[Feisbook Control]

(05-20-2014 08:57 PM)lurker Wrote:  

(05-20-2014 12:14 PM)berserk Wrote:  

You're basically saying, lets eat all our food in the summer and save none for winter. Or the famous saying: "After us, the flood, I care not what happens when I am dead and gone". Of course, a few years that mistress of the King had her head chopped off in the guillotine.

"Apres moi, le deluge" is a quote generally attributable to the mistress of Louis XV, not his grandson Louis XVI.

It's pertinent here because it evidences a misunderstanding of Keynesian economics. Keynesianism is not just about deficit spending: the other, almost universally overlook half of it is about national surplus saving. Under a Keynesian system, you put away money you don't need during the "summer months" to smooth over economic downturns during the "winters." The purpose is to save a citizenry from the natural business cycle, which is a fancy way of saying that people in free markets are too perennially short-sighted to adequately provide for their long-term needs, which causes reverberation effects across the entire population in the form of liquidity crises when bubbles pop and recession hits. Protecting people from their own idiocies and misfortunes through collectivized action is a large part of what post-agrarian civilization is all about.

Go ahead, call me a socialist.

So how have those Keynesian surpluses worked out during the boom cycle? Rather than save them up for the inevitable bust cycle, government always just gets expanded, at least whilst left wing parties are in power. If right wing parties get in power, it's a case of this, at least in the outline of the past two decades of federal Australian politics illustrate:

Quote:

Democratic politics also corrodes right-wing economic policy even more directly. The lesson from Reaganism is especially stark. From the beginning, political competence is expressed by a single dominant insight: any gains made by a right-wing administration in the direction of fiscal responsibility is simply a savings account for the opposition. It can be predicated, with absolute confidence, that each step painfully taken away from public insolvency will be reversed, with opposite political sign, as soon as the Left gets its turn once again. Thus, the Reaganite stance that any intelligent conservative government is bound to the proclamation ‘deficits don’t matter’. It is only by keeping public finances hard up against the edge of bankruptcy that fiscal laxity can be prevented from reverting to its natural state, as a fund available for the promotion of leftward social acceleration. Private saving is profoundly compromised by democratic governance. Public saving — or even moderated indebtedness — is simply impossible.

Taken from here.

The red pill on politics is recognising the ratchet that is the democratic political process. In this case, what happens is that in a truly parasitic way, the left in Australia uses the surpluses of the right against them to shore up the pork. Then, they pass the mess onto the right again just in time to build up a new pork fund for the left to then distribute as the "nice guys". Don't mistake this for me being pro-centre right though. They're a bunch of useful idiots, enablers and downright masochists.