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The Forum > Article Comments > Keeping up the stimulus > Comments

Keeping up the stimulus : Comments

By Tristan Ewins, published 20/10/2009

Now is not the time to withdraw economic stimulus: without it the world economy could again nosedive.

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Tristan
It is you who are considering economics out of context of its social consequences, because the policies you are in favour of are causing the problems you are concerned about.

You have been unable to answer the question that would show that the stimulus policies are justified, namely:
How do you know that the uses and benefits that must be foregone by withdrawing resources from employment A will not be greater than the uses and benefits to be derived from diverting the same resources to employment B?

All you do is endlessly recirculate fallacies that were refuted over a hundred years ago.

You are in favour of measures that cause unemployment, poverty and disadvantage, and then you want to solve the problem with more measures that cause unemployment, poverty and disadvantage.
Posted by Peter Hume, Saturday, 31 October 2009 8:29:40 PM
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You are adept at changing the subject, Peter Hume.

>>Four main upstream interventionists are both causing the depression, and preventing the recovery.<<

"Preventing the recovery"? Please explain this, in the context of both how a recovery is being prevented, and how removal of the "interventions" will facilitate one.

The four "interventions" you describe are:

"FRB and Fiat money"

This is not an intervention, in the commonly-used sense of the word. It is the system we work with. Your arguments against it have always been, and will remain, philosophical rather than practical, which can easily be proven by describing the manner in which this "intervention" can be removed, and the impact of its removal on our economy.

Give it a try, and let us know how you see it panning out.

"Industrial relations law illegalises mutually beneficial employment at the market rate".

It also protects workers from exploitation. There are arguments on both sides, and what we have is a balancing act. That's the way we like it in our democracy.

"What occupations in Australia do not require compulsory licensing, qualifications, registration, insurance, training, fees, more fees etc.? We have forgotten what it is like to live in a free country."

Yep, that's government for you. They like to try to protect consumers as well as workers. Damn their eyes. But the same rules apply. It's compromise and trade-off all along the line.

"High taxation"

Yep, that's government for you. They just love to take your money, any which way they can. We have a solution to the problem, though. Elect a government that realizes that it serves the people, not itself.

This is all a long way from the broken-window theory, though, in that none of the above "interventions" has any bearing on the case at all.

Because all of them exist as a part of the system in which that community operates; if the government chooses to mend the window, in the form of borrowing from the community's future earnings, the cost is not extracted as a single, painful hit on the economy.

Yet another trade-off.
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 2 November 2009 7:50:01 AM
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The sign of an irrational belief is that it is unfalsifiable. I understand Marxist and Keynesian theory, and can refute them multiple different ways. But you do not understand Austrian theory, can’t refute it, and seem to satisfy yourself with misrepresentation, invincible ignorance, or deliberate dishonesty.

Marxism is like a religion in that, no matter how much it keeps on getting refuted, the Marxists just keep popping up like one of those weighted punching clowns. As a means to reducing unemployment, repetition of Hindu mantras, or of the rosary, would be just as irrationally religious, but at least would not do as much damage to the disadvantaged and the working class as your mindless religious Marxism.

You keep on misunderstanding the broken window fallacy to mean a problem prior to governmental intervention, rather than the attempt to obtain social benefits by violating property rights.

Underlying all your defence of government attempts at price-rigging is an assumption that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. There is no reason to think that using a monopoly of violence, whether or not backed by majority opinion, will produce a more ethical, less exploitative, more pragmatic, or more productive outcome than would otherwise obtain from society's voluntary interactions. Nothing you have said has shown that it would.

But perhaps if you keep arguing by personal sneering, begging the same questions, repeating the same fallacies, and state-worshipping abracadabra, they will amount to a rational argument eventually?
Posted by Peter Hume, Monday, 2 November 2009 7:00:28 PM
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Just because the *intent* of governmental interventions is to do good, it is not valid to assume that therefore their *effect* is good. You need to prove it. But you haven't.

I have shown why they have anti-social consequences. You have only replied with more of the original flawed assumption, more superstitious state-worship: a belief we can make bread out of a stone.

I asked how the author knows whether the stimulus policy will be produce lesser rather than greater unemployment or other social detriments. No-one was able to answer except by assuming what is in issue. Hence no-one has rationally defended the stimulus policy.

I said upstream interventions are causing the problems the stimulus advocates are trying to solve. You asked which. I explained which interventions, what economic and social dislocation they cause, and what would be a less-pain option. None of this has changed the subject.

According to you, by definition nothing would be an intervention, since as soon as the government had enacted it, it would be "the system we work with" and therefore not an intervention. Is that the best you can do?

FRB and fiat money are interventions in that they change the price from what it otherwise would be, claiming to create social benefits by rigging prices.

You do not deny that these monetary policies are fraudulent nor that they caused the GFC. The only reason you think it is more “practical” to continue with these is because you think it would require "destroying the world economy", destroying "95 percent" of businesses, and would bomb us back to the agrarian age.

I have explained why this is mistaken, and the cure in plain language. So then you feign ignorance and re-circulate all the fallacious assumptions I have just refuted. Neither accepting nor refuting the argument, and endlessly assuming what is in issue, might satisfy your intellectual standards, but if I may say so, it shouldn't. It is irrational.
Posted by Peter Hume, Monday, 2 November 2009 7:03:00 PM
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