Reminds me of this article here:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/i-warned-of-crisis-ten-years-ago-then-did-absolutely-nothing-about-it,-says-brown-200901271536/

“I (Gordon Brown) was watching that new Batman film the other night and there’s a bit where Michael Caine – he plays the butler – says that ‘some men aren’t looking for anything logical, some men just want to watch the world burn’. That’s me, that is.”

Let’s be honest. Our nation is ruled by liars, thieves, and murderers. Keynesian economics is nothing more than stealing. The wars to defend our country are mass murder for profit and power. The billowing words of hope and placation are calculated lies. To discuss the ruling class in any other terms is to delude ourselves.

The only policy of the aristocracy is to loot and pillage. There is no economic or social theory behind it, and it is vain to look for one or pretend that we or they believe in one. The nation is on the verge of collapse because the parasites can do nothing more than suck blood and spread disease. They are incapable of even a symbiotic status quo.

Why is the this nation and every other nation in such dire circumstances? Because ordinary people have listened to the siren song of democratic robbery and bought into the strategy of take what you didn’t earn for yourself. By and large we are a society of rationalizing and nationalizing thieves.

Thieves care nothing about the future and therefore have no future. When a large enough percentage of civilization lives by stealing from their neighbors, the civilization collapses. We are not facing an economic problem, we are facing a catastrophe of civilization.

Like I said at the beginning, we are ruled by liars, thieves, and murderers. When there is nothing left to steal, they aren’t going to get productive jobs–they will resort to killing to expropriate what little there is left. That is how authoritarian regimes respond to their failures.

Incentives are insidious things – they don’t just rule well-intentioned acts badly intentioned. They don’t even make the well-intentioned acts less-well-intentioned. They just COEXIST and blend ONLY in deflecting what actors do.

On this and related sites, I find MUCH too much hand-wringing about the “ignorance” of governmental actors. I don’t deny the ignorance, but “pure” ignorance has an innocent sound about it that this article (and book?) tend to offset – the “ignorance” of governmental actors (bureaucrats and elected officials) is WILLFUL. Even if the actors KNEW the things known and agreed to on this site, they STILL would do no differently from what they do, because it benefits them. Readers of this site might do no differently in their place (this includes me) – it isn’t WORTH their while to know or care about what we know to be “right” because acting in accordance with it would harm them.

This article, and perhaps book, engage in productive exaggeration. Whether the intentions of the actors are as evil as depicted or not, the OUTCOMES of their actions are exactly as though they were, indeed, evil.

And that is an absolutely essential truth for all to understand.

Paul Cleveland got it completly wrong.
The people who have practically destroyed our country for the last eight years are the Bush team and their supporters.
Obama is finally bringing some sound policy to the United States economy. Our economy was fast going to be on the path of becoming a third world country with fraud, corruption and out of control markets.

The reference of “The Dark Knight” actually refers to Batman, not the joker. At the very end of the movie, Comission Gordon explains to his son that Batman is Gotham’s “Dark Knight.”

“Obama is finally bringing some sound policy to the United States economy. Our economy was fast going to be on the path of becoming a third world country with fraud, corruption and out of control markets.”

Laughable. At best.

How does doing more of what Bush did, and doubling-down on his mistakes equate to ‘sound policy’? How does George W. Obama’s new mistakes of nationalization of major sectors of the economy, cap and trade BS, promotion of trade unions by the banishing of secret ballot, and federalization of education with universal access to college equate to ‘sound policy’?

Exactly to what ‘sound policy’ are you referring?

raoul oreskovic: If you really believe that, you have a LOT of reading to do before anyone here is going to take you seriously. And I’ve never seen anyone here say that Bush is innocent, so don’t get that idea either.

See the mises.org store for some good starter books–really. Start with Meltdown by Tom Woods if you want something about the recent “meltdown”. (Not the other “meltdown” by that hack what’s her name, which is rated about 2 stars on Amazon. Get the Tom Woods book, the 5 star book on the NYT bestseller list.)

I agree with Paul A. Cleveland and I like his analogies. We are on a very dangerous path. Because of the wrong lessons very superficially learned from the Great Depression, our FED and Treasury are putting gasoline on this fire.

i have another analogy to offer. Why not look at the Economy as an organism or body — perhaps something like Mary Shelley’s Monster in her novel Frankenstein? In Shelley’s novel the doctor’s name was Frankenstein and the monster was just that, the Monster — only later in Hollywood movies did the Monster get the name Frankenstein.

The analogy that Economists and others often use to justify ‘stimulating’ the economy is that the Economy is a Monster. We have to do something to bring this torpid Monster back to life. We have to increase so-called Aggregate Demand. The question is — are we as smart as the original Dr. Frankenstein? And apparently, even he was not, in the end, all that smart.

Current Aggregate Demand reflects the collective free choice of billions of people to consume at their own desired level. This level of demand is no longer considered to be adequate in the eyes of the overseers of our Economy. This demand is seen to be collapsing, stepwise, and each such collapse seems to bring only more collapse.

So like to some giant Frankenstein, the electrodes must be attached, the current applied and the process of collapse halted.

We are told that we have to pump in newly-printed money from Central Banks. Likewise our doctors of the Economy try to convince us that we have to force-feed loans taken from the appropriated ‘donations’ of long-suffering taxpayers into the Monster. In other words, our governments will spend our money for us. Our individual current propensity is to save ‘too much’ of our money. The government will artificially create the so-called DEFICIENT Aggregate Demand.

Will the Economy-as-Monster thus get sustenance and life-giving energy? Will the Monster otherwise die? Can this work? Is it the best prescription? Is the diagnosis correct? Is the prognosis correct? And what exactly is the real lethargy-causing disease in the Monster?

Alternatively, is it possible that this new ‘lethargic’ state is the new normal, the new stasis, for our Economy-as-Monster?

Or is the more correct analogy provided by the Economy-as-Junkie who needs just last one fix to get through one more day? And can this last fix possibly kill the Junkie?

Can the economy revive just from the stimulus and from new debt created on the backs of taxpayers? Can the resulting temporary high, or new economic growth, really be life-giving and self-sustaining to the Monster?

Rush Limbaugh is wrong to say that we should hope current revival efforts fail because they are not constitutional. There is a lot that is not constitutional including our paper money and the entire Federal Reserve System. We should pray that such efforts do not fail because we may not have that many more chances. Indeed, such other solutions which might work today may not even work later if the patient is in a different more critical condition as a result of our current missteps.

As a result of his eagerness to avoid Socialization and Success, Mr. Limbaugh may end up with Socialization AND Failure — which some would say is redundant.

But Mr. Limbaugh may be right in another respect — this approach might not work at all. It is true that it has never really worked all that well in the past, when the Monster has been on his knees in such similar morbid condition.

In fact our solution to bring the Monster back to life may be its and our own destruction. It is not without huge risk. It may not be worth the odds. We are playing at being God.

Adam Smith wrote of the Invisible Hand in our Economy. But our authorities apparently have it from some learned higher authority of dubious pedigree that they can knowledgeably operate the Invisible Hand. That money itself can always and everywhere fix things.

This is a bizarre view. It is not based on anything much more than vain hope. When the Hand is moved by the governments of the world, it cannot reflect what that Hand is supposed to be left Free to do — reflect the collective intent of all of us whether we are producers or consumers.

In trying to ‘resurrect’ the Economy we have many challenges. One of the first questions we should answer is whether or not the Economy is really sick. Or has the Economy reached a level that is actually more ‘normal’ than what it was operating at in the last few decades?

If it was the prior level that was artificially-maintained at some unsustainable level, then it hardly makes sense to get ‘back’ to that level, at least in the immediate future. In fact it may completely unrealistic.

It is my supposition that this was in fact the case — that is to say, something like the Great Depression sometimes happens because we manage to ‘goose’ the economy to a level of output that is unrealistic for contemporary circumstances.

If this is true, then even while the ‘correction’ can indeed overshoot on the downturn, it nevertheless indicates that the correct level is not what it was say 3 years ago during the housing boom. Those days are gone and will not come back no matter what ‘juice’ we feed to our Economy, our Monster.

One of the problems with operating Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand ‘manually’ is that we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t have a manual to follow. We don’t know how to operate the Ghost in the Machine. So most likely the machine is best left alone to run itself. We can do a lot of damage because we don’t know what we are doing.

First we don’t know what part of the body is ill. Is the whole ill? Or is the illness more localized? Do the parts that are ill cause general lethargy in the whole? Or is it something in the whole that is causing various parts to fail?

Is the problem in the mind or in nervous system? Is there information that is not getting from one part to the other?

Even if we have some idea of the objectives (like getting rid of the lethargy) we don’t know if this addresses the underlying pathology.

So even if we knew what our specific objectives were in terms of which specific organ to reactivate, we have no idea what it would take to reactivate that part.

If the auto industry is wounded, do we fix that? What’s the point, if we keep the manufacturing of automobiles ‘healthy’ while the rest of the body (society) has diminished use for the autos built for a long time thereafter?

This is analogous to fixing our Monster’s kidney function while the rest of the body is undergoing multiple organ failure. But the harm done is worse that this. This ‘fixing’ is drawing resources DIRECTLY from the rest of the failing body. There is no ‘outside’ in this analogy as there is for a real patient in a hospital setting.

So force-feeding the system (from WITHIN the system) with more credit may not help. It may be counterproductive.

The system may not be able to usefully use the shifted resources.

Such transferred resources in any case are likely to be misdirected by us, even if they could help.

There is a constraint which all finite living systems (including both human and natural Economies) are bound by at any given time. This is that there is a maximum amount of life-giving energy and thus life-giving order that can be drawn upon from the immediate surroundings.

When debt has been used to over-draw on that life-giving source, that source needs time to replenish itself. This seems illogical. It looks to us as observers that there is no reason for any change in our economic growth rate. We think that the account has not been overdrawn. Yet it has.

Why it seems illogical is that we simply cannot easily recognize that the recent period was in any way exceptionally hyperactive.

But what we did was employ capital in ill-considered ways. There is little payoff (as the Austrian School of Economics points out) from badly invested capital.

There is a concept in physics called Entropy. Essentially this is a measure of disorder. With each passing day, with each passing ‘bad’ investment made, more Entropy was created within the Economy.

That disorder is now manifesting itself. It can be considered to be negative capital.

It was as though our Monster’s body sent huge internal resources to one or two parts of its body at the cost of the other organs that were drawn down. Say the liver got bigger and bigger and the rest of the organs and blood and nervous system had to supply the energy and calories to build that liver up.

In a biological sense our Monster’s body had poor information and acted on that information.

When we cut ourselves, our biological system sends just the right resources to the cut to help the healing. But when our nervous system is broken, our body cannot send the appropriate resources — it may send none, or wastefully, send too many resources.

That is what happened to our money system, which we could consider to be the nervous system of our Economy. Our money system was so skewed with misinformation (cheap credit) that it deployed scarce resources willy-nilly to very wasteful endeavors.

Our Economy has to now redeploy its resources. It needs time to reorder itself. It needs to heal.

One of the bad effects about this wasteful deployment is that now, even good organs will fail due to the earlier over-pandering to the liver.

In various parts of the world we have previously-viable factories, car companies, career choices, shipping companies, ships, railroads, mines, ethanol refineries, roads, bridges, employment levels, and so on, including social units like families, all showing signs that they are failing. The nervous and life-giving connections are failing. This is something like a cascade of organ failures.

We use other terms for this like Credit Contraction. But the effect is the same — many of the good go down with the bad. This was unnecessary. And so-called recovery is not likely to be a two-year event. As mentioned earlier, the new “new” may be what we have arrived at today.

Looking at a depression as something that is unusual or to be recovered from may be the wrong way to look at this situation. It may be a new permanent status quo.

Of course we will get back to the prior levels at some point. But we may have to accept that the capital so wastefully employed is gone for good.

When you have a nervous system (money system) that is so broken — which I maintain it was over the last decade — then it naturally leads to that wasteful deployment. That badly deployed capital (or negative, life-wasting, Entropy) is gone forever. It is blood that has been constituted into a bigger liver, most of which cannot be redeployed usefully. It is capital that has been blown away in the wind.

So loans that are bad will mostly not be paid back.

Toxic assets are mostly not going back to their earlier value in real terms.

When we now continue on the path of trying to ‘juice’ our Economy mostly in wrong ways (since I maintain we cannot consciously identify the good ways) we will only create more bad investments and destroy more capital. This capital is precious. Do we really want to blow more of it away?

It’s like we are outside our own body trying to consciously tell it where to send its little white blood cells to heal our cuts. That cannot be done from outside. Of course the true analogy is that we are individually part of that Economic body. But no little cell in the body can direct the entire organism. This is something that is done in the collective, largely autonomically, in response to stimuli within the body. If we try to override those nervous system signals we are threatening to prolong the healing process.

Even if we don’t entirely override the signals that should be directing the recovery, we are causing them to misfire and some portion of the Economy will wastefully send resources in sub-optimal directions — these need not be completely wasteful, but they most certainly are suboptimal.

It’s a little like building a road that you will need one day, but not today. But you DO need a bridge first and if you build the road first, your bridge has to wait. This is what is considered to be sub-optimal. The bridge has to wait, and those earlier-needed factors of production that depend on that bridge will also have to wait. Also if the road gets built too soon, it will start to wear out before it is ready to be productively used. Then we will later have to rebuild the road anyway.

It’s a little like giving too much sugar if the body needs just a little. Then we have to give insulin because we had given too much sugar. We don’t have the knowledge and the body knows much better how to self-regulate. The shortage or surplus of insulin in the Economy can cause lethargy or even a coma.

The system optimizes the path to growth and recovery — we are just meddling. It will use the resources available much more judiciously than any government agency can. In the first place it is more intelligent and I don’t mean that disparagingly — I mean that when you have millions of consumers and producers making those decisions you are reflecting where the Economy wants to go. The Economy in its totality IS those constituent parts — so how could we expect other intelligences to better perform the recovery task?

Our Economic doctors like to suggest that our Economic body is under-deploying some of its potential resources. That appears to be logical by observation.

But to wastefully deploy those apparently ‘idle’ resources — rather than having them be called upon in proper sequence by the Invisible Hand as part of the normal healing process — is also not only wrong and misguided, but IMHO is criminally irresponsible.

I think an actual Joker as president would be the best thing to ever happen to the United States.

I mean come on, the guy’s a committed anarcho-capitalist!

Also it saddens me how the quality of the updates has gone down lately. Where there was once sound economic analysis, there’s now ideological puling and self promotion. There are still good articles from time to time, but most Mises readers and supporters don’t need to be told that the current ruling party’s policies are bad. Although I did find Paul Cleveland’s article to be entertaining, that’s not the type of content I expect to read while browsing this site. This kind of stuff doesn’t belong here, leave it to LewRockwell.com or some other libertarian blog.

Oh, and you all should go a little easier on the author. Everyone strikes out once in awhile, so maybe this is one of those times. He’s not the enemy, so we should keep the criticism constructive…

But I would agree that Obama is more of a Hancock type of superhero, not mean on purpose, just powerful and bumbling. (And more friendly.)

I didn’t mind this article all that much, but maybe that’s because I took it for what it was: a book plug.

The Fox News point was totally off base.

I have noticed a slight decline in the quality of articles, but some of the comments here take it a little too far.

~~~~Verloc wrote:

Oh dear, more wingnut bait. You’ll have Obama eating live babies next.~~~~

He already supports live birth “abortions” (i.e. murder of U.S. born citizens) by his own admission. We don’t have to have to say a thing.