jeudi 30 septembre 2010

Une règle mathématique


La corruption apparaît quand on dépense l’argent des autres. Plus nombreux les domaines où l’État intervient, plus nombreuses les occasions de corruption. C’est une règle mathématique. Plus un gouvernement distribue des autorisations, des contrats et des subventions, plus les gens auront une incitation à recourir aux pots-de-vin pour obtenir une autorisation, un contrat ou une subvention.

La citation du jour


As you know, I've always distinguished them this way: the Democrats definitely don't believe in economic freedom, but they say they believe in social freedom, while the Republicans definitely don't believe in social freedom, but they say they believe in economic freedom. Neither believes in both – that would make them libertarians.

Protectionnisme Américain contre la Chine: explication



September 30, 2010

Economic Attack on China

Despite Ron Paul and his compatriots, the US House has passed yet another predatory protectionist measure against China. Here is how the American Propaganda service puts it:

The House has approved legislation that would allow the U.S. to seek trade sanctions against China and other nations for manipulating their currency to gain trade advantages.

Translation: as the US massively depreciates its currency, in part to benefit its exporters, China has no business trying to protect its exporters. Now, both governments are running economically ridiculous anti-consumer trade policies, but the US empire, as God’s chosen vehicle for global rule, expects all to bow down before it. I do not know what the result of this latest outrage will be. Capo di tutti capi Bill Kristol and the other neocons want a new Cold War with China, facilitated by a trade war. Any rational person–and the neocons seem to all have a crazy gene–wants trade and peace with all. But this belligerent act, though the Senate may not go along, cannot, even so, be having a good effect. China is growing in prosperity while the US is declining. And our Keynesians are worse than their Keynesians. So it is not smart, even without the war wars that often follow in the wake of trade wars, for the US to exacerbate this trend.

Bonne nouvelle: les Américains croient moins à la propagande des médias de masse



Distrust In US Media Hits Record High, As CNBC (And Especially Mad Money) Viewership Drops To Multi-Year Low

Tyler Durden's picture


In today's "less than surprising data point" category, the clear winner is Gallup's analysis of people's ever increasing distrust in the mass media. From 46% in 1998, the percentage of people who indicate they have "not very much/none at all" trust in mass media has grown to a stunning 57% currently. This is an all time record, as the general public perception toward the MSM has flipped over the past decade. Is it becoming increasingly more difficult to lie to the average American? In this time of unprecedented economic upheaval, where the political regime depends on just how far any given administration's lies can penetrate amongst the broader population, this may well become the most critical factor in determining policy for the future. And with ever increasing alternatives of non-traditional media, could the legacy ad-supported media model, which by definition is one which espouses the status quo, be doomed precisely by the slow but steady education of the average American, who intuitively realizes that nearly every "fact" appearing in the media, especially that supported by any given political party, is a lie?

Une (rare) conséquence positive du protectionnisme Américain...

...la Chine répond en interrompant l'exportation de minéraux essentiels pour la fabrication d'armement high-tech.

Par Mike Shedlock (L'article vaut la peine d'être lu au complet):

Last Sunday in Prepare for Currency/Trade Wars; How Might China Respond to US Tariffs? I mentioned the possibility China might shut off exports of rare earth metals used in making glass for solar panels, motors that help propel hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius, and laser guided bombs.

Indeed, it was the shutoff of rare earth metals to Japan that caused Japan to "cry uncle" and release a Chinese boat captain detained by the Japanese in disputed waters.
...
The Bright Side

Although "unobtanium" is a cause of concern for warmongers everywhere, being the ever-optimist that I am, I prefer to look at the bright side.

Prices are soaring. Isn't that what Bernanke wants?

mercredi 29 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


To illustrate the difference between the innovator and the dull crowd of routinists who cannot even imagine that any improvement is possible, we need only refer to a passage in Engels' most famous book. Here, in 1878, Engels apodictically announced that military weapons are "now so perfected that no further progress of any revolutionizing influence is any longer possible." Henceforth "all further [technological] progress is by and large indifferent for land warfare. The age of evolution is in this regard essentially closed." This complacent conclusion shows in what the achievement of the innovator consists: he accomplishes what other people believe to be unthinkable and unfeasible.

De l'importance d'enlever aux gouvernements le contrôle de la monnaie (écrit en 1995)



When the dollar and gold were set loose from each other, we saw the closest thing to a laboratory experiment we can get in human affairs. All Establishment economists – from Keynesians to Chicagoite monetarists – insisted that gold had long lost its value as a money, that gold had only reached its exalted value of $35 an ounce because its value was "fixed" at that amount by the government. The dollar allegedly conferred value upon gold rather than the other way round, and if gold and the dollar were ever cut loose, we would see the price of gold sink rapidly to its estimated non-monetary value (for jewelry, dental fillings, etc.) of approximately $6 an ounce. In contrast to this unanimous Establishment prediction, the followers of Ludwig von Mises and other "gold bugs" insisted that gold was undervalued at 35 debased dollars, and claimed that the price of gold would rise far higher, perhaps as high as $70.

Suffice it to say that the gold price never fell below $35, and in fact vaulted upward, at one point reaching $850 an ounce, in recent years settling at somewhere around $350 an ounce. And yet since 1973, the Treasury and Fed have persistently evaluated their gold stock, not at the old and obsolete $35, to be sure, but only slightly higher, at $42.22 an ounce.

...

Inflation, credit expansion, business cycles, heavy government debt, and high taxes are not, as Establishment historians claim, inevitable attributes of capitalism or of "modernization." On the contrary, these are profoundly anti-capitalist and parasitic excrescences grafted onto the system by the interventionist State, which rewards its banker and insider clients with hidden special privileges at the expense of everyone else.

Crucial to free enterprise and capitalism is a system of firm rights of private property, with everyone secure in the property that he earns. Also crucial to capitalism is an ethic that encourages and rewards savings, thrift, hard work, and productive enterprise, and that discourages profligacy and cracks down sternly on any invasion of property rights. And yet, as we have seen, cheap money and credit expansion gnaw away at those rights and at those virtues. Inflation overturns and transvalues values by rewarding the spendthrift and the inside fixer and by making a mockery of the older "Victorian" virtues.

Le ministre Bolduc va planifier personnellement les urgences, pour pallier aux défaillances de la planification


Même en Union soviétique, la planification n'était pas centralisée à ce point. Voici ce que j'écrivais il y a dix ans dans un éditorial intitulé Le chaos planifié dans les urgences:

Comme des drogués qui ont toujours besoin de doses plus fortes pour rester sur leur high et éviter de subir les effets du sevrage, les bureaucrates croient qu'il faut planifier toujours plus pour régler les problèmes causés par la planification. Et les injections de fonds à la dernière minute pour pallier à la crise ne sont évidemment qu'une solution temporaire qui ne change rien à la situation.

La crise des urgences ne peut se résorber que si l'on comprend, accepte et met en place une politique fondée sur la logique économique: i. e., il est impossible de planifier un secteur économique dans son ensemble, encore moins une économie au complet, comme le prétendent les communistes, socialistes, interventionnistes et autres étatistes tripoteurs de «leviers collectifs». Le problème n'en est pas un de compétence. Même les bureaucrates les plus compétents au monde ne pourraient gérer convenablement le réseau de la santé parce que l'information pour y arriver n'existe pas de façon centralisée, dans un bunker de la Grande-Allée. Elle ne peut être réduite à un organigramme compliquée comme ceux qu'affectionnent les gestionnaires du secteur public. Elle est au contraire dispersée dans la tête de milliers d'intervenants du réseau, les médecins, infirmières, urgentologues, administrateurs d'hôpitaux, et les patients eux-mêmes qui ont des choix à faire lorsqu'ils sont malades.

La «planification» ne peut se faire que dans un contexte limité, local, lorsque chacun de ces intervenants prend une décision en se fondant sur les informations disponibles. Chaque décision, relayée par les mécanisme du marché à l'ensemble du réseau, s'inscrit alors dans un ordre global. C'est ce que l'économiste de l'École autrichienne Friedrich Hayek a appelé «l'ordre spontané». C'est le seul ordre économique possible. À l'opposé, sans prix et sans marché mais avec une pseudo-planification centralisée sur le modèle socialiste, on obtient le chaos dans les urgences. Les ressources pour traiter les cas urgents manquent de façon chronique, malgré le bon sens élémentaire qui dit que c'est là qu'elles doivent se trouver, de la même façon qu'on connaîtrait une pénurie d'eau encore plus dramatique si on en gardait le prix artificiellement bas dans une situation de sécheresse extrême et de rareté, même si tout le monde comprend en théorie l'importance de la conserver pour les besoins essentiels.

M.M.

Le temps en tant que prix, appliqué au système de santé Canadien



The same laws of economics apply to any other service, such as, for example, healthcare services that are very specific and, in Canada, provided by a centrally planned, legalized monopoly that does not charge a direct per-unit price. Instead of the money price, this organization must rely on a nonmonetary mechanism of managing the demand for its services, such as administrative procedures and, unavoidably, waiting times.

Most people have some mild health-related problem most of the time, but it would not be worth it to them to wait for six hours to receive treatment. They might, however, be willing to wait 20 or 30 minutes or even an hour. The wait time is the only price they pay for the service, but if the price is too high, these people will choose not to use the service offered by the healthcare provider.

However, there are always a small number of people that would be willing to wait six or more hours because the value they put on their particular health problem is quite high. Generally, as the wait time decreases, the number of people willing to wait increases.

...

Another issue that is often overlooked is the destructive nature of a system devoid of money prices. While paying for a service with money represents an exchange of claims over resource ownership, paying for the same service with time represents outright resource destruction. The time spent in waiting is lost forever and cannot be used in any productive activity, whereas the money paid for service could be used for purchasing goods and services that had already been produced. The time not spent in waiting could be used for the production of new resources.

mardi 28 septembre 2010

Petite victoire de la liberté sur Leviathan


L'état-nounou recule un peu dans la guerre au mode de vie, et comme on s'y attend, les fascistes de la santé et les statocrates crient au meutre.


Canada freezes big anti-tobacco push, critics fume

(Reuters) - Canada has frozen long-held plans to slap graphic new warning labels on packs of cigarettes, prompting critics to attack what they see as the tobacco industry's excessive influence on the minority Conservative government.

The official opposition Liberal Party said statistics showed that since the Conservatives took office in 2006, the rate at which Canadians have quit smoking has declined.

"This government is listening to the business lobby, the tobacco lobby," said legislator Ujjal Dosanjh, who was federal minister of health when the consultations were launched.

"The illegal tobacco traffic ... is important. But you can't take your eyes off this particular problem," he told Reuters, saying the government could easily fight tobacco smuggling while ensuring the warning labels were more graphic.

Meghan Leslie of the left-leaning New Democrats said the decision to freeze the anti-smoking campaign and the focus on contraband cigarettes "say to me that this is not about health ... this is about industry, at the expense of people's health, perhaps at the expense of people's lives".

"I would have expected that large warnings would be announced by now ... the government hasn't really given a clear reason why and I can't conceive of a good reason why," said Rob Cunningham of the Canadian Cancer Society.

La 2e citation du jour


The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

La citation du jour


In short, as is now being more and more generally recognized, economic planning inevitably leads to, and is the cause of, the suppression of individual liberty and spiritual freedom which we know as the "totalitarian" system. As has recently been said in Nature by two eminent American engineers, "the State founded on dictatorial authority … and the planned economy are essentially one and the same thing?"

Indiana: les métallos refusent une baisse de salaire, votent 457 contre 96 pour perdre leur emploi à la place



Monday, September 27, 2010

UAW Workers Vote 457 to 96 to Close Plant Instead of Reducing Salaries


With Indiana unemployment rate at 10.1% one might think that jobs that pay more than double the minimum wage would be in demand. Actually, such jobs are in demand, but ironically not from some of those who have them.


lundi 27 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


"I think economists as a rule—and it is not personal to him—take for granted they know a lot of things. If they really knew so much, they would have all of the money, and we would have none."

-Bernard Baruch, 1955

L'universalité de l'amour humain pour la liberté


Affirmer que selon certaines cultures, des hommes et des femmes apprécient que leurs libertés de penser, de parler, de circuler, d’interagir soient restreintes, voire inexistantes, découle d'une perspective dangereuse et malhonnête.


Le don d'organe et le biais anti marché


In any transplant operation, the patient or the patient's proxy pays through the nose. The hospital is paid. The surgeons are paid. The nurses are paid. The anesthetists are paid. The bookkeepers, bean-counters and bureaucrats all take home a paycheck. And the medical "ethicists" who inveigh against applying market principles to transplant organ supply? They do so on salary.
The only person not paid—the only person forbidden by law to be paid—is the one indispensable supplier, the owner of the organ. And we wonder why there's an organ shortage?

vendredi 24 septembre 2010

La dette nationale américaine, version Sesame Street


Merci à Zero Hedge.

La citation du jour


There is, or should be, nothing shocking about discovering that police have abused civil liberties and that their responsible superiors have helped them conceal their misdeeds. It is no more shocking than the discovery that the family dog has messed on the rug; it can't be permitted to continue, and you may have to smack the animal with a newspaper to teach it to quit, or get rid of it if it simply can't be trained. But the disclosure of the mess and how it happened does not bring discredit on the household; indeed, this is the only way to get it cleaned up. Sweeping it under the rug and accepting it as evidence that the dog is zealous in defending the security of the home will, however, soon make the house uninhabitable. The householders may also help to forestall such domestic tragedies if they learn to detect, by its usually stiff and pompous gait, when the creature is really full of shit, and turn it out before it gets a chance to do further damage.

-Edgar Z. Friedenberg


jeudi 23 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


C’est mon plus beau souvenir d’université : mon professeur socialiste commence à vanter aux étudiants le modèle cubain en le comparant au méchant système américain. Prenant mon courage à deux mains, je demande la parole et pose la question qui tue : «Mais… dans quelle direction vont les radeaux?»

La citation du jour


I would say a country is much better off with a million cynics than it is with a million fools.

-Anonyme

mercredi 22 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.


lundi 20 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


I feel silly pointing out that great companies should live and lousy ones should die. And great companies that become lousy companies should die too. Government should not decide this. Customers should. And they do. Every day we vote with our dollars. Nothing is more democratic than capitalism. It is a system of creative destruction that allocates capital far better than any government, commission, czar, or think-tank.

Beaucoup de sang sur les mains de Mao


Via the Independent:

Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent

Friday, 17 September 2010


Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.




Merci à Antagoniste.net.

jeudi 16 septembre 2010

La citation du jour

The term health care is a fraudulent misnomer. Health is everywhere a strictly personal responsibility, and determined largely by diet and exercise. It was laughable when that fat slob Michael Moore made the argument that the average Cuban was healthier than the average American because of their nationalized doctors and hospitals. He's right that the average Cuban is much healthier – but it's solely because he's got a simple, fresh, low-calorie diet, he necessarily gets a lot of exercise every day, and he's not taking a half dozen pills every day to assuage every real or imagined pain.

mardi 14 septembre 2010

Les mots vs la réalité


If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that "gun control" laws do not control guns, the government's "stimulus" spending does not stimulate the economy and that many "compassionate" policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Do you know how many millions of people died in the war "to make the world safe for democracy" – a war that led to autocratic dynasties being replaced by totalitarian dictatorships that slaughtered far more of their own people than the dynasties had?

L'histoire selon Rothbard

And to wind up at my own doctrine about history, followingAlbert Jay Nock, history is essentially a race or a conflict between state power and social power, as Nock put it. Social power is a network of voluntary interactions: the economy, civilization, everything that is voluntarily interacting. Nock calls that social power.

And state power, of course, is the State. It's always trying to repress social power, cripple it, tax it, loot it, etc.

So history becomes a race between these two forces.

-Murray N. Rothbard

lundi 13 septembre 2010

Les US abandonnent le libre-marché, alors que les Cubains commencent à l'adopter


Suite logique des récentes déclarations de Fidel Castro.


Cuba to cut one million public sector jobs

Cuba has announced radical plans to lay off huge numbers of state employees, to help revive the communist country's struggling economy.

The Cuban labour federation said more than a million workers would lose their jobs - half of them by March next year.

Those laid off will be encouraged to become self-employed or join new private enterprises, on which some of the current restrictions will be eased.




La citation du jour

President Barack Obama’s economic team has diagnosed the U.S. economy as suffering from a lack of aggregate demand. Businesses and consumers aren’t spending enough. Banks aren’t lending to make more spending possible.

Our casual observer might wonder how it is that more borrowing and spending can fix a case of excess leverage and overspending.

-Caroline Baum, Bloomberg

dimanche 12 septembre 2010

La citation du jour

“There is no case known in modern times of the people being consulted in the initiation of a war.”


-Randolph Bourne

Bill Bonner sur le mythe du 'stimulus' des dépenses militaires

Via the Daily Reckoning:

You say Obama; I say Ozawa! You say boom; I say ka-boom!

The Nobel Prize committee has never withdrawn a prize. It might want to consider it. In Tuesday’s New York Times, prizewinner in economics, Paul Krugman reveals either that he knows nothing about economics…or that there is nothing worth knowing in it. We’re beginning to think it’s the latter.

“From an economic point of view,” he writes, “World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Deficit spending created an economic boom – and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity….”

In the 1938 US elections, voters showed what they thought of the New Deal; Democrats lost 70 seats in the House. Then as now, the public had lost faith in public spending, says Krugman. Nearly two out of three of those polled said they were opposed to stimulus efforts. Roosevelt buckled under the pressure; he drew back from further spending to fight the slump.

Thank God for WWII! No one opposes military spending in time of war. Krugman made his position clear in 2008 in his New York Times blog.

“The fact is that war is, in general, expansionary for the economy, at least in the short run. World War II, remember, ended the Great Depression.”

According to this line of thinking, the best form of stimulus spending is money spent on the military. It creates consumer demand without creating consumer supply. Consumer prices rise; people spend. The slump is soon over.

But if WWII helped the US economy, think what it must have done for Japan; proportionally, its stimulus efforts dwarfed those of the US…and began much earlier. Just this week, Ichiro Ozawa, running for prime minister of Japan, vowed to take “every measure” to lower the yen and promised a stimulus package more than twice as big as the current program. He was just following in the footsteps of Japan’s leaders from the ’30s. It was “economic security” they said they were after. And they thought they could get it by central planning and government spending. Military spending rose from 31% of the budget in the early ’30s to nearly 50% five years later. By the early ’40s it was around 70% and nearly 100% later on. Deficits and debt soared.

Did that create a boom? You bet it did. Japan was the first nation to get out of the global slump. It boomed…and boomed…and ka-boomed. When it came to warships, planes, and soldiers, Japan was soon among the richest nations in the world. Yes, Americans had more electric fans, automobiles, central heating, aspirin, ice cream, and the rest of the paraphernalia of civilized life at the time. In the mid-’30s, the US produced 40 times as many autos per person as did Japan. Even during the Great Depression, the US out-produced Japan by a factor of 7 and its workers earned 10-times as much money.

Economists can’t even measure real prosperity, let alone fiddle it. So they put on the GDP and employment numbers the way a bald man puts on a cheap wig. It makes him look ridiculous and fraudulent, but it’s the best he can do. Unemployment disappears in a war economy. Japan put a million men in uniform. Two million more were part-time reservists. Those who weren’t in the army were put to work building tanks and planes. By 1941, Japan could produce 10,000 planes a year. If you were a swallow you wouldn’t want to build your nest in Japan’s factory chimneys; they belched smoke night and day.

And talk about fiscal stimulus! Krugman would have loved it – stimulus unfettered by real money or even a casual regard for real prosperity. Takahashi Korekiyo was known as the “Japanese Keynes.” Gillian Tett notes in The Financial Times that he was assassinated in 1936 after he came to his senses and tried to bring state finances under control. He was done in by army officers who did not want the stimulus to stop. Not that we’re being judgmental about it. As far as we know, the quality of central banking could probably be improved by an occasional assassination.

Takahashi wasn’t the first. Before him Junnosuke Inoue had held out for the gold standard and balanced budgets. He was out of office by 1931 and out of luck in 1932, when he was murdered. The gold-backed yen was abolished the day he left office. Then, public spending, deficits, central planning, debt, and inflation ran wild. By 1939, the Japanese were spending $5 million a day on their war with China – a huge sum for the Japanese at the time.

Was the economy improved by all this spending? No, it was perverted…hammered into a grotesque imposter – a parody of a real economy. Most of the nation’s resources were put to work building things almost no one wanted. Then, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the stimulus efforts were redoubled. Rations were reduced further. Working hours were extended. What few consumer items were available were three times as expensive at the end of the war as they had been when it began. Men were conscripted into factories and the army. Women were expected not only to make the tanks, but to join the home-guard and prepare themselves to repulse the American invaders with sharpened bamboo sticks. What a marvelous economy – operating at full capacity and full employment until General MacArthur finally put it out of its misery.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for
The Daily Reckoning

Regard en profondeur de Michael Lewis sur la culture de corruption en Grèce

L'auteur de Liar's Poker et The Big Short dresse un portrait détaillé des événements et attitudes qui ont mené à la calamité Grecque.

Très long mais extrêmement intéressant.

vendredi 10 septembre 2010

La citation du jour


The one incomparably powerful means of exploitation is the State. It is also the safest means, because it is irresponsible. It is exempt from all the basic sanctions of ordinary morality. It is free to murder, cheat, lie, steal, and persecute at its own good pleasure and without fear of reprisals. … Their irresponsibility brings on a regime of prodigality, waste, inefficiency and corruption.

-Albert Jay Nock

Socialisme=pénuries et rationnement


Via Antagoniste.net:

Venezuela introduces Cuba-like food card
The Miami Herald

Presented by President Hugo Chávez as an instrument to make shopping for groceries easier, the « Good Life Card » is making various segments of the population wary because they see it as a furtive attempt to introduce a rationing card similar to the one in Cuba.

The measure could easily become a mechanism to control the population, according to civil society groups.

« We see that in short-term this could become a rationing card probably similar to the one used in Cuba, » Roberto León Parilli, president of the National Association of Users and Consumers, told El Nuevo Herald. « It would use more advanced technological means [than those used in Cuba], but when they tell you where to buy and what the limits of what you can buy are, they are conditioning your purchases. »

Chávez said Tuesday that the card could be used to buy groceries at the government chain of markets and supplies. Former director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, Domingo Maza Zavala, said this could become a rationing card that would limit your purchases in light of the country’s recurring problems with supplies.

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said that Venezuela’s current problems of scarce supplies are very similar to those Cuba faced when Fidel Castro introduced the rationing card.And although the cards were introduced as a mechanism to deal with scarcities, Suchlicki said, they later became an instrument of control.


jeudi 9 septembre 2010

Candeur Castriste

Via Yahoo.com:

Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work

Le mythe des 'stimulus' économiques

Via Mises.org:

For example, most pundits accept the claim that "World War II got us out of the Depression." And it's true that the official unemployment rate dropped like a stone with US entry into the war. But as economic historian Bob Higgs points out, FDR had hardly "fixed" the economy: all he did was force millions of American men to leave the conventional workforce and jump into a slaughterhouse. By the same token, if President Obama made it mandatory for five million Americans to cross the ocean and paint the Great Wall of China, it's possible that the official unemployment rate would drop.

-Robert Murphy

mercredi 8 septembre 2010

La citation du jour (2)

What happens to the social welfare state when the number of people who are meant to be supported becomes larger and larger…while the number of people who are meant to be supporting them becomes smaller and smaller? We don’t know. But we’re going to find out.

-Bill Bonner

La citation du jour

"Some have said that the key risk investors face today is of ‘policy error’. But isn’t that always the key risk? Financial history is one long series of ‘policy errors’ and while policy makers labour under the delusion that they know the unknowable it will remain so. All investors can do is try to see the funny side, and focus on things we can know."

-Dylan Grice, stratège financier, Société Générale

Banqueroute Keynesienne

Nous avons déjà cité le nobélisé Paul Krugman, qui implorait en 2002 Alan Greenspan de créer une bulle immobilière pour 'redémarrer' l'économie après l'implosion de la bulle techno.


How Keynesian Archduke Krugman Recommended A Housing Bubble As A Solution To All Of America's Post Tech Bubble Problems

Tyler Durden's picture