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Tuesday, May 18 2010 - 05:06 PM
Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics
“Many Americans watch with alarm as their government attempts to lurch from servant to master of its citizenry. Keynesian economic theory legitimizes that control and instructs the adherent that the ruling elites can best determine the economic fate of millions.
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the influential British economist who asserted that enlightened government control of economic policy could guarantee national economic health, prosperity, and growth by escaping the turbulent and unpredictable forces of free markets. Keynesian economic models advocate government control of wages and prices, claiming that judicious adjustments would ensure employment, control inflation, and — combined with the careful insertion of public monies at appropriate places and intervals — guide the planned economy to preeminence. His theories were widely accepted for decades, applied throughout the world to one level or another. They lost favor only when the evidence accrued, overwhelmingly, that those who actually applied them failed, and those who adhered the most to the Keynesian model suffered the most. Britain’s economy before Margaret Thatcher was the most obvious example, where government economic policies and an extortionary labor movement produced a collapse of what had been one of the world’s most robust economies.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/citizens_or_subjects_keynesian.html
“Government control of major industries and financial sectors is the very epitome of Keynesian economic theory, which Obama has achieved with the U.S. auto industry and Wall Street. Add to that failed model the government control of health care, the massive cap-and-trade tax increases, restrictions and reductions of industry, and the ideological radicalism that justifies anti-capitalist social engineering, and we have a toxic mixture that may well permanently undermine American economic strength.”
“Keynesian economic enthusiasts are quick to shift blame for the disasters of government economic involvement we see today in the European Union and the U.S. Yet the consequences have become so obvious, the impact so far-reaching, that the correlation can no longer be spun away. Greece is insolvent, soon to be followed by Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy, which in concert may well bring down the euro.”
“…that there exists a class of people [perhaps economists very much resembling Lord Keynes] who are completely informed, rational, balanced, wise, who have means of knowing at all times exactly how much investment is needed and in exactly what amounts it should be allocated to exactly which industries and projects, and that these managers are above corruption and above any interest in the outcome of the next election.
In that one sentence, Hazlitt cuts to the heart of the problems we now face. It is a utopian delusion that government can overcome fundamental human urges, make the correct decisions at the correct time, remain free of corruption and special interest influence, and ensure prosperity with benevolent statist altruism. Obama and the left are true believers in this utopian fiction, arrogant as only echo-chamber academics can be, and blind to the evidence of history.”
“Those who apply Keynes forget the rights of the citizen and gravitate to treating him as a subject to be manipulated and controlled, his tax dollars harvested on an ever-increasing level.”
“More government means inefficiency, corruption, and excessive spending. Excessive spending means more taxes. More taxes mean less growth and more regulation. More regulation means less freedom, and less freedom means failure. It always has, and it always will.”
American says...
Very true. RON PAUL 2012!!!
CONGRATULATIONS RAND!!!
NEXT UP….PRESIDENCY FOR RON!!!
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Randy Hall says...
“Where professors rule, life is cruel.
That is the bottom line for the average American in this, the transformative age of the president the New York Times and Washington Post has called “Professor” Obama, who “schools” the ignorant at home and abroad. Never before have so many with so little humility gathered together in our government, each believing he “is the smartest guy in the room.”
This is an administration stuffed with academics. And not just any academic: These are educators from elite universities, the kind of experts prized by a political and media elite seeking confirmation of a worldview that expects, notes the Washington Examiner, “the rest of us … to shut up and do as we are told.””
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/americas_death_by_professor.html
“Welcome to government by professor. Assorted faculty of Ivy League schools have come together to form an administration with the least real-world and most academic experience of any in modern times, the American Enterprise Institute notes. And so we have a government of scolds, lecturers, and bullies, arrogant academics cheered on by mainstream media when they take a “paddle” to average citizens and taxpayers.”
“It’s okay to be ordinary, a “swiller of beer,” Berkeley Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. says, but it takes a “superior intellect” like that of Barack Obama and his taxpayer-paid faculty, Ivy Leaguers most, to understand the needs of Main Street.
The dean well represents the arrogance of an educated class who sees the ordinary taxpayer as raw material to be shaped by regulations wielded by their intellectual superiors, as one of those superiors.”
“Where professors rule, life is cruel. Elite professors have routinely championed thugs and butchers. Ivy League campuses and at least three of Obama’s czars continue to extol the virtues of communism, “a totalitarian and bloodthirsty theory that killed one hundred million people in the 20th century.””
“The University of Chicago, for example, welcomed to its faculty lounge a Nazi official who was complicit in atrocities that “cover[ed] a complete range of a demented imagination … torture and killing.” The official went from leaving “Jewish corpses in the street to be chewed up by dogs” to “a highly successful professional career” as part of the “educated class” of David Brooks and our media elites.
“Hail the Conquering Professor,” the New York Times proclaimed after passage of health care legislation that takes life and death decisions away from Main Street and empowers the White House faculty lounge. This is the elite group that has given the nation its highest unemployment in three decades, an “ever-expanding government” with exploding payrolls, and who has created a “debt time bomb” threatening the prosperity and freedoms built by generations of “beer swillers” over more than two hundred years.
Indeed. Where professors rule, life is cruel.”
Stuart Schwartz is on the faculty at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
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Randy Hall says...
Swiller of beer…got to love that lable.
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Randy Hall says...
“6. It is a hard thing to break through a habit, and a yet
harder thing to go contrary to our own will. Yet if thou
overcome not slight and easy obstacles, how shalt thou
overcome greater ones? Withstand thy will at the beginning,
and unlearn an evil habit, lest it lead thee little by little
into worse difficulties. Oh, if thou knewest what peace to
thyself thy holy life should bring to thyself, and what joy to
others, methinketh thou wouldst be more zealous for spiritual
profit.
CHAPTER 12: “OF THE USES OF ADVERSITY”
1. It is good for us that we sometimes have sorrows and
adversities, for they often make a man lay to heart that he is
only a stranger and sojourner, and may not put his trust in
any worldly thing. It is good that we sometimes endure
contradictions, and are hardly and unfairly judged, when we do
and mean what is good."
Kempis
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Randy Hall says...
People who have censored my posts: Guy Marsh, Denise Latanzi, Mathew Keltner, now Roxi.
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Randy Hall says...
5. The beginning of all temptations to evil is instability of
temper and want of trust in God; for even as a ship without a
helm is tossed about by the waves, so is a man who is careless
and infirm of purpose tempted, now on this side, now on that.
As fire testeth iron, so doth temptation the upright man.
Oftentimes we know not what strength we have; but temptation
revealeth to us what we are. Nevertheless, we must watch,
especially in the beginnings of temptation; for then is the
foe the more easily mastered, when he is not suffered to enter
within the mind, but is met outside the door as soon as he
hath knocked. Wherefore one saith, “Check the beginnings; once thou might’st have cured, But now ’tis past thy skill, too long hath it endured."
For first cometh to the mind the simple suggestion, then the
strong imagination, afterwards pleasure, evil affection,
assent. And so little by little the enemy entereth in
altogether, because he was not resisted at the beginning. And
the longer a man delayeth his resistance, the weaker he
groweth, and the stronger groweth the enemy against him.
Kempis
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Randy Hall says...
President Obama has nominated Elena Kagan, a graduate of Harvard Law School, for the United States Supreme Court. If the Senate confirms her, all of the Court’s justices will have graduated from Harvard or its rival, Yale. Some commentators, and at least one U.S. senator, have questioned whether it is appropriate for every justice to come from such a narrow pool of candidates. In his May 16 Washington Post article, “Why Elites Do Belong on the Supreme Court,” Christopher Edley, Jr., the dean of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, says that it is.
It might seem surprising that Dean Edley is so willing to defend the Harvard/Yale Supreme Court monopoly. After all, Edley oversees one of America’s great law schools, a proud and prestigious institution that turns out more than its share of great professors, judges, and practitioners. Do Berkeley graduates not merit attention, too? Does Edley believe that his school should continue to be excluded from the list of schools able to supply justices?
It’s unlikely. But while Dean Edley raises this issue, he has no desire to answer it. He has another mission in mind: supporting the nomination of his friend, Elena Kagan. Edley’s argument goes something like this: (1) we need really smart people like Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court; (2) the elite law schools supply really smart people; and (3) the elite law schools are sufficiently diverse that the American people should not be concerned that a small group of them supply all Supreme Court justices. Edley’s argument is not persuasive.
Edley is undoubtedly right that Kagan is smart. Some recent nominees faced nagging questions about their intellectual firepower. Not Kagan…
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/do_elites_belong_on_the_suprem.html
But despite her intellectual firepower, Kagan is yet another Supreme Court nominee lacking one critical qualification: experience as a lawyer.
It might sound strange to criticize the dean of Harvard Law School as lacking legal experience. But it is possible to spend a lifetime in the hallways of elite law schools without suffering the misfortune of bumping into the actual practice of law. The elite law schools may be the training grounds for the nation’s future lawyers, but they are staffed largely without using any lawyers at all. Law professors at those institutions tend to be smart academics who know little or nothing about what lawyers do.
No matter. The American public has other, more pressing problems, at least as long as the damage is limited to the law students themselves. Caveat emptor. But when the Supreme Court is staffed by academics with little or no experience in the practice of law, the whole country suffers. While the oracles-from-Olympus constitutional opinions get the press, much of the Court’s work is more mundane: parsing statutes and case law to provide guidance to lower courts. And when it comes to that task, experience in the legal trenches is as valuable as intellectual firepower.
Not knowing the life of a practicing lawyer, Supreme Court justices frequently churn out opinions that are not tethered to the real world, opinions that that could be the result of a brainstorming session in the Harvard faculty lounge rather than the work of seasoned practitioners. The rulings tend to have complexity and nuance, chock full of complicated, multi-factor balancing tests…and too often, they utterly fail to give lower courts, practicing lawyers, and clients the clarity and predictability the law needs.
Some of us in the trenches are skeptical. Is it really too much to ask that Supreme Court justices know how to practice law before presuming to write the rules for those of us who do?
Chris Arledge is managing partner of One LLP, a Southern California-based intellectual property and entertainment law firm.
Any lawyers care to say why he’s wrong?
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roxi says...
“The elite law schools may be the training grounds for the nation’s future lawyers, but they are staffed largely without using any lawyers at all. Law professors at those institutions tend to be smart academics who know little or nothing about what lawyers do.”
I can say from personal experience that NYU School of Law, and NYU Schools of Business have many practicing lawyers. I find it hard to believe that Harvard is lacking in qualified professors-seems to be a stretch.
Don’t we have enough Lawyers as Congressmen running our country right now? Or plenty of Corporate Lawyers representing PACs in DC and actively writing U.S. POLICY?
I do not necessarily support Kagan, as it’s difficult to getting a handle on what her opinions are of our laws and how she would proceed.
Lancaster has a Lawyer as a mayor – has that shown to be a good idea – or not?
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Randy Hall says...
Not really the point of the article roxi.
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Randy Hall says...
This:
“Some of us in the trenches are skeptical. Is it really too much to ask that Supreme Court justices know how to practice law before presuming to write the rules for those of us who do?”
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roxi says...
They don’t write the rules, they interpret existing law. Oh, also they elect presidents…is this what the right is so upset about?
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Randy Hall says...
Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/citizens_or_subjects_keynesian.html
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