The failing of free market economics is that
it does not differentiate between beneficial production that helps society flourish and unnecessary growth of production of useless polluting products that end up a gross negative in terms of our environment. A dollar is a dollar perhaps, but some dollars buy things that are good for us and some buy things that ultimately make us sick, are unsafe, and inefficient regardless of how cheap the item may be, some production is a gross negative for society and skews free market values toward things like warfare, hoola hoops, strip mining, and sky scrapers. Just think about what I am saying here. GNP can be good or it can be gross national pollution.
All free market calculations under classic economic theory lack a moral or social responsibility assessment. Economics is a subsystem of nature and not the other way around. To regard the world as simply one big supply system that gives her raw materials to us at no cost it to engage in a crazy half cocked notion that man rules the planet and there are no physical laws he cannot violate at will if he is clever enough. Also, if you are in the investment class, there should be no sector of the planet that cannot be turned into a profit center. This free market bullshit has been repeated and repeated over and over again and it is just plain short on REALITY.
The biggest problem with capitalism is that it's so successful. It's given us time and resources to worry about these problems where we never did before. It's hard to say Columbus cared much about other people if we go by the story that he intentionally used small pox to try and kill off the native population.
It is the evolved mixed mode modern economy, the combination of capitalism and the government, that has been so successful. You and the other supply siders are telling us that we will be even more successful that the economy that produced all of this success if we change to more of a free market by getting the government out of the economy.
And yet when we do try to remove the government from the economy, through deregulation, and it causes massive problems like the savings and loan fiasco or the Great Recession all that we get from you are weak arguments that the problems were caused by the government again, that there was no way that removing regulations or failure to enforce the regulations could possibly cause the exact same problems that caused the regulations to be written in the first place.
When we enact the fiscal policies that you and the supply siders say will boost business investment and improve economic growth and after thirty five years they fail to do either you blame it on unknown factors in the economy and you blame the messenger, the measurements of the economy, even though thirty five years ago the case for supply side economic policies was based on those measurements without question.
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The GOP after winning the house, tried to mandate the CBO use different measurements in an attempt to get several results allowing them to pick and choose results to avoid the problem of well developed tools that gave them answers they did not want to see.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/b...alculating-economic-impact-of-bills.html?_r=0
Both sides have played that game. If one party wants to say that unicorns will come about from their legislation, then CBO has to score it that way. CBO is just a guess.
Do you have any examples of the other party doing the same thing or are you going to leave it at unicorns?
It is more than one instance of the Republicans interfering in research that are contrary to their delusions. Just recently we learned that the Republicans ordered the CDC and the NIH to stop researching the impacts of our ever loosening gun laws.
After 2009 the Republicans ordered the IRS to stop calculating the effective corporate income tax rate, which the IRS reported to be only 12%, even though the normal tax rate was 35%.
The Republican house held hearings on the supposed overstatement of inflation by the cost of living index, the CPI. The House of Representatives finally wrote the instructions in law that the BLS should reduce the index by 1% because the hearings had determined that the BLS calculations overstated consumer cost of living by 1%. Largely by not calling any witnesses who hadn't already announced that they too had the feeling that the CPI overstated the cost of living by at least 1%.
Once again, it is not a question of accuracy, only of precision. It wouldn't matter if the BLS calculation overstated the costs of living by 1% because we are only interested in the year to year change in the costs of living.
If the CBO and their economics is just a guess what economics are you depending on to make your recommendations to increase income inequality even more and to deregulate the economy? Isn't just a guess on your part? Or rather a faith in the possible existence of the free market?
It is unnerving that you haven't thought more critically through the arguments that you present here.
