The Burden of Knowing Everything Important

They teach the Keynesian B.S. in college macroeconomics courses, if for no other reason than to make students aware that such a line of reasoning actually exists.  What those economics professors fail to say, much less emphasize, is that Keynesian economics does not work.  Worse than that, people who become politicians get degrees in all kinds of fields, including economics, and come away believing in the Keynesian B.S. because no one told them it doesn't work; all the while professors of history were telling them the legends of how FDR saved the USA, if not the world, by applying Keynesian theory.  Worse than that, the true believers of Keynesian B.S. figured that when they got that message there was no point in pursuing economics any further, so they went off to things like ethnics studies, women's studies, the theory of LGBT, and who knows what other productive line of inquiry.

 Worse than that, the people who went on to careers in economics believe the Keynesian B.S. and try to apply it at every opportunity.  So we have the spectacle of Keynesians like Christina Roemer, placed in positions of some considerable authority, making predictions of how things would turn out with and without a government bailout, aka The Stimulus Plan.  Just to make things easier to read, the chart below, when Christina Roemer originally presented it in a press conference had only the two blue lines.  The DARK BLUE line was a prediction for how the US unemployment would recover with the Obama stimulus plan; the LIGHT BLUE line was a prediction of unemployment would recover without the Obama stimulus plan.  The red dots at the top of the chart are actual unemployment experience -- with the Obama stimulus plan.  Now, you can explain that outcome in one of two ways:  1.  Keynesian economics applied to a real world situation does not work, or 2.  it's Bush's fault.  What does the rational mind conclude?

Formulas for Success

A blogger at Puffington Host (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds) has finally come right out and admitted that he wanted the US-led war in Iraq to fail -- and it was/is a US-led effort despite the claims from the Left about the war being a unilateral effort. What a surprise! His reason for rooting for the bad guys? Well, the way the Bush administration proceeded is the direct opposite of how he feels that the US should exercise its power. Fancy that. He would have preferred that we had talked Saddam to death rather than doing it the old fashioned way. Ditto for Uday and Qusay and their ilk.

But George Bush chose the direct approach and earned the ire of everyone Left. You know the resultant response: protests and efforts to undermine the war effort. Who can forget Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claiming in April 2007 that the war was lost? The war might well have been lost, had not the Bush administration finally taken serious steps to root out opposition and destroy it. So much for politics and diplomacy. Now, however, it looks like the war in Iraq is won. It would look very bad for the Obama administration, now, to take actions that would alter the expected outcome for Iraq.

On the other hand, the lefty blogger is upset with Rush Limbaugh because Limbaugh is quoted as saying that he wants Obama's economic policies to fail. Well, that's not what Limbaugh said, actually. You can read the transcript of his speech at Fox News.com. Limbaugh didn't so much say he wanted Obama's economic policies to fail, rather, he said he wanted Obama's over arching plans for changing the culture of the United States of America to fail. He wants Obama's social policies to fail because they are, in a word, Socialism. Socialism has been an ongoing failure wherever it has been put in place. Socialism is virtual assurance that almost all citizens will be reduced to the same level of misery. The ruling elite, of course, are excluded from that economic prison sentence.

It's not so much a matter of wishing that Obama's economic policies fail as it is the fact that they are doomed to failure. As a matter of economic fact, the New Deal policies that promoted huge rounds of deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy did little to improve the economic lot of American citizens. FDR, and now Barak Obama, are listening to John Maynard Keynes for economic advice. In defense of the FDR administration, they were listening to the then current thinking of Keynes. A much much wiser and older Keynes admitted after WW II that deficit spending was not the way to go. Rather, tax cuts do more to stimulate an economy than deficits. So, an Obama administration has the benefit of history and the words of an early hero and advocate of Socialism to go on. Rather than read all the way to the last chapter to learn what Keynes had learned from experience, the Obama administration prefers to try a redux the part of Keynsianism that failed.

Keynsianism reloaded is going to fail just as surely as it did the first time around. Karl Marx is quoted as saying: "History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce." There have been some farcial moment lately, but it remains to be seen how this all plays out.