There’s No Pain-Free Cure for Recession

Peter Schiff wrote a lucid article on the problems of government economic intervention, particularly in times of a recession, in the Wall Street Journal that Ben pointed me to recently. I’m a big fan of Schiff; he’s an Austrian economist and a stellar communicator. An exerpt is below and the full article can be found at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123033898448336541.html

schiff

“But it is axiomatic in Keynesianism that national governments can create and sustain economic activity by injecting printed money into the financial system. In their view, absent the stimuli of the New Deal and World War II, the Depression would never have ended.

On a gut level, we have a hard time with this concept. There is a vague sense of smoke and mirrors, of something being magically created out of nothing. But economics, we are told, is complicated.

It would be irresponsible in the extreme for an individual to forestall a personal recession by taking out newer, bigger loans when the old loans can’t be repaid. However, this is precisely what we are planning on a national level.

I believe these ideas hold sway largely because they promise happy, pain-free solutions. They are the economic equivalent of miracle weight-loss programs that require no dieting or exercise. The theories permit economists to claim mystic wisdom, governments to pretend that they have the power to dispel hardship with the whir of a printing press, and voters to believe that they can have recovery without sacrifice.”

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