Kshartle wrote:
I don't blame people for taking a check offered to them. This is a straw man argument. When you say "We could be even more redistributive and it wouldn't change a single thing other than be more a lot more humane." do you mean the government could send out larger checks to more people? You don't think that would decrease employment, productivity and the economy? It would be stealing from producers to reward non-producers. Of course it would make things worse. How is it humane to rob someone, keep half then hand the other half to some stranger to buy their vote?
We live in a statist reality and have been since Lincoln. Everything is theft by a thousand cuts. A moral argument about that is not going to win the day when the bigger moral and immediate issue is that people are struggling for jobs, healthcare and retirement. You have to do triage first before you can first reform the patient! But no, I don't think more transfer payments alone are going to fundamentally change people's confidence. Government is simply terrible at improving productivity. But the free market is no saint either. Greed is the worst form of moral imperative ever devised, except for all the others.
How can you say there is no effect, the effects are all around us. Have you noticed who the president is? How about the record number of people on welfare, food stamps, disability and unemployment. Might those government wealth redistribution programs be contributing to the lowest labor participation rate in over 3 decades? Might that have something to do with the sluggish economy where "confidence" as you say is low?
Again, symptoms not causes. And these transfer payments amount to a pittance. Food stamps average $150 per month and you must be under the poverty level with no assets beyond a house, car, furniture, etc.. And I'd be a little more careful about lumping disability in with welfare. Like SS, it is earnings-based from employment, not welfare. Entitlement is about fairness, welfare is about poverty. I agree that unemployment (which is a pseudo-entitlement) is a disgrace because it is too little money disconnected from earnings power at the same time it doesn't involve mandatory job retraining. You merely have to demonstrate you're "looking for work" by cutting out classified ads. Hysterical. In that case, then yeah it probably deserves to be only $900 a week, but again people are struggling, though probably not in the same league as the impoverished.
I'm a strong advocate of doing away with all welfare and entitlements and replacing it with a basic Citizen's Dividend of $2500 a month or whatever would get all levels of government out of the whole meddling business. Good luck, Switzerland!
To the second point you are saying hyperinflation can't occur until there is an economic recovery? Hyperinflation does not occur in strong economies it occurs in weak ones. If the fed prints zillions of dollars to permit government spending of course we'll have hyperinflation. Who would hold onto dollars If they are printing zillions per year? Interest rates would have to be in the ummmm.......bazillions?
Hyperinflation can only occur if a country's productive capacity is so decimated that there's no effective free market anymore. A "weak economy" is not severe enough. And it never happens to the world's core economy anyway, only tertiary economies because capital flight seeks safety in the core. It may be a little different in these modern timees with "major world currencies" compared to history, so there's more options but the USA is still the world's core economy and still #1. That's confidence.
Incidentally I've always said I don't expect hyperinflation, I expect this to all end in deflation eventually. For some reason when I say I expect the fed to print trillions more and gold to surge past the 2011 high the retort is always that I'm predicting hyperinflation. That straw man argument is constantly thrown out here. If someone says they expect increasing inflation and rise in the price of gold and other things at an increasing rate the hyper-inflation staw man is brought out to be knocked down as if it's a valid response. It's like someone arguing against welfare and the response is "ohhh so you advocate the poor starving to death?"
Well, a deflationary scenario isn't bullish for gold, only cash, so I don't see how you can be a gold bug doom porner from that perspective. Nor do I see cash of the world's core economy hyperinflating into worthlessness short of a World War III or extraterrestrial invasion. So here's your chance to clear it up, what exactly are you forecasting?
