Awesome Bastiat Quote
"Poor people!" he lamented of the duped French populace in the same tumultuous year [1848]. "How much disillusionment is in store for them! It would have been so simple and so just to ease their burden by decreasing their taxes; they want to achieve this through the plentiful bounty of the state and they cannot see that the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!"
Written over a century ago, but still just as relevant today.
Chris:
in our case its take 3 borrow 4 and give 5.
August 6, 2011, 7:20 amRoy:
Amazing how many degreed economists I know or debate with who have never read Bastiat.
August 6, 2011, 10:08 amColoComment:
What's amazing is that we are still arguing about this stuff, well after Bastiat, Ricardo, Macaulay, Wanniski and Hayek, et al.
How many more times does society have to endure government's attempts at implementing Keynes's ineffective and probably harmful counter-recession theories before Keynes is once and truly forever disproved?
August 7, 2011, 9:24 amsteve:
"How many more times does society have to endure government’s attempts at implementing Keynes’s ineffective and probably harmful counter-recession theories before Keynes is once and truly forever disproved?"
Before, he is disproved? 0 more times, it has already been done. How many times will we do it anyway? I shudder at the thought.
August 7, 2011, 5:20 pmRichard A.:
@Roy,
Generally speaking economists aren't steaped in their own history. They want their 'science' to be a hard one like physics, therefore unless they're antiquarians all they need do is study the most recent stuff. Lost knowledge or the idea that someone in the past had a better idea never occurs to them.
And Warren is wrong to a certain extent too. Bastiat's quote only applies society wide. In the practical application some give less than ten, or give nothing, and still receive something. There's always a net beneficiary at the expense of the rest of us or it wouldn't happen. Keynes' ideas leave society as a whole poorer in the long term while making a select few richer in the short term. The trick is to find those parasites and get rid of them.
August 8, 2011, 9:30 am