I cannot change your mind

I cannot, no matter how rationally I argue, no matter how simple the arithmetic is, show the light to those who refuse to see. I can say that 2 + 2 = 4, but if it offends your beliefs of what this world "should" be, then you will still say I am wrong. I will not try to change your mind.

I am talking to the Statist. The one who believes that Government ought to maximize happiness or minimize joblessness. The one who believes that safety and security is more important than human rights and freedom. The one who believes that as a condition of being human, we are entitled to goods and services (work, health care, food, etc). The one who believes that force, murder, aggression, and theft ought to be the rule of law, so long as it is for "the greater good".

I am talking to the Neo-Conservative who believes pre-emptive war is rationalized. I am talking to the Progressive who believes the poor are entitled to the property of the rich. I am talking to the Statist who believes the end justifies the means. I will never change your mind.

I will never change your mind, even if I show you how our structural deficit is absolutely unsustainable. By 2050, the Structural Debt will be greater than 300% of GDP (Source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/national-debt-skyrocket). Arithmetic says you are wrong, but it will not change your mind.

No matter how simple the arithmetic, no matter how inevitable the destruction of property rights, it will not change your mind.

"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." -- Alan Greenspan. This is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve telling every single one of us "Deficit spending is an offense against property rights".

So you need to ask yourself, do you have a right to property? If I come into your home and forcibly take your life savings, have I committed a crime? Yes, because I have violated your property rights. But if the Oligarchy, if the State takes your property indirectly through deficit spending? "I am contributing to society". You fool. You lemming. You weak-minded fool.

What is the root cause of our Structural Debt? Mostly unfunded Medical expenses. The root cause of this? Fear of suffering and death. Fear.

So I will not try. I can only vote for those who value the protection of freedom and rights. Obama doesn't. Gingrich doesn't. Romney and Santorum don't. None of these puppets have, historically, shown any respect for property rights, because they have shown constant support for deficit spending. They have all supported massive deficits in the name of safety or security. They believe there is a moral obligation, and so they abandon the respect for property rights that any decent human being understands.

I can't walk into your house and take your television. But the Government can confiscate your wealth through deficit spending, and there is no outrage?

You believe that Government ought to maximize happiness, or minimize suffering. You can give $100,000 to every citizen, and we will temporarily know happiness. But only at the expense of the rights of us all. This is the right to property.

"What is your position on debts and deficits" is the most important question you can ask of any politician. If the answer is anything other than "It is a cancer which destroys our basic human rights to property", then they are not close to understanding the magnitude and gravity of the EVIL that is the status quo. The EVIL that is our current state. The EVIL of a system which spits in the face of the individual. The EVIL of a system which says "you do not have human rights if it threatens our feelings of safety and security."

And again, the root cause, at its most basic level, is FEAR. Feelings of insecurity. We spend any amount of money (and in doing so, trample on human rights) in an effort to feel safe and secure. I choose to love, but you never will. I can never change your mind.

 

Seems like a lot of subjective mumbo jumbo.

 

You've proven my point: the status will refuse to see, no matter how simple the arithmetic.

 

So what you're saying is that we just give up fear, we won't need a state?

Well. I suppose that makes sense. Without fear, we wouldn't need a lot of things.

How do you propose to make everyone fearless?

 

Because your basis is absolutely 100% wrong. I can easily make the case that with out deficit spending our economy would crash. So obviously what you are saying isn't "simple arithmetic".

 

To get rid of fear, is to get rid of everything.

 

Of course it would. Our nation would be on the brink of complete disorder without massive deficit spending, QE1, and QE2. However, that does not mean that such policies are right in the long-run. What alleviates short-run economic hardship could easily be the downfall in the long-run.

 

The problem here is this is purely subjective again. There is no empirical evidence that a country is better off in the long-run by causing short term depression. Look at the Great Depression. That lasted over a decade and it took the largest spending spree in the history of America to get out of it.

Deficit spending adds net financial assets to the private sector. I have no clue why people are against having more assets.

 

Glad you added the clarifier at the end.

 

Is that how consumerism impedes the will?

 

To be honest, I don't know what you're talking about.

 

You don't need to make everyone fearless. They will still fear death. You just need to make sure that the Federal Government doesn't subsidize this fear. But it doesn't matter what solutions I share with you, it won't change your mind.

 

S'okay. I get that all the time. It's just that I'm British. And you're not.

(I'm not really British.)

Consumerism is the low-rent end of capitalism. You consume an amazing amount of resources and you create an enormous heap of crap and garbage. It's like a zombie movie, all this mindless chewing that doesn't actually serve any purpose except to turn goods into garbage.

In order to defend the right to consume, which is sort of related, but not quite identical, to the right to vast amounts of private property, you require a state. The consumer needs the state so that the capitalist can keep providing the consumer with cheap goods.

So if we gave up consumerism, which is basically fear-based resource use, we would have one less reason to have a state.

But that wouldn't be the last reason to have a state. The capitalists would still need a state to protect their actual stuff. Though they'd need it less, I suppose.

 

From the Old Keynesian perspective, absolutely. The multiplier effect,the aggregate demand model, and expansionary fiscal policy supposedly is the fuel of what you describe. However, I think you are intellectually honest enough to admit that the old Keynesian multiplier effect and expansionary fiscal policy have been proven to be flawed in regards to deficit spending, especially in relation to the 2009 stimulus bill. The proof can be found in a report by John B. Taylor and John F. Cogan of Stanford University, two mainstream economists. In their report entitled New Keynesian Versus Old Keynesian Government Spending Multipliers, they predicted that the stimulus would have a decreasing multiplier over time, starting from about 0.96 all the way down to I believe 0.48. They theorized that every dollar for stimulus spending takes away from the private sector. In addition, they theorized that all multipliers are actually less than one.

Ironically, in comparison to Obama's economic advisors Christine Romer and Jared Bernstein, Taylor and Cogan had the most accurate economic analysis of the stimulus. After their successful report was published, other mainstream economists from Harvard, Columbia, and colleagues from Stanford started to agree with them and their theories. The government economists were being scrutinized by the pool of economic minds that are usually in agreement with such deficit spending policies.

 

This is why I'm not posting here as much anymore. I've come to accept the futility of it all. Most people do not listen to anyone else. Everyone has all the answers and they do not even try to understand the other person's position with whom they are arguing. They're just eager to "correct" them on everything. If you are already thinking up your retort before you get to the end of the person's post, then you are obviously not listening to them. You're just trying to shoot them down. You can't have a productive exchange of ideas like that. So what's the point in even trying to discuss anything serious or important on here? It all just descends into petty bickering and trolling.

 

Shoot now I look stuipider. (Yes, I know I misspelled it)

I think I get it. The consumer is afraid, so they have a state to protect them from the capitalists. But the capitalists are also afraid of the consumers, so they need a state.

 

That's not necessarily true. I try to keep an open mind. But I do process things very carefully and thoroughly. What you're saying now, I'll probably mull over for so long that by the time I've made up my mind about it, I won't remember that the idea came from you. So you won't get your due credit for changing my mind, that's true. But I promise you, you do have a chance of changing my mind. It is open.

 

This is the fundamental flaw of this argument on the multiplier theory...

They theorized that every dollar for stimulus spending takes away from the private sector

No one is forced to purchase Govt debt other than Primary Dealers, which of course are banks. No private individual has to give up a dollar in order to fund our deficit spending. It is completely funded by foreign central banks and our own banks. So these multiplier theories have a flawed premise to start with.

And the other problem is, anyone with an agenda can find an economist out there with a multiplier that fits their theory, lol. You can find negative multipliers all the way up to multipliers of 4. The range of which economists come up with these multipliers makes it seem to me that it is a number they come up with simply to fit whatever agenda they are trying to push.

 

No they do not, unless you realize that the primary dealers are private sector institutions.

Now, you may not be taking a dollar from Joe Schmo on Main Street, but you are taking a dollar from UBS Securities or Morgan Stanely on Wall Street. Nonetheless, you are taking from the private sector.

In addition, the real point I am trying to make is that Obama's economic advisors in the case of the stimulus were in the minority. After seeing the actual results in regards to GDP and unemployment, in which GDP barely increased rather than increasing by 3.7 percent and unemployment peaking at 10.1 percent rather than 8 percent, most mainstream economists started to question the legitimacy of the old multiplier in regards to government policy. Out of all the reports by economists, the two Stanford University economists' report was the most accurate.

 

Excellent.

Two of the most feasible solutions:

1. Having each State fund their own S.S./Medicare/Medicaid, if they so choose. Personally, I think these programs are bad. Liberals believe we have a moral obligation to help the sick, and that the programs are good. We are destined to duel for eternity, the Liberal and I.

So I say to them "Fine, I don't care if you want the Government to take care of these things, so long as they do it at the State level". Why? Primarily because States can't print money. States are accountable for budgets. The Federal Government is not.

Furthermore, the 10th Amendment says something like 'those powers not given by this document to the Federal Government are reserved to the states'. So just as a matter of legality, this legislation should not and cannot be managed at the Federal level.

Finally, we would have some states who have the programs, and others who don't. We would be able to see which states achieve the best results, other states could mimic if they desire, and there would be a slow evolution of ideas. California would have a big budget deficit (but less un-insured), Texas would have small deficits (assuming they reject the programs, and they would have more uninsured), and there would be several states experimenting in the middle ground to find the optimal solution.

2. If we cannot move these programs to the states, pass a Constitutional Amendment which requires a balanced Federal Budget. The founders made it very difficult to amend the Constitution, and with good reason, I believe. So achieving this balanced-budget-requirement would be no easy task. If we could pass the amendment, it would have to be with significant public support. This requirement would force the Congress to keep these programs at sustainable levels.

== Anything we can do to prevent massive deficits at the Federal level would be an improvement from the current state. We can have these programs, while still respecting property rights of individuals, if the programs were funded and managed at the State level.

 

No you aren't. Banks do not purchase treasuries with their money. They purchase them by leveraging their capital. They purchase treasuries the same exact way they give you and I a loan.

And to be a Primary Dealer you are mandated to participate and bid on every treasury auction.

 

This does have the advantage of built-in compromise. We wouldn't be likely to see the entire country collapse. Different states doing different things ... that does sound practical ...

I'll keep thinking about it.

What about that theory that deficits can work out in our favor? Preventing massive deficits sounds wise, but does the budget have to be completely balanced? What about saying that a particular year might run a deficit but a decade has to be balanced?

 

Have you ever heard of sectoral balances? The theory posits that Govt deficits are private sector savings. So when the Govt runs a surplus, it drains private sector savings, and if the Govt ran a constant balanced budget net savings would equal 0.

This starts to make sense when you use basic accounting. However, I will not go in to it because I know it will fall on deaf ears.

 

It's not hard to amend the Constitution. It was done twice in 1913, once in 1919, once in 1920, and twice in 1933. It's easy to do if people want to do it.

 

How can anyone look at this graph and come to the conclusion that Govt deficit spending is bad for the economy?