Economic Sophisms

Boy do I wish my job were to write this blog. A month since the last post. I’ve written several lengthy drafts in the meantime—too bad they were all rubbish.

Most of my readers will be at least aware of the Sumner v.s. Wren-Lewis +Krugman debate. Once I saw that their fight was over fiscal multipliers I sort of stopped reading. I am too busy crawling my way through a Swedish translation of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Swedish is truer to the original I figure), the new Steve Jobs bio and most interesting: Money in a free society.  Sumner is a trooper for fighting with those who are too craven to just come out as say they want more government spending, rather than concocting Rube-Goldberg arguments to trick us. The honest progressives like Matt Yglesias impress me so.

There is nothing wrong with saying the welfare state should be bigger, a lot of reasonable people think so. However, in a world where MV=PY there is no credible argument for fiscal stimulus.  If we need more nominal spending, do it through the rigors of the market by dropping money from helicopters. That way the new spending is owned by someone and subjected to the warehood of scarcity, not the lalaland of marginal and temporary government spending.  Don’t give it to the same people who gave us the TSA.

Speaking of silly politicians, if these SOPA and PIPA laws are really as bad as Jimmy Wales says, I will have to move to Canada ASAP. Give me Wikipedia or give me death.

If you want to hear a funny tongue and learn a whole lot in the process, check out the Norwegian documentary series Hejernevask (brain wash) on youtube. The program’s showman (what do you call the guy who does the interviewing, the Michael Moore?) interviews PC Norwegian academics on various Nature-Nurture debates, invariably hearing that Nurture trumps all. He then tracks down the best experts in the world (usually in the U.K. and America) who then tell him that, no actually it is mostly genes behind man’s behaviors, lusts and capacities The best part is when the aforementioned PC academics are confronted with the impressive evidence in favor of biology, they come across as the charlatans they are. There are instructions just below the play button and time selector on the youtube interface for the version with English subtitles. Don’t forget to check out the other episodes.