I also agree with others that without background knowledge of real economics, many of your words and most of your ally’s words were lost on the audience.

The last reason why I think you guys lost was that you were offering tough love. Your opponents offered a beautiful illusion to a group of people that are not ready for the truth. Treat liberals like folks that are not ready for AA.

For removing the minimum wage, I always try to give an example of an unpaid internship with a master of some skill where it is a priviledge just to work with the guy. Why would the master pay someone to slow him down, heck maybe you should be paying him and treating him as a teacher. Of course this is with the hopes of a better pay off down the road for the intern/student. The other side even admitted that missing a job would hurt your down stream results.

For taking money from the rich and the CBO numbers I usually win these debates by bringing up simple human nature instead of the numbers argument. Would a certain percentage of the population work a little less if taxes went up 6% on them? Of course the honest answer would be yes and that less taxes would result from this so the CBO numbers would automatically be wrong simply due to EXPECTED human nature, we are not robots.

The lady in red who asked what the fire truck solution was from your side of the debate, for someone that is about to run out of unemployement benefits, felt like her question was not answered. I would have said family, church and of course the last resort would be government BUT the following regulation changes would maximize the number of people getting jobs so there would be some pain but it would be far less than continuing down the path of limitless unemployement and it would begin to work instantly. It is also not the governments job to take care of people, that is your job and your community’s job. Expect hissing with that last little bit hehe.

I really enjoyed your side of the debate. The high point for the other side was to quibble over who came out with the 8% figure and what their title was at the time. I

I also agree with others that without background knowledge of real economics, many of your words and most of your ally’s words were lost on the audience.

The last reason why I think you guys lost was that you were offering tough love. Your opponents offered a beautiful illusion to a group of people that are not ready for the truth. Treat liberals like folks that are not ready for AA.

For removing the minimum wage, I always try to give an example of an unpaid internship with a master of some skill where it is a priviledge just to work with the guy. Why would the master pay someone to slow him down, heck maybe you should be paying him and treating him as a teacher. Of course this is with the hopes of a better pay off down the road for the intern/student. The other side even admitted that missing a job would hurt your down stream results.

For taking money from the rich and the CBO numbers I usually win these debates by bringing up simple human nature instead of the numbers argument. Would a certain percentage of the population work a little less if taxes went up 6% on them? Of course the honest answer would be yes and that less taxes would result from this so the CBO numbers would automatically be wrong simply due to EXPECTED human nature, we are not robots.

The lady in red who asked what the fire truck solution was from your side of the debate, for someone that is about to run out of unemployement benefits, felt like her question was not answered. I would have said family, church and of course the last resort would be government BUT the following regulation changes would maximize the number of people getting jobs so there would be some pain but it would be far less than continuing down the path of limitless unemployement and it would begin to work instantly. It is also not the governments job to take care of people, that is your job and your community’s job. Expect hissing with that last little bit hehe.

I really enjoyed your side of the debate. The high point for the other side was to quibble over who came out with the 8% figure and what their title was at the time. I

Keep up the good fight. You’re doing a great job. I can imagine that was hard to endure, but when I read the Slate article they audience member admitted as much that you won, he just didn’t like the answer so choose to believe the Keynesians:

“He even thought Mitchell and Epstein “presented a more comprehensive argument” than the other team. But it “was also the view from 30,000 feet, and less satisfying for an audience asking for a jobs solution right now.”

The point is that in Dan Mitchell’s video, he suggests that Keynesianism just takes money out of one pocket and puts it in another, to no net effect. But what if it takes it out of non-spenders’ pockets and puts it in spenders’ pockets?

That doesn’t make any sense to me. What is the benefit to the large businesses? Are they going to make interest on this borrowing? In theory, how is this different from issuing treasuries (which, presumably, businesses would buy with their cash) and lowering taxes (tax credits for everyone)?

Why involve the government at all? Let the large businesses loan their money to people who buy homes and cars. Simply lower tax, and you don’t even have to pass the money through a government bureaucracy.

It was an excellent debate, and I thought you and Richard Epstein won. But that is, I think, because we already share set of unspoken premises that were not shared with the majority of the audience. And that gap is why they were not convinced.

For example, your demonstration about redistribution makes sense to me. But to the audience, you left out some details. So, if you take the money from one half of the audience and give it to the other, sure, there isn’t more money. But the unspoken assumption of the audience is that the money is taken from people who aren’t spending it and being given to people who will spend it. That whole marginal propensity to save that another commenter referred to. And this, coupled with another assumption held by the audience that spending, rather than investment (savings) creates jobs, makes your exercise cute but unconvincing.

So I think those two need to be addressed better.

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

• Annual family income: $21,700.
• Money the family spent: $38,200.
• New debt on the the home equity line of credit: $16,500.
• Outstanding balance on the mortgage: $142,710.
• Total budget cuts: $385.

There appears to be no end in sight for the spending. The new stimulus is akin to our family borrowing another $5,000 and going to the casino to raise more money.

I don’t know which form the crisis will come in, just as I don’t know where the first bubble will form in a pot of water to which heat is applied. But the crisis will come, just as sure as the pot will boil. Free lunches and macroeconomic gimmicks that attempt to achieve prosperity by flattening the effort-reward curve are doomed to fail like attempts to circumvent the principle of conservation of energy – they only result in even higher levels of entropy – an irreversible process. Governments (i.e. the collective) are resorting to the very leveraging they so much derided the financial sector for, in order to further forestall the reality of decreasing incentives to produce and distort reality into another, even bigger bubble.

So when the crisis comes to America there will be panic. In that environment, the poor will acquiesce to VAT (or something like it) and the rich will get punitive taxes (what are they going to do anyway, they’re a minority).

As I said, I don’t know in which form the crisis will come, but my best guess is when borrowing costs for collective debt (i.e US bonds) start rising.

So the path to Francification is sealed. And for many people that has actually been THE dream: A slower French like decline growing at 1%, drowned in a world that is growing at 4-5%.

The few smart people in the BRIC countries must be watching in amusement and bewilderment the Western world commit suicide.

“Fear the Boom and Bust: A Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem”:

“Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round 2:”

Governments are always seeking new sources of revenue and new ways to spend money, often with no little desperation; yet economic science, for over a century, had sourly warned against inflation and deficit spending, even in times of recession.

Economists … were the grouches at the picnic, throwing a damper of gloom over attempts by governments to increase their spending. Now along came Keynes, with his modern “scientific” economics, saying that the old “classical” economists had it all wrong: that, on the contrary, it was the government’s moral and scientific duty to spend, spend, and spend; to incur deficit upon deficit, in order to save the economy from such vices as thrift and balanced budgets and unfettered capitalism; and to generate recovery from the depression. How welcome Keynesian economics was to the governments of the world!

In calling for job creation now, Keynesians ignore von Mises’s argument in The Clash of Group Interests that short-term intervention ultimately fails, that long-term planning is better and more prosperous in the long run.

Instead, their plan, as Bastiat criticised in The Law is to make sure they get their ‘fair’ share of the redistributionist bounty.

One wonders about the ultimate success of unseating President Obama and with what sort of incentives the Republican challenger must tempt the voters.