Jan

24

First, why are so many people unemployed? The answer is very simple.
Because there is no profitable work for them to do as present labor
rates. Thanks to previous meddles, the US economy focused itself on
building houses and importing geegaws from overseas for people who
couldn't afford to pay for them. This was a dead-end economic model. And
the end came in 2007. Now, the latest figures show an uptick in
manufacturing…which is clearly the direction to go. But it will take
years before the US economy has made the adjustment to a new, healthier
model…making and selling things at a profit.

In the meantime, unemployment levels will remain high.

But wait…there's more. For which the adjustment is taking place, US
authorities are trying to block it. How? By taking resources from the
new, unborn industries and using it to prop up the old, dying ones. Like
Wall Street, for example. The financial industry grew like Topsy in the
bubble years. It began to shrink in the crisis of '07-'09, but the feds
came in and pumped more than a trillion dollars into the financial
sector, producing record profits for the big banks, but depriving the
rest of the economy of much needed capital.

Not only that, the feds also take the pressure off labor to make
adjustments. Food stamps, minimum wages, unemployment compensation,
make-work, shovel-ready boondoggles - all these things cause workers to
think they can continue as before…that a "recovery" of the good ol'
days is just around the corner…and that they'll soon be earning as
much as they were in 2007. Maybe more!

Want to really fix the unemployment problem? Listen up. Eliminate all
bailouts, subsidies, giveaways and support systems - both to business
and to labor. Abolish all employment restrictions and employment
paperwork. All free labor - undocumented non-citizens - to compete
equally with native-born workers. Cut taxes to a flat 10% rate for
everyone. Abolish every government agency that begins with a letter of
the alphabet. Then abolish the rest of them.

We confidently guarantee that the nation would be back at full employment within 30 days.

Tyler McClellan comments:

 This whole argument is bullshit.

The productive industries are by their own choice and for their own
reasons net suppliers of capital to the rest of the economy. It's a
myth, complete myth that capital flows to where it is most profitable.
It flows from where it is most profitable to where it will be accepted.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

I wish I could agree with Craig, but he omits a significant handicap.
Because of the catastrophic decline in the productivity of American
elementary and secondary and college education, the skill sets of
workers under 30 are far, far lower than they were in 1945 - 1955. The
transcripts are immeasurably more impressive that they were for people
coming out of the military service and leaving college after the GI
bill. That Army confirms this sad fact in its recruiting statistics. The
handicaps for inductees in WW II were that some had had very little
formal education and were underweight from having struggled through the
Depression. The Army found that these could be remedied with "basic
training" in the 3 Rs (Reading, writing and arithmetic) - usually a 3-4
month course - and some decent chow.

The handicaps for recruits now are obesity and the creeping dumbs -
almost all the kids from the inner cities and slum suburbs are fat,
illiterate and without any learning skills. No entrepreneur in his or
her right mind is going to hire these kids, even if Craig's hallelujah
miracle of sane political economy suddenly appears. Full employment is a
long, long way off - as far away for this generation as it was for
people like my father-in-law in 1930. He had degrees in geology and
petroleum engineering from the Universities of Texas and Oklahoma, and
it took him half a decade to find steady work - initially as a
roughneck. These poor (in all senses of that word) kids don't stand a
chance.

Gary Rogan responds:

While I agree with all the recommendations, guaranteeing full
employment within 30 day while possible contradicts some fairly recent
Nobel prize work (of course the very fact that Krugman has one
invalidates it stature, but still it's something to consider).

The work of the winners,
Professor Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dale
T. Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher A. Pissarides of
the London School of Economics, is best known for its applications to
the job market.

The researchers spent decades trying to understand why it takes so long
for people to find jobs, even in good economic times, and why so many
people can be unemployed even when many jobs are available.

Traditional economics, after all, would predict that wages should simply
drop, helping the labor supply to meet labor demand automatically and
sweeping jobless workers into whatever positions were immediately open.

These researchers’ explanation addresses the complications that come
from searching for jobs and job candidates: it takes time for unemployed
workers to be matched with the proper opening, since people are not
identical, cookie-cutter units, and neither are jobs.

While all this may seem intuitive, in the 1970s it was considered quite
radical. The resulting insights about how search costs can affect
markets also helped revolutionize not only labor economics, but fields
like public finance and housing economics as well. The work is
especially relevant today, as policy makers try to understand and combat
the causes of stubbornly high unemployment in countries like the United
States.

Stefan Jovanovich responds:

The equilibrium assumption behind the Diamond, Mortensen, Pissarides
study is fascinating. Why should there be any necessary match between
ALL the skills being offered and ALL the skills being demanded? Prices
can adjust supply and demand where markets exists; they cannot produce
demand for skills that offer no profit to the buyer at any price. The
neo-Keynesian fallacy is that money dropped from helicopters will cause
private employers to find profits in having holes dug and then filled up
again; the original Keynesian fallacy was that the government can take
money from the incomes of people whose skills are marketable and give
the money to the hole diggers without reducing the amount of savings
available for investment.

Scott Brooks writes:

Capital doesn't flow where it will be accepted, it flows to where the government allows it to flow.

America is like a sick body riddled with metastasizing cancer. Nothing
works properly in a body that is fighting for it's life. Nothing "flows"
properly. The "Body America" is riddled with the cancer of statism. As a
result, the entire "financial organ" of the "Body America" isn't
working properly.

Mr. Albert comments:

The 'Greatest Generation' had an enormous advantage. After the war,
the US faced essentially no mercantile or manufacturing competition, and
thus dominated foreign markets at a time of enormous replacement need.

It was easy for the unskilled and unlearned to find work in that
environment. This advantage lasted essentially for the career length of
that generation. Fortunate circumstances coupled with the wealth
transfer of government borrowing and spending fuels the illusion that
somehow they had it right and the next three generations don't.

Craig Mee writes:

Thanks Stefan and co. It
seems he brings up many areas, but at the heart of it, is protection,
and political correctness and slowly slowly, and looking after the
flexions. When in fact a case of strong medicine is often needed, and a
swift kick up the butt. 

Stefan Jovanovich comments:

Tyler makes the conventional mistake of assuming capital and savings are
equivalents. People, by and large, have been remarkably canny about what
they do with their savings as long as their money is immunized from the
manipulations of the government and the better class of people
(academic joke). "Capital" - that Marxist construct now used by central
banks presiding over fiat monetary systems - will always want to snuggle
up to the Emperor and the Praetorian Guard and stay as far, far away
from the unruly uncertainties produced by the getting and spending of
the plebs in the marketplace and their insistence of being paid in
actual coin.

Gary Rogan comments:

While there is something to the paradox of thrift as a game-theory
type concept, the idea that the government can solve it through directed
spending is one of the more evil ideas that ever occurred in terms of
practical impact.

Tyler McClellan comments:

I feel very confident in saying you simply
don't understand the paradox. you have likely never read it, have no
idea (unlike stefan) that it arises from the identity of private sector
account that savings must be equal to investment but that our motivation
towards the one is the opposite and equal of the other. That they are
intermediated by the financial system under any circumstance just at a
level that is previously not computable because it would require knowing
what everyone's planned savings and investment were prior to some of
their income being destroyed by or added to based on others similar
calculations. In aggregate society cannot save by dissaving.

Oh yes it can via the production of indeterminant claims by the
government which is a result of excess private sector savings demand
over and above each individuals in aggregate investment demand (real
investment as a flow).

Now Stefan is learned enough to admit that he at least simply doesn't
believe in the identity, which I must admit is too difficult of a
concept for me to think about after years of trying to have kept at it.

Stefan Jovanovich responds:

Tyler and I have a quarrel over the nature of money, and his is most definitely the majority opinion. Mine is the quaint antiquarian notion that (almost) predates utility curves. You find the odd vestige of it (like a kind of monetary appendix) in the valuation of gold at the price set by President Roosevelt's order under the Trading with the Enemies Act (the loophole that allowed the provisions of the Federal Reserve Act to be superceded). This pricing of gold at a U.S. dollar figure other than the current market serves no evolutionary purpose in a world where Tyler's tautology is not only the economic rule but also the legal tender law.

But these odd remnants of a past economic world should serve as a reminder that the idea that a bank's reserve should be specie - a monetary thing tangibly powerful enough to stop even the most severe breaches of trust - was once common wisdom. It is no accident that the term "reserve" came from military doctrine; a reserve was supposed to be the troops strong and brave enough to held back from the front lines with the understanding that they would be sent forward when the frontline troops had been routed. We have nothing like that now. The Reserves of the Federal Reserve and every other central bank are to be found behind the curtains of the neo-Mussolini architecture (both inside and out) of their buildings where there lie printing presses (excuse me - computer keyboards - with linkages so vastly powerful that no skepticism about the ultimate exchangability of the bank's units of "capital' dare be whispered, even by the girl in the ruby slippers. Until now, that is.

Those odd people who insisted that the Federal Reserve Act itself affirm the exchangeability of U.S. Notes (what were to become our Federal Reserve Notes) into gold under the Constitutional standard thought Tyler's aggregations were dangerous because they established a full substitution between money and credit in the name of "capital". Most of the time this aggregation did no harm; but when people were tempted to borrow and spend (as they had in the American Civil War/War Between the States) without any regard to whether the borrowings could, in fact, be repaid in money as good as gold, the ability of the government to create savings by simply increasing paper bank reserves was a fatal temptation. As we have seen, that temptation has been impossible for modern governments to resist whether the war is one "to end all wars" or "against poverty".

Gary Rogan writes:

Whatever the nature of money is, sooner or later there is a war that interrupts even the most stable tax/spend regimes, and there is never enough political will/desire/ability to tax enough to support it. Or there is a "crisis" and the voters in the next election are always more important than the ones in the following one. So sooner or later the government will find a way to corrupt the monetary standard. It just gets irritating when someone like Bernanke is p***ing on everybody's shoes an telling them this is the rain that will finally end the drought.

 George Parkanyi writes:

And what government/country/civilization in the past hasn't done this? It's the nature of the beast. Different regimes will do it a different pace, but the long-term historical result will be the same. Read Machiavelli's "The Prince". This is an excellent treatise on how politics relates to human nature. You could always try working your way into office and try to change the government, or become some kind of guru and try to change human nature -good luck with either.

Stefan Jovanovich responds:

 No, George. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a satire. That is why the book was banned by the Pope aka the Medici's ally Julius II. Machiavelli was a republican - i.e. someone who thought tyrannies were bad because they were so ultimately stupid. Under the Florentine Republic Machiavelli was in charge of the militia and he insisted that only citizen-soldiers serve, breaking with the tradition of hiring foreign mercenaries. If you want to know what the man actually thought about "how politics relates to human nature", read Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli had no doubt that people can and do change the government and the world of political-economy they live in; it is the Princes who want us to think that history is a Hobbesian monotony.

 

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