Managing The Decline

[Jccarlton]

Obama wants the economy to trash. They are, "managing the decline."
it's all deliberate:

http://www.floppingaces.net/2010/03/04/ ... ader-post/

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/ ... guest.html
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/ ... guest.html

You look closely at the people Obama appointed and what they think and just keeps getting scarier. The only question I have to ask is, how does Obama expect to pay for all the social justice he wants while he is "managing the decline?"

[MSimon]

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller

Links etc. here:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/201 ... stion.html

[Jccarlton]

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller

Links etc. here:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/201 ... stion.html

I'm glad you linked this in. It seems as if the Club of Rome is becoming popular again:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... -rome.html
Considering their past track record, it's amazing to me that that bunch of rich, powerful and selfish old men still have any credibility. when you tie the Club Of Rome's "Limits To Growth" probably did more to wreck western civilization than just about any book ever written. In spite of the fact the Forrester model was terribly flawed for some strange reason it still seems to have credibility in certain circles. The flaws in the model are so easy to explain it's ridiculous that anybody continues to believe in it. Yet it remains the basis for much of the "theory" behind environmentalism.
When environmentalists talk about "sustainability," it's the Limits model they are talking about whether they know it or not. Limits stated that in order to prevent collapse, industrial growth had be stopped. The computer model showed that disaster was inevitable otherwise. Zero Growth became the mantra of the statists back in the 70's. Remember Jimmy Carter's conservation drives? The fact is that economic growth is sustainable:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html
In fact, it's necessary. If there is no growth, there is no change and the inevitable secular declines and system decay will destroy the civilization. If you just keep doing things the same way, forever, eventually things wear out and run out. That's the real tragedy. The Limits model had it backwards.
The great cornucopian economist Julian Simon made a hash out of the Limits model and it's creators.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
The people who created the Limits model never considered the power of price as a feedback response. Furthermore, the Limits creators never considered that as resource become more expensive they are more likely to be recycled or replaced. Very little gold does not get recycled for instance. Here's Simon's Ultimate Resource II:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
Simon's point was that human ingenuity will solve problems as they arise if you let them. That's why you get the best results with the minimum amount of of regulation. That's also why top down economic planning doesn't work. That's how small government works. Small government is not what the Club Of Rome wants. The members of the Club don't need additional money and resources. They have plenty. What they want is to not to have to share the things they value, especially places and space with everybody else. If everybody can afford to go to Martha's Vineyard, it's not the quiet resort for the wealthy anymore. I've been to Cape Cod and that's certainly the case. Small government creates wealth and wealthy people, and that's bad for the Club of Rome.
James Hudnall has been writing the is wonderful series in Big Journalism:
http://bigjournalism.com/jhudnall/2010/ ... al-primer/
http://bigjournalism.com/jhudnall/2010/ ... on-part-2/
http://bigjournalism.com/jhudnall/2010/ ... on-part-3/

The road to terrible things is paved with the desire to control. The history of the last century has certainly demonstrated that fact. How many times must we go down the road to hell? How many of those children that show up in the save the children ads have to exist in terrible conditions before we get on the growth track again?:
http://depletedcranium.com/just-when-i- ... ood-thing/

The reality is that the Club Of Romes wants world domination simply to prevent new wealth from interfering with their sensibilities. The fact is that the Club is no more entitled to make any decisions for the body politic than anybody else. They have no special knowledge that makes them wizards. The fact is that they are nothing more than a bunch of selfish greedy old men who think they own the world. The Club Of Rome is the Club Of The Corrupt. Just look at the member list.

[taniwha]

If all that about the "Club of Rome" is true, my comment a couple couple of months ago about AGW etc being about preventing a post-scarcity economy wasn't so ridiculous after all.

[TallDave]

That's a bit paranoid.

Obama and his coterie just want to make the US into Western Europe. Damaging the U.S. economy is just an unintended consequence they don't believe in (I know, we keep telling them, but they don't believe us).

The more subtle and insidious issue with Obamanomics is something that hasn't been talked about much -- rising government employee incomes and staffing levels. In Europe, everyone wants to work for the government; they're sort of an elite class. In the U.S., we've historically merely tolerated civil servants rather than making them a well-paid overclass... but in the last 30 years that has changed, government employees now typically make more than their private sector counterparts when total compensation is considered. This trend can be terribly destructive to an economy's dynamicism (i.e. you don't want your best and brightest becoming taxpayer-funded drones, you want them innovating and competing and producing tax dollars). Obama's vision is a recipe for economic stagnation and permanent political statism.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/healt ... nment.html

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Obama's staff have by far the least private sector experience of any Presidency ever. They believe in the power of government.

[MSimon]

Dave,

Look into Maurice Strong, one of the movers behind enviro looting of the US and Western Civ.

He was one of the movers behind the Montreal Protocol.

Look at the ozone stuff starting here:

viewtopic.php?p=36109#36109

Undoubtedly there are many “wizards”, but the man behind the green curtain, the man who managed to get the climate industry to where it is today is a mild mannered character by the name of Maurice Strong. The whole climate change business, and it is a business, started with Mr Strong.

Maurice Strong, a self-confessed socialist, was the man who put the United Nations into the environmental business, being the shadowy-figure behind the UN secretaries general from U Thant to Kofi Annan. His reign of influence in world affairs lasted from 1962 to 2005. Strong has been variously called “the international man of mystery”, the “new guy in your future” and “a very dangerous ideologue”.

Strong made his fortune in the oil and energy business running companies such as Petro Canada, Power Corporation, CalTex Africa, Hydro Canada, the Colorado Land and Cattle Company, Ajax Petroleum, Canadian Industrial Oil and Gas— to name just a few.His private interests always seemed to be in conflict with his public persona and his work on the world stage. Strong’s extensive range of contacts within the power brokers of the world was exceptional. One admirer christened him “the Michelangelo of networking”.

Maurice Strong described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology”.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed ... ice-strong

[Jccarlton]

The players just keep coming to the surface:
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/20 ... f-hot-air/

[Jccarlton]

Before the election I came up with the idea of the punt gun effect, businesses closing up, shutting down or just flatlining in the face of the blast effect of Obama's policies. Boy, do I hate being right.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/03/was ... ciple.html
FYI, punt gun.
http://www.maniacworld.com/biggest-shotgun.html
This is your economy on Obama. Think about it.
Obama administration preparing to fire another blast at the economy:
http://www.fusionplant.com/news/pic/200 ... nt-gun.jpg

[Maui]

That's a bit paranoid.

Obama and his coterie just want to make the US into Western Europe. Damaging the U.S. economy is just an unintended consequence they don't believe in (I know, we keep telling them, but they don't believe us).

The more subtle and insidious issue with Obamanomics is something that hasn't been talked about much -- rising government employee incomes and staffing levels. In Europe, everyone wants to work for the government; they're sort of an elite class. In the U.S., we've historically merely tolerated civil servants rather than making them a well-paid overclass... but in the last 30 years that has changed, government employees now typically make more than their private sector counterparts when total compensation is considered. This trend can be terribly destructive to an economy's dynamicism (i.e. you don't want your best and brightest becoming taxpayer-funded drones, you want them innovating and competing and producing tax dollars). Obama's vision is a recipe for economic stagnation and permanent political statism.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/healt ... nment.html

Ironically, in the short term, can there be anything better for the economy than spending? Oh, I agree that if you look at Obama's budget in the long run, it is a disaster. But in the short-run, there is really isn't much of a reasonable argument that pumping $ into the economy isn't the only real surefire way to help it (whether to individuals via tax breaks and social security bonuses, to private companies via stimulus contracts or to government workers via state bailout funds and, yes, even new bureaucracy). When private industry and individuals can't spend, the ability of the government to take up some of the slack is doing nothing but good for the economy (except in a few cases where a plan called for value to be simultaneously removed from the economy at the same time... yes, I'm talking about you Cash for Clunkers)

Now, I wholly agree that in the long run having more taxpayer-funded drones will hurt the economy, but that has little or nothing to do with the current economic funk.

But as for healthcare, while I agree there are parts of Obama's bill that I think play into "goverment takeover of healthcare" horror story the GOP has been spinning (ie, the government setting all kinds of requirements about what a policy must cover-- I disagree with that), but most of the cost of this bill has to do with incentives & tax breaks for people/businesses buying insurance not the addition of taxpayer-funded drones. There is a great deal of the bill that is actually putting more control in the private industry (ie, the exchanges that offer true competition, cuts to medicare).

[Jccarlton]

That's a bit paranoid.

Obama and his coterie just want to make the US into Western Europe. Damaging the U.S. economy is just an unintended consequence they don't believe in (I know, we keep telling them, but they don't believe us).

The more subtle and insidious issue with Obamanomics is something that hasn't been talked about much -- rising government employee incomes and staffing levels. In Europe, everyone wants to work for the government; they're sort of an elite class. In the U.S., we've historically merely tolerated civil servants rather than making them a well-paid overclass... but in the last 30 years that has changed, government employees now typically make more than their private sector counterparts when total compensation is considered. This trend can be terribly destructive to an economy's dynamicism (i.e. you don't want your best and brightest becoming taxpayer-funded drones, you want them innovating and competing and producing tax dollars). Obama's vision is a recipe for economic stagnation and permanent political statism.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/healt ... nment.html

Ironically, in the short term, can there be anything better for the economy than spending? Oh, I agree that if you look at Obama's budget in the long run, it is a disaster. But in the short-run, there is really isn't much of a reasonable argument that pumping $ into the economy isn't the only real surefire way to help it (whether to individuals via tax breaks and social security bonuses, to private companies via stimulus contracts or to government workers via state bailout funds and, yes, even new bureaucracy). When private industry and individuals can't spend, the ability of the government to take up some of the slack is doing nothing but good for the economy (except in a few cases where a plan called for value to be simultaneously removed from the economy at the same time... yes, I'm talking about you Cash for Clunkers)

Now, I wholly agree that in the long run having more taxpayer-funded drones will hurt the economy, but that has little or nothing to do with the current economic funk.

But as for healthcare, while I agree there are parts of Obama's bill that I think play into "goverment takeover of healthcare" horror story the GOP has been spinning (ie, the government setting all kinds of requirements about what a policy must cover-- I disagree with that), but most of the cost of this bill has to do with incentives & tax breaks for people/businesses buying insurance not the addition of taxpayer-funded drones. There is a great deal of the bill that is actually putting more control in the private industry (ie, the exchanges that offer true competition, cuts to medicare).

Actually, no. For one thing spending borrowed money for stimulus purposes tightens credit markets. Also, because stimulus money is spent to reward patronage, the spending rewards inefficiencies the market is trying to kill and helps to stifle the new growth that is needed. This little diity should explain some of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
The annotated version:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/1/8929/21462

[TallDave]

Ironically, in the short term, can there be anything better for the economy than spending...). When private industry and individuals can't spend, the ability of the government to take up some of the slack is doing nothing but good for the economy

In the short run, yes (but that's just an accounting trick, shifting numbers from one period to another). In the long run, this is just another version of the broken windows fallacy -- you generally can't create wealth through acts of force.

I think people sometimes believe GDP is synonymous with economic health, but they aren't necessarily the same thing. Let's say the federal government tomorrow passed a law hiring 10,000 unemployed people at $100,000 a year to dig a hole, and another 10,000 to fill the hole in. This would, technically, increase GDP because we produced a $1B hole and then produced its filling, but this would be a very bad allocation of resources because it actually produced nothing of value (and it distorted the labor market, the hole-diggging industry, etc). You can argue those workers then spent money and etc., but ultimately that money has to be seized from taxpayers at some point, so the whole thing starts out $2B in the hole (so to speak).

Normally governments aren't quite that bad at allocating resources, but at the same time there is a reason N Korea and Cuba are so poor. The evidence of the 20th century is that free markets allocate resources far more efficiently, and all else being equal the smaller proportion of the economy that is controlled by government the better off everyone is in the long run.

[Maui]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
The annotated version:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/1/8929/21462

Nice! Okay, not *everything* you post is crap, I guess.

Look, its not that I'm all pro-Keynes anti-Hayek (I guess I would argue for somewhere in the middle). For a common recession I might go along with no stimulus.

I totally agree, the problem with this (and any) recession is not the bust, but the boom. There was a whole lot of fake money holding up the fort. But how much of that was really due to stimulus spending and interest rate policy in the previous recession vs the real-estate derivative market?

I agree that a natural, free market would generally regulate itself better than government could. But I think you also have to keep in mind that we don't have a natural, free market on our hands. The problem we created I think is far nastier than what we could allow for a free market to try to correct on its own. Would it really have been better to let the financial system collapse to the point it only recovered once we were back to a gold standard currency? Sure, that might be the most direct way to a Hayek economy, but I find it hard to believe it would be worth the short term (heck, probably bordering on long-term) devastation it would cause.

Sure, stimulus spending is not the most efficient use of money (and rewarding the companies that drove us into this mess certainly is not), but I'll take that over the stone age.

I think if you really want a hands-off economy, this is really the juncture in time that you address that. The economy was landed softly (as possible given its downward momentum), but we are far from "booming" at this point. I think at this point if you let the stimulus run its course, started returning interest rate policy to normal, and reined in other spending within the next year or two (like finally out of Iraq... yay!) we would be in a position where you could look at setting the economy free without having too much of a future backlash to deal with as a result.

But who are we kidding? The economy isn't going to be set free. And as long as that isn't going to happen, why pick the worst recession in almost a century to try?

[MSimon]

FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau on Keynesian economics:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot."

[MSimon]

Maui's argument:

Bad management theory and practice are ruining the company. But to change management while the company is failing is a dumb idea.

[Maui]

Maui's argument:

Bad management theory and practice are ruining the company. But to change management while the company is failing is a dumb idea.

A patient comes in with a headache. His choices are Dr. Hayek who won't so much as put a band-aid on someone spewing blood out of their carotid artery (years ago he made headlines by praying for rather than treating his now dead daughter) or Doctor Keynes who likes to send people with splinters into surgery. He goes to doctor Keynes who puts him on a heavy regime on experimental "derivate" pills (along with some FDA approved though somewhat controversial interest-rate regulating medication)

A few days later he is rushed into the emergency room with severe heart palpitations and rapidly deteriorating vitals.

Obviously it makes sense to switch to Dr Hayek at that very moment and risk very possible death rather than let Dr Keynes stabilize you first...