House of Eratosthenes

Jobs are what matter. Product? Not so much. Thus, if the State of Illinois pays for signs with spelling errors, that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature! Workers and materials suppliers will be kept busy moving the location of the typo all around the sign. It’s all about jobs saved or created, man!
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Full circle, then: this humble sign in Illinois, far from a sign of stupidity, is a harbinger of winning the future, full employment, and portion controlled servings.

Yeah, Progress: yeah!

I wish Smitty’s humor tidbit was as big a waste of time as your average Huffington Post article or Daily Show segment, which is to say I wish it was an exercise in “wouldn’t it be funny if this thing happened, how about you go off and pretend like it really did, since if you part company with reality in that particular way it helps my agenda.” Otherwise known as I Can See Russia From My House! humor.

Sadly, though, he’s nailed it. Among the things that have people shouting and yelling and calling each other racists, is a debate about Keynesian economics — this thing we call an “economy,” do we owe it to the activity involved in the churning-around of this other thing we call “money”? Or is it necessary to the long-term well-being of this thing called the “economy” that something of practical use be created where it did not exist before? Is it some kind of heresy to believe in the creation of wealth?

It’s a good discussion to have, I think…although my mind happens to be pretty much made up on it.

Somehow, though, the people who disagree with me don’t feel particularly motivated to list their reasons for disagreeing with me. It’s much more common for them to call their detractors racist. That would be desperation if they were doing it as a ploy to get ahold of capital to try out their “economic activity without wealth” schemes…but that isn’t what is happening here. They got ahold of the capital just fine, then they spent it, then the plan didn’t work and then they called people racists for noticing it didn’t work.

I don’t know if/how this fits into your “architects vs. medicators” paradigm, but I think there are really only two ways of thinking about any large issue. You can either a) go out and look for facts, and then construct a hypothesis that might explain those facts, or b) you can get yourself a nice neat capital-T Theory that explains all possible facts, for all time, and then ride that sucker ’til it drops.

Since we live in a present-tense culture, and since the entirety of the media, academia, and the Democratic party (I repeat myself twice, of course) are dedicated to us remaining that way, it only makes sense that most people will do the easy thing and go with Theory. One could learn something about economics and monetary policy…. but that involves, like, math and logic and stuff. Much easier to just fall back on the notion of “stimulus,” which is perfect for the bong-addled brains of the Left — I give you some money, see, and then you spend it on something, which gives the guy you bought it from the money, and then he goes out and spends it on some other guy’s stuff… it’s just like passing the dootchie on the left-hand side, except now there’s, like, national health care. And stuff.
- Severian | 04/30/2011 @ 11:49
The Architects and Medicators paradigm is based on Hammurabi’s 229th law, the one that says if you build a house for a guy and he lives in it and the house falls apart and it kills him, you die. And if if it kills his family then your family dies (I think that’s covered under #230 or something).

So yeah it fits in, since it’s easy to say “this thing happens, see, then that thing and then that other thing blah blah blah.” But if you lull yourself into that, you can feel your brain flip around inside your skull, shifting a paradigm, when someone asks you to put up or shut up. Okay, we built this bridge the way you said it should work…now YOU go and walk on it.

Suddenly, you’ve got all these questions that — if your theory really is that well thought-out like you’ve been insisting it is — you shouldn’t be having.

For anyone watching the Atlas Shrugged movie, wondering why they rushed through all these scenes and then suddenly during the “John Galt Line” train ride they had time to stretch things out, wondering what that’s all about…it’s about that. The book does the same thing. Paragraph after paragraph of nobody talking. This is, I think, the point Ayn Rand was trying to make. If Dagny & Henry thought the way the looters & moochers thought, they would have been riding that maiden voyage to their deaths.
- mkfreeberg | 04/30/2011 @ 11:56
Maybe I’m trying to go in a slightly different direction, but as to the whole created wealth issue, I think it’s time for me to do a full post on the issue. It comes up from time to time in my neighborhood, as there are folks like me who are hunkering down to prepare for when TSHTF.

One of my like minded neighbors was trying to explain to someone who asked, why we are growing all this food, since he has plenty of money to buy all the food he wants. My neighbor couldn’t make him realize that when infrastructure begins to fail food will be in much shorter supply. The guy still thinks he has enough money to overcome that.

I’ve made the point that the time is coming when real wealth will only be measured in three things: food, water, and ammo. Even gold bullion will be meaningless. Abstract ideas and theories about economics will get chewed up and spit out in life and death lessons and any defense of Mr. Keynes’ ideas will probably be met with a knuckle sandwich.
- Moshe Ben-David | 04/30/2011 @ 13:38
[…] you think this post pure snark, check out the new line of street sign furniture.Update: linked at House of Eratosthenes.Category: Huffington PostComments JoeForget about the Huffington Post, progressive economics are […]
- Progressive Economics Fail At The Huffington Post : The Other McCain | 05/01/2011 @ 09:47

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Jobs Matter, Product Not So MuchSaturday, April 30th, 2011

Jobs Matter, Product Not So Much
Saturday, April 30th, 2011