Since I’ve written several times that the United States will face a fiscal crisis if entitlement programs aren’t reformed, you won’t be surprised to see that I repeat those points in this CNBC debate.
But I’m not happy with my performance.
Not because my leftist opponent grabbed more air time (mostly because the host started challenging him, which also happens periodically when I’m on Kudlow’s show), but because he gave me a giant opening to completely destroy his arguments and I failed to seize the opportunity.
He kept arguing that America is more dynamic and innovative than Europe, which generally is true, but then he argued that we should copy Europe’s fiscal policy by increasing the burden of government spending.
I think the points I made to wrap up the debate were fine, but I would be much happier with my performance if I had pointed out this huge hole in his position.
As shown in this amusing and clever poster, you don’t solve the problems created by government with more government.
[…] Here’s some of what I wrote two years ago, when asked whether I thought America could be saved from a Greek-style fiscal collapse. […]
[…] spread a message of doom and gloom about the ever-expanding welfare state and warn about the potential for European-style fiscal collapse, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve received several emails asking me variants of this […]
[…] spread a message of doom and gloom about the ever-expanding welfare state and warn about the potential for European-style fiscal collapse, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve received several emails asking me variants […]
[…] all the air time. And we both pointed out areas of disagreement. When I compare this debate to the one I posted last week, there’s no […]
America is more dynamic and innovative than Europe, but that is because in America the creative and innovative can keep a larger portion of their rewards – that is why they outcompete those of the French who still have some desire to be creative and innovative.
Therefore America’s creativity and innovation are the result of institutions, namely the traditional tendency of Americans to refrain from pitchfork democracy and, by extension, pitchfork economics. But that era is ending and a vicious cycle is irreversibly starting – as evidenced by Americans choosing Obama to correct Bush’s statist mistakes and American’s imminent decision to correct the decline path of HopNChange with even more HopNChange.. With America slowly reversing course in the balance between collectivism and individual freedom — while three billion competitors are finally awakening in the opposite direction — the margin of advantage that America enjoys is now too thin for Americans to keep commanding a six-fold standard of living advantage over the world average. And as is typical of such situations, a tipping point has now been crossed whereby the more voters lose their privileged average-American world status, the more HopNChange they will vote for.
America may still be more dynamic and innovative than Europe now, but under French incentives to produce, Americans will probably produce even less than the French themselves.
The only question remains whether America — now on its long slide towards Greece (the condition in which people who perceive redistribution as a net gain become an entrenched majority) — will somehow stabilize at the French plateau for a few years, or whether America falling from such a high place at precipitous speed will somehow blow past the French local minimum straight into Greece. I’m ambivalent in my prediction, but, for now, I tend to favor the former: Francification, a phase that will perhaps last a decade or so. Sanity will partially return in the next few years and Americans will be able to slow their precipitous decline into a slower but steadier French civilization decline.
But as you can see, as America has set its sails towards the French plateau, France, after a few decades of slow and steady collective, decline is finally and predictably falling off the other end into Hellenization (there is still a bit of German money to use up first).
Americans who manage to keep their heads above the delusion of HopNChange, plan accordingly : Hope that I’m wrong, or, set your sights and steer you children on becoming a true international citizens. The future belongs to them – mobile economic mercenaries who will migrate to whichever environment refrains from collectivizing the fruits of their labor. It would be very sad if, through Darwinian selection, these environments end up being dictatorships or semi-dictatorships (like Singapore) rather than democracies (like Switzerland). I cringe at the thought, but Western world voter lemmings and their latest infatuation with pitchfork economics does not bode well for the prosperity of western democracies.
There are two difficulties in discussing anything with a liberal/progressive.
(1) Their proposals are always generalities about what should happen, without any specifics which would guide exactly what to do. They offer campaign slogans, not direction.
For example,
We must concentrate on the economy and get it working again.
People need more money to spend.
We need to hire more government workers.
We can’t go back to the failed policies of the past.
If you say “These are generalities without specifics”, they reply: “You mean that you don’t support doing [the wishful result]? Are you in favor of failure, merely stepping aside and doing nothing?
(2) They confuse cause and effect. They say things like:
“Clinton had high tax rates, and the economy did very well.”
( Clinton lowered government spending under Republican pressure. )
“Bush lowered tax rates, causing our huge deficit problem. We would have collected much more money by now, if we had the previous, higher rates.”
( Tax collections went up dramatically under the lowered rates.)
The popular progressive economist Nouriel Rubini proposed this ridiculous method for increasing prosperity in debtor EU countries:
More vacation and leisure is a result of greater production and income, it does not cause greater production and income overall.
You might confront a statement like Rubini’s by saying one does not cause the other. The reply will be that hard statistics show that the two are strongly related economically. Do you routinely ignore what is revealed by statistics?
Saying that someone has confused cause and effect seems so fundamental and simple, that few people will believe the charge. It is too simple an error of which to accuse someone. Supposedly, the accusation must be an ideological talking point! The big lie defends itself in this way.
EasyOpinions.blogspot.com
This was a bit of an agony to watch since you never went in for the kill. You were talking past each other, you were on point with the entitlement problem, but he never engaged with you there. He was yammering on about “investments” in R & D. You should have nailed him there about WHO was doing the “investing”, public investing buys you Solendra, private gets you Apple.
Get the government back to its constitutional obligations, and slow down and eventually stop all these quality of life goodies.
The government is not, and will never be competent to run our lives.