Jim Moron | Transterrestrial Musings

The Virginia Congressman, just having beamed in from some other planet, says “the economy has recovered“:

In fact, in the last six months more jobs were created than Bush was able to generate in eight years, Chris. People don’t understand that, the economy has recovered.

Guess he picked a bad week to keep huffing glue.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Rick Santelli goes off on another righteous rant, and says to “stop spending.”

Here’s to that. Hope it stirs the folks up again, though he should have waited until closer to November. Of course, I suspect there’s plenty more where that came from.

61 thoughts on “Jim Moron”

“But part of getting out of hole is keeping the hole as shallow as possible, and that’s what the stimulus is supposed to do.”

The first rule is to know when to stop digging. You and Krugman should learn this rule.

“Tax cuts result in at best a one-to-one multiplier – $1 of tax cut = $1 of economic growth. Government spending results in a multiplier of more like $2 or $3 to $1 – $1 of government spending results in $2 or $3 of economic growth.”

Wow–government is magic!

Government spending always results in surpluses and deficiencies that are the definition of inefficiency.

Ken, you’re summarizing the socalist calculation problem, which is great, but bear in mind that when you’re talking to a statist, one of their premises is that the technocrats DO know better than everyone else. They do not believe it in, but they’ve learned to be circumspect: “Oh, it’s only for a short time, you know, until we recover” as if “recovery” were some astronomical event unrelated to private capitalization.

Hmm…or would it be more correct to say that statist simply supplants his values of the private sector? (i.e.: the shortages and surpluses in the economy are simply “wrongthink” on the part of the producers and consumers and the statist’s values are “right.”) Could be a distinction without a difference, really.

When discussing it with people willing to actually think about it, the element I focus on is overhead.

If you personally dig a ditch, overhead is zero. If you hire someone directly, it is non-zero but quite low. If you hire a general contractor, overhead starts climbing. If you wish to splurge, you could start with an architect or engineer. Now start thinking of the overhead when the city, county or state dig the same ditch.

When you’re talking about items on an individual house scale, sane people grasp that the climb in overhead is not a desired feature. Only the statist insists that higher overhead (More government workers!) is the goal and thus lauds it.

Al – actually, with a short term stimulus, the goal is overhead. All those people now have a job and will presumably buy stuff.

The key is short term. Trying to run a command economy (like the old USSR) will lead to death by overhead in the long run.

If the goal is to get people to “buy stuff”, then socialism isn’t the answer since you still have the burden of misallocation of resources (consumed in stimulus projects.) Expanding unemployment beneifts would better serve that purpose — people would still have time to job-hunt and/or retrain instead of misallocating their labor.

Yes, the market decided this was not a short term blip and stopped stimulating themselves and instead started adapting a long time ago – the government, which is much smarter than the market, decided the market is wrong and has increased spending accordingly – passing this cost (plus some) back onto the market to pay for the benefit of their wisdom.

If the government had wanted to help constructively, better looking after the people directly (unemployed, etc.) might have been a good way to do it. This would have enabled the market to get on with adapting to the new market realities as quickly and efficiently as possible, fixing the economy, and it would have allowed the government to get on with helping the people who most suffered from this disaster. The market and the government each doing what they do best.