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Now. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not from the United States. I’m an economist. I’m not a sociologist - or, whoever those guys are who should be studying when a nation hates itself (whatever that really means) - but I really feel this whole “stimulus” garbage, and, to generalize, the entire American attitude as it has morphed over the last decade or more, is misrepresentative of what the United States stands for.

Don’t get me wrong - you have some traditional (or perhaps idealized?) Americanized voices with respect to those seen in mostly involved in the libertarian movement: Ron Paul, Penn Gillette (yeah, the loud-mouth from the Penn and Teller duo) and the CATO and Mises Institutes. In fact, what we call the ‘libertarian’ movement is rather new - not something traditional at all - but this is a trick, it’s only ‘new’ because it never needed to exist before, there was no general social movement towards this metrosexualized, European-style dependent-on-the-government whining.

I have respect for Europe. The whole of it. It is just not an economically sound model. European countries are notorious for their socialist-leaning movements - from things like ‘better’ unemployment packages (see: higher unemployment) and higher minimum wages (see: higher unemployment) to the specifics, such as an establishment that supports anti-businesslike behavior¹ and the health care system (which, I hear Obama wants to adopt something similar to² ) that is dependent on a tax structure which is neither fair nor reasonable, and likely hinders development (economically) to the point where we’d all be driving flying cars and able to have personal robot-doctors by now if the government wasn’t involved.

But, this isn’t about Europe.

What this is about, is this crazy idea to spend $900 billion (okay, $780 billion) on something that the President has to sell to the public through careful politicking, panic incitement and this weird “quoting experts” stuff. The economists I talk to - and there’s quite a number of them - all have Ph.D’s and overwhelmingly think that inflation is likely to cause a bigger mess from such a stimulus, but, they all believe that the mess will “sort itself out.” I’m starting to feel like there’s incentive for Obama’s economists (or, should I just say “great minds,” he never really tells us who comes up with this stuff) to like big spending - perhaps it conditions the public in to accepting more spending, or perhaps they just happen to work with / have personal interests’ in the industries which will be positively effected by such a stimulus.

But you can’t give a man a dollar without taking it from someone else.

Even ‘printed’ or ‘injected’ money has a cost - a huge cost - eventually that debt has to be paid back, and in the interim, it’s implicitly paid back in the rate of inflation as the money spreads around the economy. Or even as the expectation of the money spreads around the economy. The value of money is only the value of the goods it chases - if there’s more money and the same amount of goods, the money is just worth less. The real problem with this ‘inflation tax’ is that it misappropriates money; those who had a lot before (or, more so, carried high real money balances) are negatively slammed by this tax as their money buys less and less - it then gets put where-ever it’s going, investment projects, the automotive industry, wars (though, clearly not this time - at least not yet). This kind of whiny protectionism and more so, absolutely ridiculous misappropriation of money is something that the American people aren’t - or at least, weren’t.

I understand that the failure of Bush’s presidency left 2/3 of the mostly unengaged American populace unhappy with the way so-called “Republican” policies (which is nothing more than big-business and big-spending pandering itself) left the country in even bigger shambles, more of a public perception crisis, and a fairly un-American standing overall; but the response to big-spending idiocy isn’t to do everything your nation stood against.

The Founding Fathers - a favorite topic of Libertarians (surprisingly) world wide - would be hugely unimpressed with the way this statist government has grown. And, the American people, if they were anything like they were 30 years ago - or even before that - would be too. Certainly progression is about not being stuck in the past, but it’s also about gripping something with some solidarity - not this Keynesian-Marxist mega-cross protectionist ‘equality is about stealing from some’ attitude.

1. I know the reference there is going to be attacked in the comments on this piece - my response, ahead of time, is that the United States has historically, like most countries, enforced monopolistic practices laws, etc., but never to the ridiculous extent seen in Europe. Personally, I don’t believe monopolies, at least, outside of the ’sticky’ monopoly (which, everything truly is) such as utility companies (sticky to the point you have to move to change providers), really exist. [↩]
2. This drives me around the bend too, people cite U.N. and other statistics saying that the U.S. has a horrible health care system, or that [insert socialist system] is a better one - but these are always bogus studies, relying on ‘access’ or ‘cost-to-individual’ as the metric. This is garbage. Now, I saw Sicko too, and the French system sure did seem quite functional - and that’s fine - my uneconomic rebuttal to that is simply that I have a moral issue with government mandated health care. In a situation where the government enforces a monopoly, you have no choices; and when they implement a ‘pay-for-services’ health care system like in Canada, it becomes impossible to see a doctor that doesn’t want to push you out the door within 5 minutes. In a situation where the government ’shares’ the market with private companies, you get a dichotomy that wouldn’t exist in a natural market - ‘good’ doctors work for the private market, and the public market only gets the C-rate doctors. [↩]

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