A Liberal Glimpses the Truth, Albeit Dimly
|
Posted: 12/29/08
|
|
A Liberal Glimpses the Truth, Albeit Dimly
By Thomas E. Brewton
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert denounces spending borrowed
money, apparently unaware that he is stepping on the party line.
Mr. Herbert is about as far left in his liberal-progressive ideology
as any writer in today's mainstream media. Yet he has glimpsed
enough of the truth to identify consumption floated by excessive debt
as a cause of our present economic woes.
Read the whole column: Stop Being Stupid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27herbert.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
All conservatives, I believe, will wholeheartedly second Mr.
Herbert's assertion that, "Somehow, over the past few decades, that
has become the American way: to pay for things - from wars to Wall
Street bonuses to flat-screen TVs to video games - with money that
wasn't there."
There are, however, important points of divergence reflecting Mr.
Herbert's economic paradigm.
The picture that Mr. Herbert conveys is of an economy that is, and
should be, collectivized and managed by a coterie of experts in
Washington; an economy in which individual people and businesses are
incapable of making beneficial decisions for themselves; an economy
in which only the government has the right to and the ability to make
proper choices for use of scarce economic resources.
A few phrases from his column illustrate the point:
"... top government officials and financial titans who were supposed
to be guarding the nation's wealth...
"We shipped American jobs overseas by the millions and came up with
the fiction that this was a good deal for just about everybody. We
could have and should have taken the time and made the effort to
think globalization through..."
"We," he says, meaning apparently the Federal government, should
regulate the process of business globalization. Just after World War
II when countries were still devastated by the war, this was known as
currency control, under which no one could exchange his local money
for foreign currency or make any kind of investment outside his
country without the approval of government ministers. When currency
controls finally were lifted, international trade bloomed and
standards of living rose rapidly.
"There is broad agreement that we have no choice but to go much more
deeply into debt to jump-start the economy. But we have tremendous
choices as to how we use that debt.
"We should use it to invest in the U.S. - in a world-class
infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a
world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that
actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the
real world they will be encountering.
"We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality
of American lives, enhances productivity...
"We need to care for our environment (if long-term survival means
anything to us)...
"And, finally, we need to start living within our means and get past
the nauseating idea that the essence of our culture and the be-all
and end-all of the American economy is the limitless consumption of
trashy consumer goods."
The elitist perspective of liberal-progressivism is clearly revealed
in Mr. Herbert's phrase "limitless consumption of trashy consumer
goods." Since the inception of socialist doctrine in Revolutionary
France of the early 19th century, socialist intellectuals have
maintained that ordinary citizens are offered too many choices of
consumer goods. The assumption is that bureaucratic regulators can
manage the economy more efficiently than individual people and
businesses and that one means of making the economy more efficient is
to limit the numbers of products and services offered to the citizenry.
It's true that a free-market economy produces a profusion of
products, some of which are trashy. But that is an inseparable part
of the liberties for which the colonists fought in 1776. The right
of entrepreneurs to produce things that consumers will buy (apart
from criminally connected items) was one of the intentions of the
Bill of Rights, which endeavored to protect private economic and
political liberties from arbitrary government action of the type
favored by liberal-progressives. Think of the Boston Tea Party,
sparked by a British order requiring Boston citizens to purchase
taxed tea from a handful of merchants selected by the crown.
Mr. Herbert uses the familiar liberal-progressive-socialist term
"investment" for expansion of government regulation, for example a
nationalized, socialized health care system.
Investment, by definition, is expenditures intended to increase
future production efficiency and output. Socialized medicine does
nothing of the kind. It merely transfers money from wealthier people
to poorer people, as determined by Federal bureaucrats, while
overlaying the process with costly regulations administered by tens
of thousands of paper shufflers who add not a whit to the real GDP.
In farming terms, this is known as eating your seed corn.
Liberals as a whole, perhaps not Mr. Herbert, assume that greater
funding for teachers' unions will improve our students' level of
academic achievement. In reality, Federal funding for education
since the inception of President Johnson's Great Society has produced
a steadily declining quality of education. The only beneficiaries
have been the teachers' unions and the liberal-progressive-
politicians whose election campaigns the unions finance.
American education before the Great Society was incomparably better,
in fact among the best in the world. Education then was a strictly
local matter, controlled by local school boards that were free to
hire and fire teachers on the basis of competence. And schools were
free to expel disruptive students who were interfering with the
opportunity of other students to get an education.
Mr. Herbert's liberal-progressive-socialist paradigm makes it
impossible for him to connect the economic dots that form a complete
picture of economic reality. This, no doubt, because the liberal-
progressive-socialist economic paradigm is an entirely theoretical
construct that must be forced into a box labeled social justice,
i.e., redistribution of wealth to make us all equally poor.
Mr. Herbert seems not to recognize that his derogation of rampant
consumption funded by debt runs into a head-on collision with one of
the most basic doctrinal elements in liberal-progressive-socialism:
the belief that consumption is the driver of the economy and that
full-employment levels of consumption depend upon government deficit
spending.
At bottom, all of the economic phenomena of which he complains
originate in welfare-state, social justice programs funded by Federal
deficit spending, which is financed by the Federal Reserve's
limitless expansion of the fiat money supply, with its inevitable
inflationary effects.
History for centuries records the same set of phenomena attendant
upon paying for government expenditures with fiat money that cannot
be converted into a valuable commodity like gold. Prices rise faster
than wages, because inflation negatively impacts business costs,
which retards job creation and wages increases. As prices rise
(think of the housing boom), money becomes worth less, leading people
to save less. In the early stages of rapidly increasing fiat money
expansion (where we are now), interest rates decline, leading people
to take speculative risks to attain investment returns high enough to
offset the effects of inflation. Because money steadily loses
purchasing power, people are encouraged to borrow increasing amounts
of money to fund consumption, expecting to be able to repay the debt
in the future with ever cheaper money.
The bottom line is that Mr. Herbert unknowingly is damning the
economic orthodoxy of his own liberal-progressive-socialism:
Keynesian economics. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes propounded a
discredited theory still advocated by liberals like Paul Krugman,
which denounced savings as the cause of the Depression and
recommended massive government deficit spending to offset private
saving.
In Keynesian doctrine, consumption expenditures, for anything from
digging and filling useless holes to funding anti-business
regulation, is the route to economic salvation. This is the nature
of President Bush's earlier economic stimulus plan and of the
incoming Obama administration's $ trillion stimulus plan.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
Click Here to Read and Post Feedback
Send this page to a friend
Distributed by www.ChristianWorldviewNetwork.com
Disclaimer: Worldview Weekend, Christian Worldview Network and its columnists do not necessarily endorse or agree with every opinion expressed in every article posted on this site. We do however, encourage a healthy and friendly debate on the issues of our day. Whether you agree or disagree, we encourage you to post your feedback by using the feedback button.
267 Views
Printer Friendly Version |
Return to home
|
|
|
