The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

4 responses to “A Christmas gift suggestion for the younger members of your family”

1. 

   Antisthenes

   August 22, 2016

   I like to read Mises Daily and Cafe Hayek they are full of quotes like this some of which I copy and paste onto a notebook for future use when I am commenting on blogs I have read. Mises Daily I rarely read their articles all the way through as they become very technical and most of it goes high over my head. Fortunately the first few paragraphs are always sufficient for me to get the gist and to decide to agree or disagree. I do not believe yet I have found one with which I disagree. Cafe Hayek is much easier for me to understand and are a wealth of quotes from economists of the Austrian school persuasion. After reading them I think how obviously right their views are and would not the world be a better place if our politicians and central bankers had the same views which very few of them appear to have.

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2. 

   Tom

   August 22, 2016

   I suspect more politicians share these views than you think. By definition they are more than averagely interested in economic questions and not all stupid. Miss Paine the Younger has now worked in and around Parliament for some years and assures me that electors’ expectations that all their problems can be magicked away are the real toxin in our society. Having managed MPs inboxes and drafted their correspondence in her time, she says those expectations are uniformly unrealistic. Perhaps their predecessors (especially those of the “from cradle to grave” welfare tendency) are to blame, but for many current legislators the problem is not to know what to do, but how to win elections while doing it. 
   How can they promote the Austrian School of economics when it is guaranteed that their opponents will use crypto-Keynesian policies (even Keynes would, I am sure, disown most of them) to justify expansionism? When they say they want to pump money "into the economy", the correct question to ask is “from where?” For all our lives the most truthful answer would have been “From the future. We are borrowing against the taxes of the children without votes or as yet unborn”. A major component of public expenditure now is servicing that imprudent debt. Only Margaret Thatcher ever pointed out the simple truth that you can’t go on borrowing forever to fund current, as opposed to capital, expenditure and look just how much she is now hated and how little even she succeeded in rolling back the advance of the “money for nothing” state! Just look how, in times of austerity, the government’s first resort is to cut the capital expenditure (on infrastructure etc) that it SHOULD be making rather than the current expenditure (on welfare and other electoral bribes) that it should NOT.
   I have joined the Mises Institute and made a modest donation towards funding “The Mises Reader” which promises to make the great man’s work more accessible to lay people such as us. In America it, and the Cato Institute, are working hard to promote sound economics to young people. The Adam Smith Institute and the IEA do their humble best here but they are hampered by the total dominance of Marxists in British academia. Any IEA researcher advancing realism will be poo-pooed on the BBC by any number of rent-a-comrade professors, some of whom are economic idiots and some actually intent on promoting an economic collapse from which the Revolution can be born.
   Dismal it may be, but economics remains a science – unlike politics which is mere institutionalised bullying. Political distortions of economic truths are the curse of modern politics. Mr Trump’s 17th Century mercantilism would be only marginally less damaging than Mrs Clinton’s crypto-Keynesianism, for example. in what passes for Jeremy Corbyn’s brain, there is some childish vision of business-people sitting dragon-like on untold hoards of stolen gold. He has never produced economic value. He never intends to. He has total contempt for those who do. And the glee with which the media is currently expounding the “broken window fallacy” in the context of Louisiana’s natural disaster would be hilarious if it were not so stupid. This last one is least inexcusable given that GDP is a measure of flows not stocks and will therefore actually rise in the USA, despite the fact that it is obviously poorer by the value destroyed.

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3. 

   Antisthenes

   August 22, 2016

   What Mises followers and you say is to me blindingly obvious and it escapes me why it is not to every other living person. I have never studied economics and long before I started reading Austrian school blogs Adam Smith being my first I pretty much had opinions that were not far away from the ones they had except they were based on intuition not on any scientific facts or sound theory. Based on prior to that the only economic statement I had ever read was in Dickens when Micawber was lecturing David Copperfield and thought then how eminently sensible. I was very very young at the time and the only economics I understood was that pocket money was provided by parents. Of course it was rather a simplistic statement but I still believe it to be a core principle that is as true today as then and always will be. I believe even in our modern complicated world that any financial transaction and any economic policy that does not ultimately follow Micawber’s law in the end it is doomed to fail.

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4. 

   Tom

   August 22, 2016

   In the final analysis Mr Micawber is always right but, as Orwell said, there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual can believe them. My own experience is like yours. I didn’t study economics but, in thirty years in business, I lived them. In semi-retirement I read Sowell’s excellent introduction and followed the blogs you mention with interest and they mostly seem to confirm (or explain) my own experience. If the academic followers of the other views HAD any experience of the business world, perhaps they would detect their own errors? But then if they had any experience of production they would be ashamed to be parasites.

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