It’s basic common sense. When you are low on cash, you don’t spend . . . you save. According to Keynesian economists, however, the way a government should handle a recession or depression is to start spending. The theory goes that government spending puts people to work, which gives them income, which gets spent, and the economic cycle gets moving again.

The problem is that Keynesian economics is as crazy as it sounds. On its face there’s a kind of a logic, but if you have even a simplistic understanding of how money works you know that it just doesn’t seem right. The reason is that the government, in order to pay for these initiatives, has to find money somewhere. It can just print it out of thin air, which leads to inflation and reduces the value of the money and further destabilizes the economy. It can also run up huge debts, which is better than fabricating money out of thin air but still leads to all kinds of long term problems. The debts have to be paid sooner or later.

Keynesian economics is a discredited theory, at least among economists who aren’t blinded by their own personal politics. It doesn’t work. It was attempted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) during the Great Depression and, despite the over-simplified story they tell us in grade school, those efforts prolonged and deepened the economic calamity we found ourselves in. It most certainly didn’t help things, and we’re still paying the debts we ran up with all of FDR’s ‘New Deal’ programs 70 years later.

Read more . . .

I’m heading out of town for the weekend, but I wanted to share an article from First Things before I leave. George Cardinal Pell writes about ‘intolerant tolerance‘, which is a subject I have found very interesting.

Many on the political left claim the mantle of ‘tolerance’ and predicate many of their political and moral stances upon being ‘tolerant’ of others. Gay rights and gay marriage issues are often couched in these terms, for example, and we right-wingers are oft’ labeled as being ‘intolerant’ because we have different opinions on this and other issues.

What is interesting though is that tolerance means accepting others opinions even if you disagree with them. I am ‘tolerant’ when I support and defend the rights of (as an example) anti-war protesters to march on Washington, even when I disagree with them. This, however, doesn’t go both ways these days. Left-wingers would be ‘tolerant’ to support and defend my rights to march for what I believe in too, but if I were to march against abortion or against the legalization of gay marriage I’d be labeled a misogynist, homophobic, hate-monger unworthy of speaking in the public square (and soon I might be subject to arrest for ‘hate speech’).

We must be tolerant of others’ Constitutionally protected liberty to live, speak, practice their religion, bear arms, and so on without fear of repercussion. If we, as a society, don’t protect these core, enumerated human rights, then we have truly lost the republic and our liberty.