Friday, October 31, 2008

Heaven Forfend!

Anonymous blogger "Pro Growth Liberal(PGL)" attacks John McCain's economic policies and defend Obama's because Obama's are more Keynesian. What particularly offends PGL is McCain's pledge to reduce government spending:

"The notion that reducing government spending is a cure for a recession must have Lord Keynes rolling over in his grave"

Oh, heaven forfend,we sure don't want that! No, no, what we want is for Lord Keynes' rotting corpse to do somersaults in his grave by reading him the Misesian way of dealing with recession, as was described for example by Murray Rothbard here.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like the bit about government slashing expenditure during a depression, its thrown out there as a policy proposal, but would that be possible in the real world?
Where would the cuts come from? Any normal democratic government will find it hard to stop expenditure rising in the coming recession, let alone make deep cuts.

6:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is scary; however, don't you think that Obama's main economic adviser being Paul Volcker is a good thing?

6:48 PM  
Blogger stefankarlsson said...

Ger: there are large numbers of highly appropriate spending cuts, like in the case of the U.S. abolish farm subsidies, withdraw from foreign military bases, abolish foreign aid, abolish the Department of Education and so on and so forth. I realize that it might be politically impossible to abolish some of them, but some are politically possible to abolish, and it would certainly be right in a normative sense to anolish all of them.

Anonymous: Paul Volcker was the best Fed chairman in the U.S. during at least the last few decades. But that doesn't necessarily mean he is right on other issue, and his support for Obama has certainly lowered my confidence in him. He is still probably a positive force within the Obama team, but certainly not anything near what would be required to make Obama attractive or even a lesser evil compared to McCain.

9:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Being anonymous prevents PGL from getting the help he needs.

3:56 PM  
Blogger stefankarlsson said...

Fred, what do you mean by that?

11:14 PM  

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