinity.” These three are connected as facets of the same socio-biological function. To get a better sense of this connection, let’s break them down as follows:

• If in comparing myself to you I find you have more, I may feel envy.
• If in comparing myself to you I find you have less, I may feel guilt.
• If in comparing someone to you I find you have more, I may feel indignation.

For Paleolithic Man, this was not just some errant feeling. It provided the basis for survival logic in a mostly zero-sum world.

As a commune grows, free-rider problems infect the labor pool.

.. the rules, mores, and dispositions ideal for living in civilizations could be very different from the rules, mores, and dispositions for surviving in Paleolithic clans.

Any human emotion can become destructive by degree. Economist Young Back Choi thinks that envy is particularly destructive because it “is man’s desire to eliminate others’ relative gains even if he would become absolutely worse off in the process.” We see this in the original Ultimatum game. And we see it in the brutal consequences of Stalin and Mao ..

Understood this way, envy, despite its evolutionary rationale, does not seem very sane .. “’Only those societies that have been able to develop sufficient means to mitigate the destructive forces of envy have been able to build civilizations and prosper. Anthropologists have documented that two of the most distinguishing features of poor societies are the relative free expression of envy and the universal fear of envy on the part of those who come to have above-average gains.”

Envy can creep into both our politics and our personal lives. So also can envy’s sister emotions, guilt and indignation. All three are facets of a brain that was sculpted by millennia in a mostly zero-sum environment. But now we can live in a positive-sum world.

Fraud. Why the Great Recession (Official Trailer) from amagifilms on Vimeo.

Free markets are not to be blamed for the Great Recession. On the contrary, its origins rest upon the deep government and central bank intervention in the economy. Through fraudulent mechanisms, this causes recurrent boom and bust cycles: bad policies create phases of “irrational exuberance”, which are then followed by economic recessions, a result that every citizen ends up suffering from.

The Worship of Leviathan Has Enabled Its Atrocities:

The all-powerful modern nation-state—and the atrocities committed by it—are the result of social and intellectual developments that began centuries ago. A key causal factor in the rise of Leviathan is a distinctive ideological orientation, what might be termed “secular theocracy”—the worship of the secular state. This ideology arose in the West just as the traditional arbiter of standards for worship—the church—was losing its hold on the Western mind. Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau dismissed natural law and conferred a sacred status on political institutions. Edward Gibbon and Voltaire asserted that the secular state would put an end to wars of religion. In reality, the world they championed was tyrannical and far bloodier and than they claimed, according to Independent Institute President David J. Theroux.

“In the actual period of European state building, the most serious cause of violence and the central factor in the growth of the state was the attempt to collect taxes from an unwilling populace with local elites resisting the state-building efforts of kings and emperors,” Theroux writes. “The point is that the rise of the modern state was in no way the solution to the violence of religion.”

What occurred was a process of substitution. During the Enlightenment, nationalism began to replace traditional religion as the belief system that dominated the public square. Wars and mass violence were condemned when committed in the name of traditional religion but celebrated when executed on behalf of the secular state. “The religious-secular split,” Theroux continues, “enables public loyalty by Christians to the nation state’s secular violence, including invasive wars, torture, and ‘collateral damage,’ while avoiding direct confrontation with Christian beliefs about the supremacy of God and natural law teachings.”

BÓNUS: Ron Paul Booed by Insane Debate Audience for Endorsing the Golden Rule

Macro Santa And The Austerity Grinch de John Papola:

Like Santa’s busy elves, today’s Keynesian economists believe that when we’re in an economic rut, government spending transforms into a magical debt-financed multiplier sack, able to create a limitless bounty of goodies. Meanwhile, they warn that our current woes are because the “austerity” Grinch has stolen Christmas! The only way for us to get the recovery bell to ring is to close our eyes and believe in the magic of Macro Santa.

There’s been a great deal of talk about so-called “austerity” and how it’s hurting our economy. Many pundits have taken to calling this the “age of austerity.” The Austerity Grinch has stolen Christmas! The only problem with this story is that it’s utterly false. It’s a fairytale. U.S. government spending is at an all-time high as it is in most of the western world. Despite this bounty of spending gifts from Macro Santa, the U.S. and other countries are still experiencing persistent unemployment.

There’s no austerity Grinch here, folks. It’s just a story being told by power-hunger politicians and proponents of larger government.

The believers in Macro Santa claim that their faith is rooted in physics-like “science” complete with complex mathematical modeling. But I thought science usually is conducted with repeatable experiments where theories are tested or falsified based on the results compared with the predictions. So, what about those infamous stimulus predictions by the Obama administration?

So they set aside the empirical data and focus on computer models because finding out what really happened is just too darn hard. Plus, the latest “estimates” from the CBO include a six-fold range of potential jobs “created” by the stimulus: between 400,000 and 2.4 million. What a margin of error! That’s not economics or science as I understand it. It’s bias-confirming econometric computer games. It’s the pretense of knowledge (or the supposition of ignorance). It’s blind faith in Macro Santa.

Contrapondo a higieno-fascistas, Tabaco: CDS rejeita «fundamentalismos»:

O CDS-PP discorda de eventuais «fundamentalismos» na revisão da lei do tabaco e defende que os proprietários dos restaurantes fizeram investimentos «avultadíssimos» para se adaptarem às atuais restrições, sendo eles quem devem determinar as condições de permanência naqueles espaços.

«Entendemos que, num espaço que é privado, que são os restaurantes, quem deve determinar as condições em que as pessoas podem permanecer, se podem ou não fumar, é o proprietário desse mesmo espaço», afirmou o porta-voz do CDS à Lusa.

No seguimento de Tudo como dantes, Macaquinhos do Chinês por Pedro Santos Guerreiro:

As nomeações para a EDP são um mimo. Catroga, Cardona, Teixeira Pinto, Rocha Vieira, Braga de Macedo… isto não é uma lista de órgãos societários, é a lista de agradecimentos de Passos Coelho. O impudor é tão óbvio nas nomeações políticas que nem se repara que até o antigo patrão de Passos, Ilídio Pinho, foi contratado.

Estava a correr bem de mais… Um grande negócio para o Estado, uma privatização que reforça a EDP, a gestão reconduzida. Mas a carne é fraca. É sempre fraca. Só falta uma proposta na Assembleia Geral da EDP: mudar o nome de Conselho Geral e de Supervisão (CGS) para o de Loja do Governo.

É extraordinário como uma empresa em vias de total privatização se consome na absurda politização. E é surpreendente: a recondução de António Mexia fora uma demonstração de isenção de Passos Coelho: este Governo não gosta de Mexia nem do poder da EDP (basta ler a entrevista de hoje do secretário de Estado da Energia neste jornal) mas quando os chineses perguntaram se o queriam, Passos não se opôs – remeteu a decisão para os accionistas. Ingenuidade do primeiro-ministro? Não, ingenuidade nossa. A troca foi esta lista de famosos da política.

BÓNUS – Lugar de Catroga na EDP vale 639 mil euros por ano

Pôr na ordem os higieno-fascistas:

Só faltava mais esta. Não bastava a classe política andar entretida com aventais, tinha de vir o Ministério da Saúde anunciar a revisão da lei do tabaco, com mais atentados à liberdade de quem gosta e quer fumar. Este país na bancarrota, sabe-se lá com que futuro e com que moeda, tem gente na administração pública que faz tudo para provar aos contribuintes que o Estado seria muito mais eficaz com menos funcionários. De facto, ninguém no seu perfeito juízo pode andar a pagar ordenados e outros custos para uns tantos higieno-fascistas afogarem as suas frustrações em leis e projectos fundamentalistas que são atentados às liberdades, à economia e ao emprego.

O Ministério da Saúde, um monstro que consome oito mil milhões de euros do Orçamento do Estado, devia andar muito preocupado com o corte nas despesas e o combate sem tréguas ao desperdício. Mas, ao contrário do que se diz e tenta passar para a opinião pública, os esforços ministeriais não conseguem reduzir a despesa, o laxismo, o desperdício e o total caos que reina em muitas estruturas do Serviço Nacional de Saúde .. nas estruturas dirigentes, a todos os níveis, haverá gente apostada em quebrar todas as regras e a boicotar todo e qualquer esforço para pôr a casa em ordem.

É neste contexto que os higieno-fascistas, que também querem o seu quinhão nos dinheiros públicos, aparecem à tona para mostrar que existem e que o seu trabalho é muito útil para a sociedade. Pior do que isso, há políticos, com o ministro da Saúde à cabeça, que alinham no seu jogo e tentam dessa maneira ficar na fotografia como meninos fundamentalistas muito bem-comportados, politicamente correctos e macaquinhos de imitação de toda a idiotice que nasce nos Estados Unidos e rapidamente atinge esta pobre Europa decadente.

Vir agora, neste ano desgraçado de 2012, falar numa revisão da lei do tabaco com o objectivo de impedir o fumo em todos os espaços fechados é, mais do que um atentado à inteligência, um atentado à economia e ao emprego. Nomeadamente na restauração, já fortemente atingida com o aumento do IVA de 13 para 23% .. o seu modelo é o de Nova Iorque e a seguir o irlandês. No primeiro impede-se o fumo em parques e jardins públicos, no segundo só os doentes mentais e os presos podem fumar em espaços fechados.

Nestas alturas, quando se vê esta gente tão excitada a violar os direitos dos outros e tão indiferente à situação miserável de milhões de portugueses, faz falta alguém com coragem para os pôr no seu lugar e na ordem. Ou no olho da rua, como quiserem.

How Egalitarianism Increases Inequality:

Imagine people become more egalitarian, to the point where they heap scorn on the rich and successful. What is the effect on inequality? By the previous logic, the effect is directly counter-productive. The more you scorn rich people, the more people you scare away from high-income professions. The more you scare away, the lower their supply. And the lower their supply, the higher their income!

Lesson: If you really want a materially more equal society, stop beating up on the 1%. Do a complete 180. Smile upon them. Admire them. Praise them. Sing songs about how much good they do for the world. The direct result will be to raise their status. But the indirect result will be to pique the envy of status-conscious people, increasing the competition among the top 1%, and thereby moderating income inequality.

On the other hand, if you want to increase material inequality, by all means heap scorn on the rich and successful. Try to fill them with guilt and self-loathing. The 1% who remain will find that living well is the best salve for their consciences.

Mr. Keynes’s Aggregates — Concealing the mechanisms of change:

One of F. A. Hayek’s most accurate, and oft-repeated, lines about John Maynard Keynes comes from a review of Keynes’s 1930 book, A Treatise on Money. Hayek wrote: “Mr. Keynes’ aggregates conceal the most fundamental mechanisms of change.” That Austrian macroeconomics rests firmly on the microeconomic “mechanisms of change” that ultimately comprise economic activity remains a crucial reason why that insight can better explain both the mistakes of the boom and the way out of the bust.

.. In standard Keynesian models (as well as most other macroeconomic models), capital is understood as an undifferentiated mass. The Keynesian model also assumes that interest rates do not equilibrate the supply of savings and the demand for investment funds. Thus when people save more, there’s no signal transmitted to investors that they should build more for the future. As a result, the decline in consumption that accompanies the increase in savings causes firms to invest lessas their inventories pile up without any offsetting increase in investment elsewhere due to the lower interest rate.

All that is true of capital here is also true of labor. Most Keynesian models also treat labor as an undifferentiated aggregate, speaking of “the” labor market and “the” wage rate ..

Being too focused on Keynes’s aggregates can also mislead us as to the best ways to get out of the recession once we’re in it. It may look as if all we need more is investment or more jobs. But once we understand that the “fundamental mechanisms of change” have to do with the boom’s microeconomic misallocation of capital and labor, we see that what is needed is a reallocation of resources not just more of them. Capital needs to move out of unproductive lines and back toward productive ones, and the same is true of labor.

Stimulus spending, bailouts, and extension of unemployment benefits only prevent the fundamental mechanisms of change from doing their work in unwinding the errors of the last decade. The cure for macroeconomic discoordination is freeing up the entrepreneurial market process to reallocate and coordinate resources. But 80 years after Hayek first made the point, the fascination by economists and politicians with Keynes’s aggregates continues to conceal the fundamental mechanisms of change, and in so doing, also continues to block the processes through which a sustainable recovery can take place.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism:

What do the following have in common: hungry Venezuelans, starving North Koreans, ecological devastation in the former Soviet Union, and functionally illiterate students in Washington, D.C., high schools? Give up? They are all consequences of socialism.

“Hold on a minute,” some will say. “You can’t compare the bad things that happen in a totalitarian state like North Korea with our well-intended and generally popular public school system in America.” Williamson shows, however, that the crucial element of socialism is present in both, namely governmental control over the provision of goods and services that would otherwise be done by private enterprise. That invariably leads to waste and inefficiency—or even worse.

Speaking of Hayek, another of his famous insights regarding socialism was that under it, the worst people usually rise to the top. I wish that Williamson had included a chapter on that point. We hear so often from socialism’s advocates that their system would work beautifully if it were controlled by good people rather than murderous dictators like Stalin. It would have been worth several pages to attack the idea that there is some magic formula to keep vicious, power-mad people from scheming their way to the top of a system that gives them what they crave.

No seguimento de Peso do Estado e Crescimento Económico, Keynesianism Doesn’t Mean Bigger Government?:

.. First, Keynes’s argument for why his view of fiscal policy need not mean a larger government ignores the incentives facing the politicians who must implement it. Those incentives would lead to a larger government. Second, Keynes called for the socialization of investment as part of a broader vision of how to prevent the crises that necessitate stimulus spending in the first place. The result of both arguments is larger government ..

.. regardless of what Keynes believed government should do, what it in fact will do is another matter .. by removing the preexisting moral and institutional constraints on deficit spending as a way to balance the economy, Keynes and the Keynesians unleashed the perverse incentives of the political process into policymaking. The problem with Keynes’s analysis is that he paid no attention to the real incentives facing politicians, who now had the green light to deficit-spend in the name of economic stability.

.. politicians continue to deficit-spend even during periods of economic growth because none wish to raise taxes or cut the flow of government benefits to their prospective voters. The result is exactly .. large and increasing deficits and debt, and a growing danger of higher levels of inflation to pay it off.

.. Keynes’s fiscal policy analysis .. requires that government play a more prominent role in allocating money for investment to avoid future recessions. This element of fiscal policy clearly calls for a bigger government.

The claim that Keynesianism doesn’t necessarily imply bigger government and greater debt is shown to be mistaken when we consider the implications of Keynes’s argument for countercyclical fiscal policy, the record of Keynesian policy in the last 50 years, and the broader context of his views on fiscal policy in The General Theory.

Margaret Thatcher on Business as Mission:

Business as Mission is a relatively new term. But the concept is not .. The momentum is growing, especially in the non-Western world.

Please read the following few paragraphs which give helpful insights regarding work, wealth creation and serving others. It is from a speech held in 1988, i.e. 23 years ago. Some may be surprised when they realize that these are words from the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“The Old Testament lays down in Exodus the Ten Commandments as given to Moses, the injunction in Leviticus to love our neighbor as ourselves and generally the importance of observing a strict code of law. The New Testament is a record of the Incarnation, the teachings of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Again we have the emphasis on loving our neighbor as ourselves and to “Do-as-you-would-be-done-by”.

I believe that by taking together these key elements from the Old and New Testaments, we gain: a view of the universe, a proper attitude to work, and principles to shape economic and social life.

We are told we must work and use our talents to create wealth. “If a man will not work he shall not eat” wrote St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Indeed, abundance rather than poverty has a legitimacy which derives from the very nature of Creation.

Nevertheless, the Tenth Commandment—Thou shalt not covet—recognizes that making money and owning things could become selfish activities. But it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but love of money for its own sake. The spiritual dimension comes in deciding what one does with the wealth. How could we respond to the many calls for help, or invest for the future, or support the wonderful artists and craftsmen whose work also glorifies God, unless we had first worked hard and used our talents to create the necessary wealth?”