Friday, August 21, 2009

"Progressives" can't deal with real science


I continue to be amazed at how quick "progressives" are to believe in the faux science of global warming yet seem to have no grasp of real science like the LAW of supply and demand.

In addition, there is more than overwhelming evidence that socialism doesn't work in so many ways. Take the socialist paradise of California. Does it appear that oasis of progressive thinking is working?

The WSJ has an article noting the more socialized the economy, the more difficulty they are having in this recession..........

Proponents of Big Government can't say we avoided the next Great Depression due to hypothetical stimulus money that is mostly unspent. So they argue it's more important that the federal government merely continued spending and didn't "slash" spending as in the early 1930s. But the federal government didn't slash spending in the early '30s. Federal spending rose by 6.2% in 1930, 7.7% in 1931 and 30.2% in 1932. Since prices were falling, real increases in federal spending were huge during the Hoover years.

President Obama clearly believes Big Government is the antidote to this and perhaps all recessions. At his first news conference in February, the president said, "The federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life." Yet that raises a key question: If the U.S. economy could not recover without a big "jolt" of deficit spending, then how did the economy recover from recessions in the distant past, when the federal government was very small?

A 1999 study in The Journal of Economic Perspectives by Christina Romer (now head of the Council of Economic Advisers) found that "real macroeconomic indicators have not become dramatically more stable between the pre-World War I and post-World War II eras, and recessions have become only slightly less severe." Ms. Romer also noted that "recessions have not become noticeably shorter" in the era of Big Government. In fact, she found the average length of recessions from 1887 to 1929 was 10.3 months. If the current recession ended in August, then the average postwar recession lasted one month longer—11.3 months. The longest recession from 1887 to 1929 lasted 16 months. But there have been three recessions since 1973 that lasted at least that long.


So once again I throw out the challenge to the "progressives" out there. If liberal policies are so great, why is Detroit such a shit hole?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The prototypical socialist basically believes that socialism works, and that the past 10,000 failures in 10,000 tries (they are batting a thousand) are a result of improper implementation of the philosophy. All that is needed, in their mind, is to follow their own flawless implemtation plan and utopia will result.

Never does it occur to these ivey league great Society geniouses that the philosophy itself might be flawed.

gordon gekko said...

Your point really emphasizes the arrogance of thought that most liberals have.