Follow the Money. It Leads to a Gun. It Is Pointing at You
March 11, 2010
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If you ask "Why do I have to do that?" enough times you will eventually find out.
Meanwhile, those who help the robbers carry out their destructive activities enjoy the good life, at your expense.
Government Workers Feel No Economic Pain
It gets worse. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? How many times do you want to ask "Why do I have to do that?"
There is a gun pointing at you right now. It's concealed, but it's real.
In between you and that gun is a layer of obscurity. This layer includes economists like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, religious figures like the bishops of the Catholic Church, lawyers, university deans and professors, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and politicians. They all make a fine living doing what appear to be completely worthless tasks. But they do serve a purpose. They hide the gun from you. As long as you do what they say, you will never see it. You can go about your life completely unaware of its existence. It may become so obscured that you claim it doesn't exist at all. You may even begin to believe that you are free. Once you are completely sure that there is no gun, you declare that you pay your taxes happily and voluntarily!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said.
Obscuring the Gun might have been the whole point of Positivism in the Social Sciences. Though the following article discusses Keynesianism specifically, you will find that nearly all of sociology academia are positivists. Positivists believe that everything must be tested before we say it is correct. This is useful for some things, but not so useful for sociology. Positivism also has a very interesting side effect. Consider that testing all of these half baked ideas costs money (your money), earns tremendous prestige even for the complete nitwits (Climate Scientists), and allows otherwise uninteresting people to surround themselves with other eager, though less enlightened nitwits, to man their ever growing research staffs.
Consider the following statement:
Something that is completely blue can not also be completely red.
You and I might call this a "truth" or "axiomatic."
A Keynesian Positivist would say, "We need to test that before we know that it is true. Now give me your money for research. (Your tax money - direct or indirect - pays for nearly all of academia's research.) It's ok," he says, "I have the conscience of a liberal."
Enjoy the following article from Gary North on using mental images to clear the obscurity of Keynesianism. Behind it, you find the gun. It is pointed at you.
David in Qatar
Four Mental Images That Immunize Sensible People – But Not Economists – Against Keynesian Economics - by Gary North
Four images provide the conceptual tools to refute Keynesian economics: the gun, the wallet, the IOU, and the printing press. Recall them every time you read a Keynesian promotion of the latest government-spending plan. Let me explain.
Think of yourself as engaged in a public debate. If you want to undermine an intellectual opponent in a debate, find his system's central weak point and latch onto it like a bulldog. Never let it go. Make sure the audience leaves the debate with your refutation in their minds.
In preparing for a debate, remember this principle of effective communication: "It is easier to forget a formula than a mental image."
Academic economists love formulas. This is their great vulnerability. Unlike formulas in physics, economists' formulas conceal profound conceptual errors that simple mental images reveal as utter nonsense. The average person can readily comprehend these errors through the use of simple mental images. But academic economists are deliberately trained in graduate school to ignore these images. They are easily blinded by formulas. This puts them at a disadvantage in public debate, especially when debating members of the one school of economics that does not use formulas: Austrian School economics. I will now offer a demonstration of this principle of debate.
KEYNESIANISM'S CENTRAL FORMULA
The account of Keynesian economics on Wikipedia is a good place to begin. Here, we read of the textbook Keynesian formula:
In scientific notation, the Keynesian Formula consists of the following make-up:
C + I + G + X – M = Y(GDP)
which means:
Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Exports – Imports = Gross Domestic Product
This is standard stuff. Start here.
Spending is the heart of Keynesian economics – aggregate spending. Consumption (C) is a series of society-wide individual allocation decisions. Investment (I) is a series of society-wide individual allocation decisions. Exports (X) are a series of society-wide individual allocation decisions. It is the same for imports.
Government spending is an allocation decision of a different kind. "See this gun? See where it is pointed? Hand over your wallet."
The student can see that total spending is based on all the letters of the formula. C, I, X, and M all begin with the original owners of resources. But G does not begin with the original owners. G begins with the new owner after multiple transactions with the gun.
G does not create. G confiscates. G cannot spend anything that it did not extract from consumers or investors.
C, I, X, and M are based on production. They are creative forces. G is based on confiscation. It is not a creative force. Everything spent by G comes at the expense of C, I, X, or M. When G spends, it does so at the expense of the others.
A bright student is smart enough to figure out what most people do when constantly threatened with robbers with guns, even if the robbers carry badges. They will not put all of their money in their wallets. They will hide some of their currency. They will not spend it. People who carry badges and guns call this currency hoarding. This is a Very Bad Thing, we are assured.
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