“The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($), in one of his best recent columns IMHO, gently taking apart a new book by Sven Beckert that purports to show how we have become rich primarily through violence and enslavement, not mutual exchange. The book is apparently more than 1,300 pages long, and the largest ever published by Penguin. To write a book that long, and miss the key elements of why free enterprise is as great as it is, seems a lot of work for scant reward. Alas, I suspect Beckert’s book will be treated as reverently on parts of the Left as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, which turned out to be built on proverbial sand.
A recent Nobel prizewinner in economics, Joel Mokyr, has written a book that I think rather more accurately identifies why, for instance, the UK became as wealthy as it did during the Industrial Revolution, and plays far more attention to the role of ideas. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes is also a good study, in my view. Anything by Deidre McCloskey is also good.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: one of “Capitalism”‘s biggest problems is its name. It conjures up images of Mr Monopoly or Scrooge McDuck swimming in his basement full of gold coins. Capitalism isn’t about capital except in a very broad sense. When people hear “capital” they think “rich people with too much money and too much power”.
So let’s call it what it is: “free markets”, “freedom of exchange”, “fair dealing between willing participants”. The power in this system has very little to do with money. It is about the immediacy of feedback when you have to make a product or service that people want more than the money you charge for it. It is about trying without permission, succeeding without penalty, and failing without recourse. It is ultimately about freedom.
The word “capitalism” makes me cringe. Let’s say “free markets” instead and improve its PR. Free markets are about liberating the little guy, and yet somehow “capitalism” is in many people’s mind (sometimes justifiably) about “the system”, the rich, the powerful and them, the regular folks never having a chance to succeed. What a cruel reversal indeed.
I think Wooldridge hit a common pitfall with this quote. The great heroes of free markets don’t “feel the future in their bones”; it’s just that one of the things they’ll do to bring it into being is taking risks.
Naive socialists will say, “If the heroes really can ‘feel the future in their bones’ then why don’t we just put them in charge of economic planning?” The many failings of dirigisme deserve discussion, but the entire premise can be avoided by pointing out that the “heroes” are expending a lot of effort & resources on projects whose outcomes are inherently unpredictable.
I realize it’s not a perfect point. More militant socialists will insist that the unpredictability of their efforts mean that the wealth of the successful is “unearned” due to “luck”, and therefore forceably redistributing said wealth is morally justified, or even morally imperative. I don’t really see how that justification follows, so there’s still that moral/philosophical discussion to work through. However, there’s still another way to refute the argument with a practical discussion: If the “heroes” suspect that the rewards for spending all their effort & resources is going to be redistributed, they’re even less likely to risk all that work instead of taking a slower-paced, more stable career. Thus, tolerating forced wealth redistribution drastically decreases the odds that anyone will build the future in the first place.
I know a few reasons why the “feel the future in their bones” pitfall is so common. Simply educating people about these sorts of issues is hard enough without also informing them of the many gaps in our knowledge; it takes time and effort to point out the gaps, and doing so also decreases a student’s incentive for learning about it. Clearly I don’t know how to do so succinctly — it takes me four paragraphs just for this — but I think even the many people smarter than myself who try to study the problem have a difficult time merely calibrating their vocabulary precisely enough that they’re all talking about the same thing, let alone reaching nontrivial conclusions. In addition, I estimate a good chunk of the western schools of philosophy doesn’t want to admit that reason can have limits at all, beyond perhaps “We haven’t figured everything out yet.” Even among those that do, nobody wants to point to a success story and admit that they would’ve advised against doing the thing that made it work. And, of course, there’s always the incentive that praising the successful “heroes” as being foresighted will flatter their egos and get their positive attention.
Burton Folsom’s book “The Myth of the Robber Barons” is showing how the great industrialists of the United States were, generally, a force for good – not a force for evil as lying “muckrakers” were pretending even in the 19th century.
A mixture of Classical prejudice against making money (to be found in Plato – and even in Aristotle, although to a lesser extent) and a vague desire for a form of Christian communalism seems to have inspired the early critics of American “capitalism” – even after these critics became atheists and led quite decadent life styles, they still pined for a “pure” world where all goods would be held in common and everyone would work for the common good (rather like the New Plymouth colony from 1620 onwards – even though it collapsed into mass starvation and, as Governor William Bradford relates in his history of the colony, had to restore private property, especially in land, and voluntary trade).
In Britain there was less of this weird hatred of people, often from humble backgrounds, who did such good in economic life – at least in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the very late 19th century this started to change (although the fictional stories of Disraeli and Dickens are somewhat earlier) – with the rise of the Fabians and other groups, the irony being that it was the “reformers” who were, in reality, the evil people – such socialists as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Mr and Mrs Webb had no problem at all with the mass murder of quite ordinary people (not just “capitalists”) yet, somehow, they have been set up as the moral judges, sitting in judgement on people who, unlike them, benefited society.
The story of such men as Josiah Wedgewood is inspiring – in that they made once luxury goods available to people who never had a chance of them before, and such men were also highly moral.
The only free Wedgewood china was that which had anti slavery slogans upon it.
And it is well worth noting that the man who denounced Wedgewood china the most – George Whitfield (or Whitefield), denounced it as anti Christian luxury, was also the man who introduced slavery into Georgia, against the founding documents of the colony.
Had Georgia not fallen to pro slavery forces the “slave south” would have been geographically impossible (look at a map) – and it was the arch critic of capitalist “luxury”, George Whitfield who led the charge to overturn the founding documents of the colony of Georgia and make it a land of slavery.
But then Mr Whitfield was a Predestinationist – and so might (possibly) have claimed he was not morally responsible for his actions as they were predetermined.
That this makes God the author of sin, seems to escape such folk.
“But what of the poor – the people who could not afford Wedgewood china?”
Everything from the clothes on their backs, to the iron tools they used was made vastly less expensive by the industrial Revolution – the claim that industrialization increased poverty (a claim that can be found even in Pope Leo XIII encyclical of 1891) is a falsehood – indeed it is the opposite of the truth.
And this includes FOOD – without the agricultural revolution in England and Wales the industrial revolution would have been impossible, and the expanding population would have starved to death.
And this did NOT involve the “stealing of land” – as enclosure was about changing land use, not (generally) land OWNERSHIP – clue, people do not pay rent for land they own.
In an American context the left talk about the stealing of land from the nomadic tribes – but rarely mention which member of which tribe is supposed to have owned a specific piece of land – it is MOSTLY vague, all “the white people” “stole land” from “people of colour” – not WHICH white person is supposed to have stolen which specific piece of land from which specific “person of colour”.
Witness IRELAND in the 1840s (and before) for the alternative to having an agricultural and industrial Revolution.
CayleyGraph2015 is correct.
One of the things that collectivist/statist/authoritarians almost invariably miss is that the vast majority of entrepreneurs do NOT initially succeed. Most of the true innovators have tried many other things before finding the one that worked. Many have risked their lives and their families to follow a dream which turned into a nightmare.
My first engineering job was with a company started by a man who had an idea for a brand new product. He attempted to get the company for which he was working as an executive interested in it but they wouldn’t touch it. He hired an engineer (not degreed, but one of the best I’ve ever met) to design it for him and built the prototype in his garage. He got a customer interested in it and secured an order for a dozen units…without even having a place in which to build or test them. He mortgaged his house to finance his new company, and rented a very deep garage with sufficient power supplies and built the first dozen units there. He hired a couple more people to assemble them, and while they were being built, he went out and secured orders for more units, and then things finally started to snowball.
When I started with them they had more than 20 people working there and desperately needed more design engineers who wouldn’t be shy about also doing the necessary scut work. I was right out of school, and it was perfect. I learned an incredible amount about every aspect of that kind of manufacturing and design. We hit a hard point when we were anticipating a VERY large payment from a customer for whom we had built a large number of units, and he couldn’t make payroll. The owner went around the building handing out our paychecks, but asking if we could put off cashing them or putting them in the bank for a while. The majority of we employees had enough cushion to go along, but several of us couldn’t…he was fine with that, and told them not to worry and that enough of us could wait. Three days later the payment came through, and he walked through the building beaming and telling everybody it was fine to go ahead the bank our checks.
I cannot even imagine the raw guts it takes to start your own company, even with a great product idea like he had. He later sold the company to a corporation, and things were never the same with their oversight. But for that period of time I got to see what kind of dedication and spirit it takes to make a company, and to provide employment for other people.
19th century France is even amusing – who did the peasant farmers of France “steal the land” – did they steal if from the aristocracy? By the way – they owned at least half the farm land even before 1789.
And what are 19th century French industrialists supposed to have “stolen”?
It is true that they wanted subsidies and Protectionism – and both these things were wrong (economically and morally) as J.B. Say and Bastiat (and others) pointed out, but Napoleon III rejected these demands.
So what “class” did Napoleon III represent? This was a serious question put to Dr Karl Marx – as according to his theory, all governments represent an economic class, and the French government (at that time) was one of the most important in the world.
Karl Marx could not answer the question – as it was clear that the government of Napoleon III did not represent any particular “class”, but rather than admit that his theory was false, Dr Marx spat that Napoleon III represented “the lumpen proletariat” – the criminals and beggars.
This was claimed to be a “witty” reply – but it was clearly no real reply at all.
Any more than Dr Marx could answer when the “feudal mode of production” had existed in Norway, or even in the county of Kent in England – when was the serfdom, when was the strip system of farming, and-so-on.
It is not just the economics of Dr Marx (the Labour Theory of Value and so on) that is false – his history is also false, as is his sociology and philosophy.
Every time I see a full Moon I am reminded that in Texas it is called a “Comanche Moon”.
Texas is the largest of the 48 continuous States of the 50 State United States – and it has more (vastly more) privately owned land, than any other State. In many States much of the land is owned by government – but not in Texas.
Leftists who claim that evil white people “stole the land” in Texas, lie – as the Comanche were no more “native” to Texas than the white people were (the Comanche came from the north) – and the Comanche were not interested in farming, they were interested in raiding and torturing people to death, and they did not care who they raped or tortured to death, people from other tribes, Mexicans (there were few Mexicans there when the Republic of Texas was founded – and they were NOT forced to leave), or “Anglos”.
Yet children in American schools are taught that the “Native American” tribes were “peaceful” (the warriors of various tribes would have taken “peaceful” as an insult – as their manhood was defined by the people they tortured and killed) and that evil white people “stole the land”
It would be better for those who control the education system (including many of the “elite” private schools) that they were never born – rather than they had been born and so abused the children that are entrusted to their instruction.
To end on a positive note….
When one of the leading Texas Rangers was getting married, in far off California – he got a gift of gold, a gift from a Comanche chief in Texas (the gift being brought all the way), who admired the Ranger as a fellow-killer (and, therefore, by the ethics of the tribes, whether Comanche, Apache, or the other tribes, – a good man, good at being a man – good at killing).
When Q. Parker was defeated at the Battle of Adobe Walls (like most conflicts in Texas this was not about fighting United States soldiers – it was about fighting private citizens) he decided to give up raiding and become a rancher.
“If my mother could learn the ways of the Comanche [not that she had any choice], I can learn the ways of the white man” he said – and so he did.
He was a good rancher.
Ouch – I got the history WRONG about the gift.
It was silver (not gold) – and it was on the birth of his first son, not on his marriage.
John Coffee Hays (who was indeed an excellent killer) got a silver cup sent to him from his old enemy Buffalo Hump (another excellent killer) and it was engraved “Buffalo Hump Jr” – implying (as a joke) that Buffalo Hump was the father of the child.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree with you and Adrian Wooldridge in saying that it was mutual exchange – and, indeed, capitalism – that made the world so much richer, not violence and enslavement. We had the system by which a great king meant a great conqueror for millennia and the world stayed poor. We had something like capitalism for a few centuries and the share of the world living in extreme poverty sank like a stone.
I also agree that Sven Beckert’s book will be probably treated with reverence by the left. The fools. Quite apart from its main thesis being wrong in fact, don’t they realise that when they preach the idea that it is committing violence and oppression against others that makes a class or nation rich, a very substantial portion of those who hear this perverted gospel think, “In that case let’s make damn sure that OUR group is the oppressor not the victim.”
My favorite land acknowledgment:
“As we gather here today, we acknowledge and give respect to the idea that we are merely stewards of this land that came to us from the original inhabitants and stewards, Williams and Johnson Accounting Services of Minneapolis, and that we simply hold this office suite in trust on their behalf until they make the journey of return from Chapter 7 bankruptcy . . . “
bobby b, was that the Babylon Bee?
Natalie: Problem is, I don’t remember, but very likely. 😉
On the name “Capitalism” :
Obviously it is mostly used perjoratively by lefties, hence the fat guy with the fat cigar image. But I don’t think it simply means “free markets.” It means free markets in a particular context. Capital is another word for “Wealth”; and “Capitalism” refers to an economic system in which the efficient use of Wealth is prominent. Once upon a time, wealth and land were pretty much the same thing, but gradually, bootstrapping away, other forms of wealth emerged. And these other forms tended to emerge as a result of free markets. So after a while “capital” begins to pile up, and gets used in more productive endeavours, producing more wealth aka capital, until the economic landscape is dominated by people seeking to find the most productive use for this capital. (Just for the avoidance of doubt this capital or wealth also includes intangibles such as knowhow, the extra skills of skilled labour etc. Not just new machines belching smoke.)
That was the landscape that Marx observed, and it seemed different to t’olden days with bucolic peasants peasanting away. And it was – in the sense of lots of capital being used in non-agricultural production. But conceptually it was still the same old same old free market, which had gradually been reinvesting profits in land improvement and other agricultural schemes. Capitalism is just when this process goes critical and the wealth hops from farming into other stuff. and therefore looks different.
Capital, aka Wealth, can of course be used in productive endeavour other than in a free market. The means of production, distribution and exchange (aka existing wealth) can be seized by the forces of progress and put to work making tractors for which there are no spare parts. But it tends to sputter out. Because the criticality of capitalism rests on continuous improvement, aka on average getting back more capital than you put in. The commies don’t get this. So they burn their capital down to nothing. And having pillaged the agricultural sector to juice the supply of capital for industry, you get your “bad luck” – aka starvation.
Anyway – I get that we don’t like people using “capitalism” simply to abuse free market folk going about their business. But it seems to me that “capitalism” connotes a particular – predictable – contextual development of free markets. It’s when they’re successful enough to throw off and employ huge amounts of wealth, effectively, in non agricultural endeavour. This is not a shameful thing, even if it sounds a weeny bit historicist and marx-adjacent.
Nothing wrong with farming – but it’s a GOOD thing we’re not all still farming. That’s capitalism.
bobby b – it is funny, but is also horrible.
This was the mentality that elected Keith Ellison as Attorney General of Minnesota, and elected the District Attorney who decided that a person (a white man – if that matters) who vandalized Tesla cars (doing 20 thousand Dollars of damage) should not even be charged.
It is all very funny – till these people come for you and your family, and they will.
As for “the land” – they are urinating on the memory of hundreds of American civilians who were massacred in Minnesota (during the Civil War), massacred by nomadic tribes.
People like Keith Ellison (that combination of socialism and a form of Islam) are not a joke – not when they can let the guilty walk free, and put innocent men in prison to be cut up with knives.
Any civilization can be destroyed – including the civilization you live in. And it can be destroyed very quickly.
As Ronald Reagan said – liberty is never more than one generation away from being lost.
And what do you think is being taught to students in schools and universities right now?
Do you think they are being taught to revere “capitalists” such as J.J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway.
More likely, if he is mentioned in schools and universities at all, he is presented as someone who “stole” to gain his wealth – and his house in Saint Paul is presented as proof of his “greed” and “ill gotten gains”.
On CayleyGraph and risk taking.
Governments are not shy about taking risks with capital. It’s just that they’re not very good at it. The trick with the risk taking thing is to do it …. well. (One structural benefit that “capitalism” provides is that the market tends to comment quite early on bad ideas. You find out that your idea isn’t going to fly more quickly than if you’re using goverment capital. Bringing the wastage of capital to an early halt is …. useful.)
It is also true that success – in pretty much any field – involves a mixture of merit and luck. Likewise failure. But the contributions of each are generally not computable, even after the event, and as CayleyGraph nearly said – if you set public policy on the assumption that luck explains 100% of success and failure, by confiscating the rewards of success and subsidising the failure, you will not be getting any merit deployed.
It makes more sense to let the lucky keep their winnings, because on average, they will have deployed some merit as well, and society would like to benefit from the success. Which benefit as has been noted is primarily the consumer surplus – ie the excess value to the consumer over the price demanded – rather than tax revenues.
As to merit – in order to believe that it is entirely absent from commercial success – you have also to believe that merit is absent from, say, sporting success. Any sport involves an element of luck – the bounce of the ball, the toss of a coin, the vagaries of refereeing decisions, injury, the weather, mistakes by your opponent etc. But generally we are willing to attribute some significant element to merit – ability, training, game plan, courage, taking shrewd rather than foolish risks etc.
As Gary Player is alleged to have said to Henry Longhurst, when the latter congratulated him on his “lucky” putts – “Well, Mr Longhurst, I find that the more I practice the luckier I get.”
Lee Moore.
As you know government “investments” normally fail – so much so that governments have changed the definition of the word “investment” (just as governments, and pet corporate entities and establishment health bodies, changed the definition of the word “vaccine” – Covid “vaccines” do not prevent people getting Covid, passing it on, or dying of it – or, indeed, dying from the “vaccine”).
“Investment” no longer means trying to get a productive, profitable, return (which governments hardly ever achieve) – it now means any form of government spending.
Hence “investment in the NHS” (more people killed off with morphine and midazolam – when the could have been saved by proper treatment for Covid, effective Early Treatments were there from the start – but NOT used in Britain and many other establishment controlled countries), “investment in education and training” (more lying indoctrination – or just some lazy bloke with tattoos and a “Palestinian” badge sitting at a desk – and not even pretending to teach), and so on.
Dr Karl Marx at least pretended to support industrial investment to improve living standards over time – the modern left openly hate it.
I am constantly darkly amused by the “trigger” warnings on TV. I watched “The Zone of Interest” a while back (not very good). Rudolf Höß was of course commandant of Auschwitz. There were only two triggerterms about occasional tobacco and alcohol use. Höß, apparently, enjoyed a cigarillo and a glass of schnaps after dinner. Oh, the horror, the horror! I mean if those were his only vices…
Last night I was flicking around and (it was late) and I had consumed beer. Anyway, somewhere on the Sky system they rate movies by points for what not to let kiddies see. The usual suspects were up there but also “consumerism”. And that from a major corporation that sells something we don’t strictly need.
If anyone can confirm this I’d love to know because it’s beginning to seem like a bad dream.
NickM – the Frankfurt School, “Cultural Marxism”, “Critical Theory” (it has so many names) is, as you know, Marxism with every rational claim removed.
The claims of Dr Karl Marx were FALSE – but they were serious claims, claims about history, economics, and so on. The sort of mutant Marxism that dominated modern universities and the Corporate types they produced is indeed like a bad dream – it is just mindless ravings.
I can not stand it – it drives me to utter despair. Of course, that is what it is for – it is meant to drive people into despair.
And if you answer back, even politely, you get banned from commenting – as I have been today from Facebook (ban effective till December 7th).
The ravings of the modern left must-not-be-contradicted – so commands both Corporations and Governments.
Natalie: I also agree that Sven Beckert’s book will be probably treated with reverence by the left. The fools. Quite apart from its main thesis being wrong in fact, don’t they realise that when they preach the idea that it is committing violence and oppression against others that makes a class or nation rich, a very substantial portion of those who hear this perverted gospel think, “In that case let’s make damn sure that OUR group is the oppressor not the victim.”
This. Such a thesis, that countries/people get rich primarily via predation rather than production can lead some to conclude that predation is the way. It also speaks to a zero-sum view of the world, which says that mutual enrichment via trade and interaction of ideas is not fruitful. It also means that those who want to “settle the score” call for things such as reparations from the supposedly richer world, and this book will therefore be another brick in the wall of grifters looking to weaponise Western guilt about wealth.
It is important to counter this. For instance, as well as the Joel Mokyr book I linked to and the Landes one, there are a few others worth a mention: Dr Kristian Niemietz of the IEA; Adam Smith and Richard Cobden were not convinced empires were good or positive for wealth creation and feared they actually were a drag on production. The US writer William Graham Sumner was a critic of US conquests of Spanish possessions. The contemporary writer Marian Tupy has criticised the notion that empires are necessary for wealth. That also gives the lie to the idea that free market capitalism required, at least originally, acts of enslavement to get off the runway. It is like the old cynical notion that every fortune starts with a crime. A terrible, corrosive cynicism operates here, and it needs to be called out.
Another writer who said that Western wealth preceded empires, rather than came after, was the economist Angus Deaton.
It has a flavour of Garrison Keillor imho
@Jonathan the notion that empires are the cause of wealth is countermanded clearly by two especially powerful examples, namely Hong Kong and Singapore. Two city states that were in fact colonized, the very opposite of being colonial. Neither had any physical resources to speak of, and neither had much land or anything intrinsically valuable really. Neither of them are even especially democratic. But because of their free market systems they became ridiculously successful. The only thing they had going for them is a free market, and perhaps the attitude of hard work and entrepreneurship this produced in its peoples, and look where it took them.
Of course things are different in HK since 1997, but even today much of its success lingers not only in HK itself, but in the cities around HK such as Shenzhen, Macao and Guangzhou which forced even Communist China to adopt a similar economic system to have a hope of competing with it.
Their existence is, to steal a phrase, an inconvenient truth.
Paul,
Lewis Carroll — ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
That is why paying the running costs of the NHS is an “investment”. That is why creating jobs (politicians love creating jobs with magic wands) is a “benefit” not a “cost” regardless of what those jobs are. Consider Keynes’ extreme example of paying one guy to dig a hole and another to fill it in.
On empires it is worth considering tellurocracy vs. thalassocracy. What drives the building of empires and why some work better than others. I now have a plumber round soon so do consider the difference and I shall return later. Leave it at his: I learned a lot from Sid Meier. Does that sound flippant? Maybe. But at various points in the game there are historical quotes which got me reading. Sometimes people I was only vaguely aware of such as Sun Tzu.
The industrialists in Britain who created the industrial revolution were great benefactors of mankind – not because of their charitable works (although they often were charitable), but because of their industry, their inventions, developments and investments.
Without them prices for goods would have been vastly higher, and the growing population would have no work.
For what happens to a country that does not have first an agricultural revolution (that clings to peasant plot farming) and then has no great industrial revolution – see what happened to IRELAND in the early 19th century.
And what thanks did the industrialists get? A lot of sneering in the fictional stories of Dickens and Disraeli – people who, it should be noted, were also about making money – but instead of making money by producing clothing, or tools, or food, Dickens and Disraeli made their money by writing lots of sneers on pieces of paper – about “Thomas Gradgrind” and so on.
NickM – yes indeed Sir.
Even when the “investment” is used to attack effective Early Treatments for Covid – and to push morphine and midazolam to kill people off.
And, of course, for the “Covid vaccines” – that are not vaccines.
@NickM
That is why paying the running costs of the NHS is an “investment”. That is why creating jobs (politicians love creating jobs with magic wands) is a “benefit” not a “cost”
This gives me the opportunity to tell a joke I have been tryin to upgrade from the standard economics joke:
Ed the economist goes for a walk on the beach with Fred, his friend.
Ed says to Fred, “You know I always wanted to do that thing where I was buried up to the neck in sand”.
“OK”, says Fred, “I’ll dig you the hole, but it’ll cost you fifty bucks”.
Ed pays Fred and he digs the hole.
Just as Ed was about to jump in the hole Pete the Policeman comes up and says: “Hey didn’t you read that sign? Holes in the beach are really dangerous, and there is a $1000 fine!”
Ed says, “So sorry, I didn’t know. What can we do?”
The cop says, “Tell you what, if you give me $100 not to notice and you fill in the hole, I’ll let it slide”.
Fred says “I’m exhausted, I can’t fill in the hole, here Ed, if I give you fifty bucks will you do it?”
“Sure” says Ed and he does so.
As they were walking away Fred said “Well that was a big waste of time!”
“What are you talking about?” says Ed the Economist. “We created three jobs, funded the government, saved $1000 and generated $200 of economic activity.”
Fraser Orr – very good, and exactly how the modern leftists think.
Recently I had leftists attacking me on X – by saying that Prime Minister Starmer’s government had “stimulated the economy” by increasing the wages of government employees – these employees would “buy more stuff” and, thereby, “stimulate the economy” (these were the actual words used).
The leftists would read what you have written (as a joke) and nod with AGREEMENT at the absurd conclusion of “Ed the Economist”.
Even Dr Karl Marx was not as bad as this – indeed he mocked such “monetary cranks” (people who thought that creating Credit Money and spending it was “good for the economy”) in the 19th century.
But since the rise of the Cambridge charlatan J.M. Keynes, this utter nonsense is presented as “modern economics”.