Is it Keynes or Is it .... ? (fwd)

17 Dec 2003

      Forwarded message:
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Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 16:09:02 -0400
From: Robert Hettinga 
Subject: Is it Keynes or Is it .... ?
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Date:         Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:12:55 EDT
From: Hayek-L List Host 
Subject:      Is it Keynes or Is it .... ?
...
"A year or so from now, it will be difficult to find
a single person who admits ever having believed
that a global free market is a sensible way of
running the world economy
No global economy is a good economy, by its very definition it is a monopoly
and contrary to the entire precip of free-market pundits.

A free-market is exclusively a *local* market.
...
laissez-faire was short-lived .. The free market came
about in England as a result not of slow evolution
No it didn't, it's the basic economic structure that everything else gets
built on. You start out with a completely free-market and build from there.
Free markets are for cavepeople.
...
but swiftly, as a consequence of the unremitting use
of the power of the state ..  The free market
withered away gradually, thought the natural workings
of democratic political competition ...
No, human psychology is what kills it.
...
century England illustrates a vital truth: Democracy and
the free market are rivals, not allies.
Duh. Economics has nothing to do with civil liberties or crimes.

One of the failures in current political and economic thought is the
necessity for the *government* to regulate the money. It isn't a new belief
either since it is embodies in our Constitution.

What is required for a free-market is a mechanism for 'fair competition'.
The problem is there is no way under a free-market to define fair or
competition.
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problematic relationship.  The normal concomitant
of free markets is not stable democratic government
but the volatile -- and not always democratic -- politics
of economic insecurity.
This is circular reasoning. A free-market is not compatible to democracy (of
course not since a free-market requires two party economic contracts
exculsively) but is compatible with a market that is solely stabalized by
economic (in)security (which is a free-market economy after all).
...
History exemplifies an equally important fact:
Free market economies lack built-in stabilizers.
Without effective management by government,
they are liable to recurrent booms and busts --
with all their costs in social cohesion and
political stability.
Duh...
...
.. But is was also a consequence of governments'
holding to an orthodoxy that believed that so
Governments *are* a form of orthodoxy, they don't hold onto it since they
embody the concepts of orthodoxy.
...
long as inflation is under control the economy
can be relied upon to be self-regulating ,,,"
Nobody with half-a-clue believe this.

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Is it Keynes or Is it .... ? (fwd)

Jim Choate