Recently in Political Economy Category

A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of bankruptcy. Just when we thought that things in the old continent are as bad as it gets, it looks like they are about to get much worse. A few weeks ago, Greece practically defaulted on its debt; Several other European countries, including England, seemed to be heading in the same direction; and global investors were already losing faith in Europe's ability to recover. And now, a highly improbable event is threatening to exacerbate the situation.

The American media is in combative mood: A year and a half after Lehman's collapse, the pundits are finally waking up to the fact that China bears a significant share of the blame for the current financial crisis. And so, the Krugmans of this world are calling for the US government to 'punish' China through a variety of protectionist measures. 

'There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.'

The above quote from Ludwig von Mises's Human Action (1949) pretty much sums up where we are and where we're headed. There are two ways out of this mess: Allowing bad banks and bad companies to go bankrupt and take some pain in the short term; or bail them out through government "creation" of more money and cheap credit.  Looks like the world has opted for the second option. 

The latest financial crisis sparked public interest in economics and rekindled the debate concerning the proper role the dismal science should play in our lives: books by and about dead economists such as Keynes, Hayek, and Schumpeter are in high demand; economic blogs are more popular than ever; and the public is bombarded with introspective monologues by contemporary economists, all the way from Paul Krugman to John Chochrane. The latest contribution is a Wall Street Journal article by Prof. Russ Roberts. Unlike the opposing so-called scientific explanations for the crisis suggested by various economists, Roberts is questioning whether economic science is at all a science and suggests that more than anything, economics might be suffering from a crisis of identity. 

'The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.'

One of the most popular memes repeated by mainstream media since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year is the idea that China will manage to avoid the consequences of the economic downturn by shifting from an export-based economy to one based on local consumption. 

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past"

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some... As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauce the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

John Meynard Keynes wrote the above in 1919, in an essay about Inflation and Deflation. This is the same Keynes whose theoretical work and policy recommendations serve to justify current calls for increased government spending, money printing, and cheap credit. How does one reconcile his views on the peril of inflation with the solutions that are being proposed in his name? More on this next time. 

"In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil. "

Frederick Bastiat wrote the essay That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen in 1850. Today, as government is increasing its involvement in economic matters in unprecedented ways in order to "cure" the economy of its ails, it is important to remember that the goals of politicians - producing "measurable" and "communicable" results - are not necessarily the goals of society, especially when it comes to economic policy. The "recovery" we see in the newspapers today, is the foundation for the bigger, longer crisis of tomorrow. More on this soon. (I am traveling for the next couple of weeks)

"Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?...The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

Once upon a time, there was a little island in the middle of the ocean. The islanders harnessed the waves to power local industry. They got fish from the water to feed their families. They built their houses along the coast. 

'One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.'

The above was not written by the speaker of China's Communist Party; it was not published on China Daily or the Global Times. It was written by Thomas Friedman and appeared in yesterday's New York Times. Friedman is so in love with central-planning, that he is willing to give up his so-called liberal ideology and dismiss China's ruthless and violent control mechanism - which holds 20% of the world's population under considerable oppression - as a system with some "drawbacks", led by "enlightened people". 

Above is a chart of the US Monetary Base - the total amount of currency in circulation and in central bank deposits. As you can see, the total amount of money in the America more than doubled since the end of 2008. This was achieved through the actions of Federal Reserve, in the service of the US Government. It was done in order to create money to pay for the government's bailouts, stimulus package, and other obligations. 

Looks like the world is going crazy. Yesterday, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, gave a testimony to the US Senate panel on Fed policy. 

I often write about the importance of free markets and the dangers of big government. There seems to be a lot of confusion these days about the meaning of those two concepts, especially when seen through the prism of traditional political left/right divisions.

Yesterday, a friend of mine pointed out that the current crisis was created under George W. Bush. If free markets and small government are really the solution, how come a "right-wing" president who "reduced taxes" brought us into this mess?

That's a great question, and president Bush is a perfect example of all the misconceptions people have about economic policy and the right-left division in US politics. How so? Let's look at the numbers.

Bush may have reduced (some) taxes, but federal spending during his two terms went up 19.7% and 25.3% respectively, not including defense spending. If you include spending on security and other adventures, the growth is almost 50%.

"Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion....To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression."

Karl Marx once wrote that every historical occurnce happens twice: first as a tragedy, second as a farce. Above is an excerpt from an essay published by F.A. Hayek in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. It is based on an essay he published in German in 1928. Not much has changed.