Is Rejection of the Liquidity Trap Doctrine an Act of Willful Blindness?

A number of posters write that this blog does not engage in any economic analysis, and while I might disagree with that claim, nonetheless this blog is not as analytical as some others, including Bob Murphy's Free Advice and Robert Wenzel's Economic Policy Journal, both of which are excellent blogs and well worth reading. (Both of them take on Paul Krugman and do it quite well. Murphy's latest devastating salvo is found here.)

Instead of going after Krugman's Monday NYT column, instead I want to deal -- using economic analysis -- with a recent Krugman blog post entitled: "Against Willful Denseness, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain," in which he declares:

From the very beginning of the Lesser Depression, the central principle for understanding macroeconomic policy has been that everything is different when you’re in a liquidity trap. In particular, the whole case for fiscal stimulus and against austerity rests on the proposition that with interest rates up against the zero lower bound, the central bank can neither achieve full employment on its own nor offset the contractionary effect of spending cuts or tax hikes.

This isn’t hard, folks; it’s just Macro 101. Yet a large number of economists — never mind politicians or policy makers — seems to have a very hard time grasping this basic concept.

He adds:

We’re not talking about stupid people here; clearly, there’s something about the notion that the rules for policy depend on the situation that some economists just don’t want to understand.

In other words, Krugman has explained it, so it must be true, and anyone who might disagree with him either is hopelessly ignorant or, frankly, evil. There can be no honest disagreement, since to disagree with Krugman on this point is dishonest.

Understand, I am taking his words and, I believe, interpreting them fairly.This is what I learned in Logic 101 as the "appeal to authority," which here means that since the term "liquidity trap" is taught in macroeconomics, then there can be no argument against it, any more than one is permitted to claim that FDR's New Deal extended the Great Depression or that high tax rates just might squelch capital investment.

Moreover, just because Krugman appeals to the "liquidity trap" does not mean it is a legitimate economic concept. Murray N. Rothbard 50 years ago took on this doctrine and had a number of criticisms, writing:

The ultimate weapon in the Keynesian arsenal of explanations of depressions is the "liquidity trap." This is not precisely a critique of the Mises theory, but it is the last line of Keynesian defense of their own inflationary "cures" for depression. Keynesians claim that "liquidity preference" (demand for money) may be so persistently high that the rate of interest could not fall low enough to stimulate investment sufficiently to raise the economy out of the depression. This statement assumes that the rate of interest is determined by "liquidity preference" instead of by time preference; and it also assumes again that the link between savings and investment is very tenuous indeed, only tentatively exerting itself through the rate of interest. But, on the contrary, it is not a question of saving and investment each being acted upon by the rate of interest; in fact, saving, investment, and the rate of interest are each and all simultaneously determined by individual time preferences on the market. Liquidity preference has nothing to do with this matter.

Furthermore, interest rates are not low because people's time preferences have changed and they are saving more. No, they are low because the Federal Reserve System has pushed them down to artificially-low levels, while at the same time, the Fed is trying to prop up malinvestments not only  here but also across the globe.

I would add the the "liquidity trap" doctrine also is based upon the economic fallacy that government essentially can do away with the Law of Scarcity by pushing down interest rates and by printing money. If one were to ask Krugman how this is possible, he would counter that there are "idle resources" (including lots of unemployed labor) that are sitting fallow because of a "lack of demand."

If one were to continue the questioning with, "What caused the 'lack of demand'?" he would answer, "Because people stopped spending." And if one asked, "Why did people stop spending," he most likely would answer, "Because of the financial crisis."

Yet, what caused the financial crisis? Malinvestments. That's right, malinvestments, those very things that Keynesians claim can be turned profitable with just a little more "stimulus" money, created the crisis in the first place. (Kind of like the housing market, which the government unsuccessfully has tried to reflate since its collapse in 2008.)

Now, that is interesting, given that malinvestment is an Austrian term, and Austrians are not supposed to know anything about economics. The idea behind "stimulus" and ratcheting up spending is that if the government spends enough money on lots of things, somehow those malinvested items will be resurrected and become profitable again. Now, why these things would supernaturally become profitable is another question, but Krugman and the Keynesians seem to believe that as long as the government is throwing money at something, sooner or later it will become a winner. (Krugman's insistence that massive government subsidies of "green energy" some day will magically transform that industry into something genuinely profitable is an example of the wishful thinking that accompanies Keynesianism.)

I also would add that the "liquidity trap" doctrine assumes that even though mutually-beneficial exchanges would be possible, individuals will act irrationally refuse to act on those opportunities. Why? "Because we are in a liquidity trap," and everyone knows that the liquidity trap overturns logic, the Law of Opportunity Cost, and probably the Law of Gravity.

My larger point is that Austrians really do have a basis for disagreeing with the Keynesian viewpoints, and the basis is grounded in logic and fundamental laws of economics. That Krugman interprets this disagreement as nothing more than yahoos wallowing in their willfulness says much more about Krugman than it does the Austrians.

Uh, Isn't this a Case of Malinvestment? I Forgot; Krugman Doesn't Believe in Malinvestment

A while back, Paul Krugman mocked the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT -- or ATBC), claiming it was akin to the "phlogiston theory of fire." Why would he use such terms? Because the ABCT is based on the view that government economic intervention -- and especially aggressive monetary intervention -- creates malinvestments that cannot be sustained, and every good Keynesian knows that the real problem is "aggregate demand."

Thus, to get an economy quickly back on track after a bout of poor aggregate demand, all that is needed is for a government to engage in aggressive spending, borrowing, creating inflation (when the economy is in a "liquidity trap"), and creating vast subsidies in order to ramp up more spending. Krugman has emphasized these points time and again the past four years, and they are part-and-parcel to Keynesian doctrines.

Yet, in his most recent column, Krugman tries to claim that a financial crisis is "different" from other business cycle downturns because it takes longer for the economy to recover. Yet, to me, this brings up a number of questions that seem to contradict his Holy Keynesian Faith. He writes:

... President Obama’s people failed to appreciate something that is now common wisdom among economic analysts: severe financial crises inflict sustained economic damage, and it takes a long time to recover. (emphasis mine)

The simply question I ask is: Why? For that matter, given the Keynesian view that for analytical purposes factors of production are homogeneous, why should a housing bubble be a bad thing? (Oh, I forgot, the Federal Reserve System is trying to reflate the housing market and Krugman approves. That's called creating another bubble.)

If a housing bubble, or any other financial bubble, puts prices out kilter with fundamentals, why is that a problem given that Keynesian doctrine treats an economy simply as two curves, an aggregate demand curve and an aggregate supply curve? No matter what the government does as long as it encourages more demand is just fine.

Does Krugman believe this? No, or at least if he recognizes financial bubbles, then he also recognizes malinvestments, even if he claims otherwise. However, in looking at his infamous "Hangover Theory" article, there is a contradiction that Krugman never has tried to erase. He writes:

...let's ask a seemingly silly question: Why should the ups and downs of investment demand lead to ups and downs in the economy as a whole?

However, during both the Tech Bubble and the Housing Bubble, unemployment rates did go down and we had a general economic boom. (The Clintonistas claimed that they had created a "New Economy" by raising the top tax rate to 39.6 percent.) The booms were the trigger mechanism for much of the creation of new money and were central points of spending. Furthermore, the U.S. dollar was considered to be the world's "reserve currency," so when people were able to hold more dollars, the rest of the world was glad to accept them.

Even Krugman would acknowledge that point, but he has no intellectual theory to explain why it is that a housing bust and financial crisis should then result in long-term economic damage complete with high unemployment. His criticism of the ABCT could just as well be criticism of his own Keynesians beliefs:

The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present.

We could say the same thing about Keynesian Theory and Krugman's earlier point about financial collapses. If government simply takes over all lending and spends and spends and spends, then why should there be any residual problems at all? In fact, the government has done all of these things, yet the underlying economy is very weak. Krugman can try to play the political operative and spin the current mess as a huge success for the Obama administration, but he has not explained how a financial bubble (1) could help create a boom and (2) how a bursting of the bubble would cause damage given that government can fix things with spending.

Furthermore, if prices really don't matter (except aggregates put into an index), how would we know in the first place that a bubble had occurred? So what if housing prices are high; if the relationship of the prices don't really matter, then who is to say that housing is out-of-kilter? No doubt, these statements will enrage a Keynesian True Believer, but Keynesians -- including Krugman -- are not free to claim that prices matter when they want them to matter and that prices don't matter when Keynesians claim they don't.

Krugman Solves Another Mystery! And Breaks More Windows!

In his column on why he believes austerity is the wrong policy, Paul Krugman manages to play the part of both a psychologist AND an advocate of Broken-Window Economics, which is a pretty big accomplishment when one is limited to 750 words. But, then, Krugman is an exceptional person and he was up to this mighty task.

Broken Window Fallacy, Again (and Again)

It is hard to know where to begin, but I think I'll start with his newest version of why breaking windows is good economics, and leave the psychology until the end. In a move that is like hurling a one-ton boulder through a huge plate-glass window, Krugman writes:

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison? 

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. 

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.

 I admit that this sounds good, and I am sure that the Really Brilliant People at Princeton and the NY Times will be his Amen Chorus, but Krugman actually manages to pile up one fallacy after another, and in the process he also demonstrates his belief that factors of production really are homogeneous. Now, if that really were the case -- one set of assets is just like another -- then maybe the Keynesian argument would make sense, but in an economy made up of heterogeneous labor, resources, and capital, Krugman really is pursuing circular logic.

Austrians argue -- correctly, I believe -- that the real problem that becomes manifest during the boom is that investors are led down the wrong paths into investments that cannot be sustained, period. Take housing, for example. Since the Housing Bubble burst in 2007-08, the government has poured billions and billions of dollars into trying to reflate the bubble, yet overall housing prices are continuing to fall.

Keynesians have no answer for this, because in their view, if the government or private consumers continue to throw money at an asset, then it automatically should be sustained. Yet, it is obvious that the housing market it not behaving according to Keynesian dictates.

Nowhere is the dichotomy between Austrians and Keynesians more clear than in those three paragraphs. With Krugman, it is all spending all of the time, and if government slashes spending on things like "green energy" subsidies, then it is making EVERYONE poorer. Austrians, on the other hand, correctly note that these kinds of subsidies themselves enrich those who are politically-connected at the expense of everyone else. Malinvestments don't even enter the picture, at least not in Wonderland.

Yes, Yes, Advocates of "Austerity" Hate Poor People

Krugman next turns to his psychological skills, ferreting out what he says is the REAL reason that "austerity" advocates continue to push their views:

...the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs.

In the world of Keynesianism, spending on social programs creates wealth. For example, when President Obama announced that he was killing the Keystone Pipeline, he also added that the payment of additional unemployment benefits actually would help the economy more than would the building of a pipeline because it would bring about more spending than would occur in the construction of the line.

To put it another way, Obama believes that oil is not an asset, only a cost. In that regard, he is being a good Keynesian when he claims that profitable ventures are a drain on the economy but paying out welfare benefits adds to wealth.

I believe this demonstrates a huge point of difference between Austrians and Keynesians. Keynesians like Krugman hold that by spending on social programs, the government is generating new wealth and can help build an entire economy upon such actions.

Austrians, on the other hand, believe that social programs must rest upon the back of an economy that has created real wealth elsewhere. Fiscally speaking, these programs are a cost, not a generator of net wealth. This is not an argument against such programs, but rather just a statement of economics.

In other words, the arguments reflect fundamental views of economics. Unfortunately, Krugman has decided to claim that since "everyone knows" that social programs on their own are wealth-generating, that the only reason one might argue that they should be cut back is because one hates poor people.

Economies are not self-generated from government spending. Cranking up the government printing presses and then directing the newly-created money to those who are politically-connected does not give the overall economy a boost. Instead, it enriches some at the expense of others.

Now, I am not jumping in with the "austerity" crowd that holds that governments must jack up tax rates in order to pay banks that took risks when they threw loans at dubious "investments." However, Krugman's "we owe it to each other" is not sound economics on any level, period. Furthermore, his view that government spending alone will boost the economy into a real recovery is just plain wrong. His is not a prescription for recovery; it is a prescription for a continuing depression.

Krugman and the "Magic" of Inflation

I remember reading a book 30 years ago in which the author said that in the end, Keynesians have one arrow and only one in their quiver: inflation. While they might deny that to be true (Hey! We have FISCAL policy!! We borrow a lot of money that is created by the Fed!)

But Paul Krugman certainly seems anxious to prove the author's point, as once again he calls for the "solution" of printing money as salvation for Europe. For that matter, he has long advocated the same "salvation" for this country, continuing that fallacy that our economy is exactly like the so-called babysitting co-op in Washington.

Today's column is pretty typical of Krugman. While I agree that the bank-imposed "austerity" measures put on the regimes of Greece and Spain are not helpful to economic growth, my differences with Krugman are substantial. To Krugman, the entire thing is spending; the more a government spends, the richer everyone becomes, end of discussion. And if the government does not have enough to spend in tax revenues, then print money or borrow, but spend, spend, spend.

As I see it, restructuring any economy in order to place its debt service at the top (which means high tax rates) is likely to be counterproductive in the short run AND long run. Like it or not, governments usually are an impediment to economic growth and certainly not an engine of the same.

For Krugman, financial bubbles ARE the soul of capitalism, period. In his view, investors are a bunch of lemmings that always run over the cliff unless wise government agents steer them otherwise. As Austrians see it, the culprit is going to be the central bank or government in one form or another.

(For those people who claim that the housing bubble was SOLELY the result of private investment, they ignore the role of the Federal Reserve System, Freddie and Fannie, and a government that demanded that more people be put into home ownership, damn the consequences.)

So, what is Krugman's "solution"? He provides it here:

Italy and, in particular, Spain must be offered hope — an economic environment in which they have some reasonable prospect of emerging from austerity and depression. Realistically, the only way to provide such an environment would be for the central bank to drop its obsession with price stability, to accept and indeed encourage several years of 3 percent or 4 percent inflation in Europe (and more than that in Germany).

Both the central bankers and the Germans hate this idea, but it’s the only plausible way the euro might be saved. For the past two-and-a-half years, European leaders have responded to crisis with half-measures that buy time, yet they have made no use of that time. Now time has run out.

So will Europe finally rise to the occasion? Let’s hope so — and not just because a euro breakup would have negative ripple effects throughout the world. For the biggest costs of European policy failure would probably be political. 

Yes, salvation through inflation, as though a central bank can "manage" rates of inflation over time. Krugman's love affair with inflation totally ignores the underside of such a policy, and ignores the fact that over time, the corrosive effects of inflation grow and any "positive" effects (i.e. "deleveraging") tend to diminish.

You see, Krugman truly seems to believe that the only "bad" effects of inflation would be higher prices, although those higher prices would be offset by higher incomes. Inflation, at least in Wonderland, has no effect upon investors' choices, it does not direct money into lines of production that are unsustainable, and it has no destructive effects at all unless it gets out of hand, and even then, the results are not very bad.

Like the Bourbons who, in the words of Tallyrand, "learned nothing and forgot nothing," the Keynesians never learn from inflation, and in the end always reach for that last arrow. Like Krugman, who apparently believes that the Obama administration can subsidize the economy into recovery (see "green energy" and other such nonsense), Keynesians truly believe that all assets are homogeneous, and that an economy is a mixture into which one stirs money and if one stirs in enough money and forces everyone to spend, out of it comes prosperity.

That is a Wonderland view of economics, but apparently that is what our economic and political elites are trying to claim is the truth. So print and spend yourselves into prosperity, Europeans! It must be so, it must be so!

Easy Useless Keynesianism

When it became clear in 2007 and beyond that the housing bubble was breaking up and the bills for the national spending spree were coming due, the Bush administration shifted into "stimulus" mode. (It was nice getting an extra $2,100 in my checking account, but I defied the government and paid some bills instead of buying that big-screen HD TV. Yeah, I'm a bad example to all of you.)

Barack Obama came into Washington with Big Plans For A Big Stimulus, and the Federal Reserve System has been spreading dollars everywhere. However, the economy remains mired in depression, and Paul Krugman believes he has the solution: more stimulus. Lots more stimulus.

In his recent column, Krugman claims that the problem is that we don't have enough government spending, and if we don't spend, expand the state, and employ more people as bureaucrats, our economy never will recover. Actually, if we continue to spend, expand the state, and employ more people as bureaucrats, indeed, our economy never will recover. Krugman writes:

Of course, structuralistas say they are not making excuses. They say that their real point is that we should focus not on quick fixes but on the long run — although it’s usually far from clear what, exactly, the long-run policy is supposed to be, other than the fact that it involves inflicting pain on workers and the poor. 

Anyway, John Maynard Keynes had these peoples’ number more than 80 years ago. “But this long run,” he wrote, “is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the sea is flat again.” 

I would only add that inventing reasons not to do anything about current unemployment isn’t just cruel and wasteful, it’s bad long-run policy, too. For there is growing evidence that the corrosive effects of high unemployment will cast a shadow over the economy for many years to come. Every time some self-important politician or pundit starts going on about how deficits are a burden on the next generation, remember that the biggest problem facing young Americans today isn’t the future burden of debt — a burden, by the way, that premature spending cuts probably make worse, not better. It is, rather, the lack of jobs, which is preventing many graduates from getting started on their working lives. 

So all this talk about structural unemployment isn’t about facing up to our real problems; it’s about avoiding them, and taking the easy, useless way out. And it’s time for it to stop. 

 And what constitutes "doing something"? According to Krugman, it is having governments increase their borrowing and monetary creation supposedly to start employing idle resources. Unfortunately, we are not dealing with idle resources per se; we are dealing with malinvested resources and every one of Krugman's schemes to deal with the problem only will make that problem worse.

Whether it is propping up the housing industry or creating new bureaucracies or subsidizing pet Obama-favored "clean energy" firms, the end result is expanding the malinvestments and ensuring that those still-healthy industries are unable to lead the recovery. Unfortunately, Krugman truly is stuck in 1939, refusing to acknowledge that the very things he claims will give us recovery are leading us into the abyss.

There is one more outrageous point that he makes. Earlier in the article, he writes:

O.K., there’s something I didn’t tell you: The paper in question was published in June 1939. Just a few months later, World War II broke out, and the United States — though not yet at war itself — began a large military buildup, finally providing fiscal stimulus on a scale commensurate with the depth of the slump. And, in the two years after that article about the impossibility of rapid job creation was published, U.S. nonfarm employment rose 20 percent — the equivalent of creating 26 million jobs today. 

 As Robert Higgs noted in his paper on the alleged "prosperity" of World War II, the notion that World War II was "good for the economy" and made Americans prosperous is fraudulent, period. Today, prosperity will come if Americans prepare for an invasion of space aliens.

Krugman: Not enough economic destruction

There are times when Paul Krugman is merely outrageous, and then there are times when he really lets himself go, and today's column reflects the latter. In one fell swoop, Krugman exposes his ignorance on money, on investment, and on economics itself.

I'll go further. Krugman is not advocating a real economic recovery; instead, he is demanding that the Federal Reserve System and Ben Bernanke take the kind of action that will be utterly destructive and thus guarantee that in order to have a real economic recovery, people in the United States are going to have to suffer the kind of pain that would not have been necessary had we done the right thing four years ago and, for that matter, 11 years ago.

The theme of Krugman's column is explained by his title, "Not enough inflation." In other words, we don't need less destruction of the dollar; we need more, and make no mistake about it, inflation is the destruction of the value of money.

As Steve Horowitz pointed out in my recent post, Keynesians like Krugman cannot differentiate between factors of production and consumer goods, nor can they differentiate among capital and other factors. For that matter, Krugman cannot even explain what real investment is. Take the following from his column:

How so? For one thing, large parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years; this debt burden is arguably the main thing holding private spending back and perpetuating the slump. Modest inflation would, however, reduce that overhang — by eroding the real value of that debt — and help promote the private-sector recovery we need. Meanwhile, other parts of the private sector (like much of corporate America) are sitting on large hoards of cash; the prospect of moderate inflation would make letting the cash just sit there less attractive, acting as a spur to investment — again, helping to promote overall recovery. (Emphasis mine)

This simply is an outrage; no other word will do. What Krugman is saying is that inflation would create incentives to invest, which is something that no real economist would say. As Robert Higgs has noted here, and here, the economy is lacking the kind of long-term investment that is needed for real recovery, and inflation will NOT bring that about.

In fact, inflation would have the opposite effect, as it would create even more regime uncertainty and would force people to put it into things where the value of money can be sheltered, and that would NOT be the kind of long-term investment that requires both confidence and low interest rates and, yes, low or no inflation. As one can see in this column, such investment is not even on Krugman's radar screen; after all, to a Keynesian, the real value of investment is the short-term spending that takes place and little or nothing else.

Once again, we also see the "Goldstein" analogy that Krugman is fond of giving. Yeah, if it were not for those evil right-wingers, we would have lots of inflation and lots of prosperity. What Krugman does not say is that the kinds of "investments" promoted by inflation are not sustainable because they are malinvestments. That is the hard truth, even if Krugman denies it.

One of Krugman's constant revisionist themes is that the 1970s were a golden age of investment and economic growth. He can throw all the charts he wants, but we had two serious recessions, double-digit inflation, price controls, and a lot of economic chaos. Yes, since Krugman and I were in college at the same time, both of us remember what it was like, and people were not spinning the happy tales that Krugman wants us to believe.

If Krugman is successful in encouraging Ben Bernanke to unleash the wolves of inflation, the result is not going to be one with a happy ending. The economy still will be moribund, there will be lots of unemployment, and people will have to deal with higher real prices, which means they will become poorer with no hope in sight. True, Krugman believes that somehow the Fed can "manage" inflation rates of 4-6 percent quite easily, but as F.A. Hayek once noted, inflation creates a "tiger by the tail" situation, and it does not take long for the situation to get out of hand.

And when and if it does, then look for Krugman and his acolytes to call for price controls, capital controls, and all other modes of coercion, as though the state can coerce an economy into prosperity. Don't kid yourselves about what Krugman is demanding; he is calling for economic destruction in the name of promoting economic recovery. We cannot have both.

Is government spending really "investment"?

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman claims that the lack of spending by state and local government is undermining our "weak recovery." Of course, he understands that the decline in state and local government spending is coming about because the economies of those states are not generating the same amount of tax revenue as they did before the depression hit.

Now, while Krugman has not called for states and local governments to raise taxes per se, he sees the Sugar Daddy role being filled by the federal government, which should incur even more debt and borrow into near-oblivion, apparently. He writes:

That is, we’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

What an utter disaster.

The comments raise two questions in my mind. The first is the issue of idle resources versus malinvestments. To the Keynesian, all it takes to employ all "idle" or unemployed resources is more spending and, if needed, outright bailouts. (Bailouts always are good if they divert resources to politically-powerful labor unions.)

To Krugman and other Keynesians, the cause of the downturn is simple: spending slowed down and government must take up the slack or we will go down the economic drain. Austrians see things differently, believing that government policies, both monetary and fiscal, directed resources toward unsustainable ends, namely housing. Furthermore, Austrians believe that by continuing to direct massive amounts of spending toward unsustainable projects like "green energy," the government and the Obama administration simply and surely are blocking the recovery.

The second issue is that of what Krugman calls "investments." All of this reminds me of Bill Clinton's throwaway campaign line, "We're going to invest in education and the environment," thus creating a new term for what government always has done: spend. All of the rhetoric and all of the spending in the world will not make government schools more effective, as study after study has demonstrated that per pupil spending does not equate to good education results, as there are so many other factors that contribute to educational success.

As for government "investment" in "green energy" products, we are seeing Obama-funded firms go belly-up as though they were on a failure assembly line. Furthermore, even with all sorts of "green" mandates, this business still sucks in resources and spits out unemployment.

Take the Obama administration's continued obsession with high-speed rail, an obsession that Gov. Jerry Brown in California seems to share. It doesn't matter to Krugman or Brown or anyone else that the numbers that the government uses for high-speed rail are utter fiction, nor does it matter that financially high-speed rail would be a black hole.

No, the California high-speed rail project that Obama and Brown want is yet another example of "investment" by government that really is nothing more than a vast welfare scheme for the politically-connected -- with everyone else being saddled with the bill. Furthermore, Krugman assumes that political issues don't factor into "government investment," as though politicians cared only about financial success. As I see it, the vast amount of "government investment" is pure spending. (Yes, yes, we have roads, but roads are a tiny, tiny portion of overall government spending. And Keynesians assume that if government funds something, then it never ever could exist outside of government funding.)

In the end, Krugman is left to claim that that when state and local spending fall, that means that resources actually are disappearing, as the only way to make things appear is via government spending. In reality, the government spending, the bailouts, and the vast increase in the burden of government has assured us that this depression will last a long, long time, and Krugman will continue to call for even more destruction all the while claiming he just wants us to have a recovery.

Do we need jobs, or do we need real economic growth?

In my criticisms of Keynesians in general and Paul Krugman in particular, I have said that the Keynesians tend to ignore simple Opportunity Cost. For example, in his best-seller, The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman declared that printing money in the face of a so-called "liquidity trap" provided what he called a "free lunch."

Well, it turns out that Alan Blinder has rejected the notion of a "free lunch," or at least he claims to reject it. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Blinder, while calling for a new "jobs" program, admits that his suggestion is "mitigation," not a "cure," as "there is no such thing as a free lunch." Of course, he then goes and lays out the plans for what essentially is a "free lunch" when it comes to dealing with the economy, as we shall see shortly.

Krugman, on the other hand, takes a more "bold" approach. Unlike Blinder, who advocates a "jobs tax credit" to employers, Krugman wants massive new borrowing and spending by the government in order to create a vast federal employment apparatus. He asks, in a rejoinder to those who say the "stimulus" did not work:

Everybody knows that President Obama tried to stimulate the economy with a huge increase in government spending, and that it didn’t work. But what everyone knows is wrong.

Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.

Krugman further claims that most of the "stimulus" actually "consisted of tax cuts, not spending," and the government's attempt for mortgage relief has failed because the government has not tried it, spending only $2 billion of the $46 Congress set aside for the program. Even if that is true, Krugman has not explained how mortgage relief would jump-start the economy.

If there is a difference between Blinder and Krugman (even though they both teach at Princeton University), however, I would say that Blinder believes that any "jobs program" would provide temporary relief while Krugman seems to be a True Believer that new government jobs would promote new spending which would give the economy what he calls "traction" to move on by itself. What neither person seems to understand, however, is that unemployment is a symptom of the current economic problems, not a cause.

Now, to a certain extent, Krugman kind of understands this, but only on a most superficial and, frankly, circular basis. In Krugman's analysis, spending creates jobs, but then people with jobs also spend, so if the economy suffers from a lack of spending which causes people to lose their jobs, then the government should start spending so that people can get their jobs back so they can spend.

Neither person seems to have a clue as to what an economy really is, and neither seems to understand even the most fundamental basis of production. To them, an economy is something that just happens; spend the money and an economy magically appears. And if an "economist" cannot even understand an economy or only can explain its workings in the most superficial and mechanistic fashion (Y = C + I + G), then he or she pretty much is incapable of understanding that a "job" is not an independent and random creation of the state, but rather the employment of factors of production that is purposeful in nature.

To Keynesians such as Krugman and Blinder, factors of production really are homogeneous; as long as money is spent, it will flow evenly to all of those factors that currently are unemployed and lift them back into employment at the same time. Yet, one cannot understand the dynamics of a recovery unless one understands the simple fact that factors of production are heterogeneous.

This goes back to the Keynesian view of the boom, which Keynesians see as a good thing. When the bust occurs, argue Keynesians, government must spend to "fill the hole" (in Krugman's words) in order to keep boom conditions flowing. However, the booms do not go off the rails because of a lack of spending per se, but rather because the boom is based in large part upon spending and investment that is directed toward lines of production that cannot be sustained because consumer spending is trying to move in a different direction.

The contraction, or recession, actually is a corrective action in which the malinvested resources no longer are receiving the same amounts of investment money, with entrepreneurs looking for those lines of production that are sustainable, given consumer preferences and choices. The bitter irony is that the government's "stimulus" actions, along with its regulatory initiatives, are trying to keep resources in those unsustainable lines of production and actually are blocking a recovery.

Furthermore, President Obama has painted himself into a corner. By continuing the Bush initiatives to deal with the original crisis and prevent the necessary liquidation of some lines of production, Obama also has guaranteed that an ensuing correction will be much worse than it would have been had the economy been able to take a corrective course four years ago, and I think that he and his advisers know it.

Unfortunately, Obama continues to insist that he can do the impossible: direct investment into lines of production that are unsustainable in a free market (such as "green energy") and blame Bush and the Republicans for everything. (And Bush and the Republicans bear a lot of responsibility, but Obama is in his third year of office and he only has made things worse.)

The sad fact is that the American economy has not yet seen the very necessary economic correction that needs to happen before we can have a real recovery. The political classes have done all they can to block the correction, which means that we are going to have the worst of both worlds: economic stagnation. There is a way out, but neither the "elite" economists nor the people in political power are willing to take that route, and everyone else will pay for their foolish choices.

Greece: Creating prosperity through spending, Right?

A constant theme of Paul Krugman's columns and blog posts is the idea that prosperity is created through spending, lots and lots of spending. When the economy started tanking seriously four years ago, Krugman and politicians of both parties immediately started to push more spending as a way to end the downturn.

Obama himself after taking office declared that the USA would spend its way out of this recession/depression and the only condemnation that Krugman could muster of this strategy was that the administration wasn't borrowing and spending enough money. Since the government could create its own "money" at a whim, the only limit on spending our way back to boom conditions was a political will to increase the government's debt obligations to future taxpayers.

Then came the Greek crisis. Consistent with his Keynesian viewpoint, Krugman said that the "solution" for Greece either would be huge European Union bailouts or a return of Greece to its own currency, abandoning the Euro. Anyone who might argue that governments were cannibalizing future resources and production in order to maintain current spending was condemned as a promoter of "austerity," which in Wonderland is a Truly Evil Person.

Ever since joining the EU, the Greeks have acted as though Paul Krugman were their Guiding Light. As this article demonstrates, Greece's government, courtesy of EU taxpayers, has created boondoggle after boondoggle complete with a bloated public payroll:

Even on a stiflingly hot summer's day, the Athens underground is a pleasure. It is air-conditioned, with plasma screens to entertain passengers relaxing in cool, cavernous departure halls - and the trains even run on time.

There is another bonus for users of this state-of-the-art rapid transport system: it is, in effect, free for the five million people of the Greek capital.

With no barriers to prevent free entry or exit to this impressive tube network, the good citizens of Athens are instead asked to 'validate' their tickets at honesty machines before boarding. Few bother.

This is not surprising: fiddling on a Herculean scale — from the owner of the smallest shop to the most powerful figures in business and politics — has become as much a part of Greek life as ouzo and olives.

Indeed, as well as not paying for their metro tickets, the people of Greece barely paid a penny of the underground’s £1.5 billion cost — a ‘sweetener’ from Brussels (and, therefore, the UK taxpayer) to help the country put on an impressive 2004 Olympics free of the city’s notorious traffic jams.

The transport perks are not confined to the customers. Incredibly, the average salary on Greece’s railways is £60,000, which includes cleaners and track workers - treble the earnings of the average private sector employee here.

The overground rail network is as big a racket as the EU-funded underground. While its annual income is only £80 million from ticket sales, the wage bill is more than £500m a year — prompting one Greek politician to famously remark that it would be cheaper to put all the commuters into private taxis.

Not that any of this would matter in Keynesian thinking. Indeed, the Greek Underground would be considered the Ultimate Exercise in Creating Prosperity because it spends lots of money, and anyone who might protest that this is a huge waste of resources is an Enemy of the People.

The picture painted of Greece in the above article is a picture you won't read on Krugman's page or in the NY Times, as the omission of Greek wastefulness really highlights where Keynesians and Austrians part company (not that they ever walked together, anyway).

In the Keynesian/Krugman view, spending is separate from production and, to be honest, spending is the key to producing wealth. If you spend, they will produce.

I note this because I can anticipate the objection: Demand drives production, and even Austrians, with their emphasis upon the valuation of the factors of production being imputed by consumers placing value on the "final product," would admit to that. However, when Keynesians and Austrians speak of "demand," they are speaking in two different languages.

Keynesians couch demand in simple spending; put money into the hands of people, let them spend, and the economy magically will appear. (Chartalists go even further, claiming that because governments can claim a legal monopoly over money creation, that the amount of "demand" governments can create is infinite, since government is not "revenue constrained.")

Austrians, on the other hand, note that one cannot consume when one is not producing, and that Say's Law -- yes, that "tyrannical" Say's Law that Keynesians hate so much -- has something to tell us. The only way out of this world-wide depression is for governments to stop this massive borrowing and spending and permit the malinvestments -- and they are legion -- to liquidate and for the lines of production that are sustainable to be permitted to develop.

The current tragedy in Greece is the product of reckless spending and malinvestment. Unfortunately, neither the Greeks nor the economics faculty at Princeton are willing to face the facts.

"Spending" versus Consumption: Does Economic Theory Actually Assume People are Human?

Keynesians and Austrians have a lot of economic and philosophical differences, some of which I have tried to spell out on this blog. However, in my view, other than the implied assumption about "homogeneous factors" and the Keynesian view that one can do specific economic analysis with nothing but aggregates, perhaps the greatest gulf between Austrians and Keynesians comes in how people from those camps view actual human economic behavior.

I believe that Krugman, in this blog post ("The Economic Narrative"), does all of us a favor by explaining his position and unwittingly laying out the real differences between the Keynesians and Austrians. If I can reduce it to one sentence, it would be: Keynesians ignore the fact that human beings engage in purposeful economic behavior. Krugman writes:

A straight Keynesian analysis implied the need for a much bigger program, more oriented toward spending, than the administration proposed. And people like me said that at the time — we’re not talking about hindsight.

If, indeed, an economy were a mechanistic operation in which we robotically put inventory on the shelves and then "spend" so we can clear the shelves (so we can put more stuff on the shelves again), then Krugman would be correct. A government program to encourage spending would do the trick.

However, because what Krugman calls spending actually involves purposeful behavior by individuals, we are dealing with different perspectives on the matter. Krugman implies that an economy is made up of two detached arms, one that produces and the other that spends. They are disassociated from one another, and if spending does not occur in large enough amounts or quickly enough, then the other side breaks down.

Austrians, on the other hand, believe that the economy is a very complex web in which producers look to meet the needs of consumers, needs that consumers will meet by purchasing goods. This process is not mechanistic, by any means. Moreover, the processes are related; more production means more consumption, as the base of our "purchasing power" is not how much money government can put into the economy, but rather our ability to produce those goods that people want.

Although Krugman (as we saw in an earlier post) has recognized the presence of asset bubbles, he then turns around and denies that the boom produces systematic malinvestments. However, what does he think a bubble is, anyway? It is the creation of malinvestments.

Krugman Takes on Hayek? Spare Me!

Well, it seems that Paul Krugman is taking on F.A. Hayek, but, as usual, Krugman really has no idea as to what Hayek was saying in 1932, and what Austrians are saying now. First, let us look at Krugman's argument:

...going back to Hayek: attributing the failure to recover to trade restrictions was, in a way, characteristic. Hayek, like his modern followers, never could get his mind wrapped around the fact that the key problem in depressions, and the key observation his theory needed to explain, wasn’t misallocation of labor and other resources — it was mass unemployment. It’s not surprising to see that in the depths of depression he was focused on removing what was, in the end, a minor source of allocative inefficiency. But it’s a stark reminder of the extent to which he really, truly, didn’t get it. (Emphasis mine)

Now, I have read a lot more of Hayek than has Krugman, and never once does Hayek blame the Great Depression on either Smoot-Hawley OR "allocative inefficiency." Hayek, instead, looks at the Great Depression in two stages.

First, there is the original crisis in which the monetary authorities forced down interest rates and allocated resources into lines of production which could not be sustained. THAT is the misallocation of resources of which Krugman speaks.

However, there is NO reason that this misallocation or series of malinvestments should LEAD TO A GREAT DEPRESSION. Hayek NEVER said that, so Krugman is misrepresenting him. (Gosh, I'm shocked, SHOCKED. Krugman is misrepresenting what someone is saying.)

Second, the Great Depression came about because of government RESPONSES to the original crises caused by the malinvestment of resources. Smoot-Hawley was one of the causes, but there were others, which Murray N. Rothbard lays out in his classic America's Great Depression.

Unfortunately, Krugman never will understand that point, not that the guy cares.

Spend Now and Save Later? Right

In the world of Keynesian economics, there really is no individual behavior that is purposeful. People don't "spend" because they believe that the purchase of a specific good or service will make them better off, but because they are "buying back the product" they have produced as workers.

This is what one might call circular logic, and it reminds me of the imaginary exchange that Professor Israel Kirzner used to explain the circular flow of Keynesianism:

FIRST PERSON to SECOND PERSON: Why do you eat breakfast?

SECOND PERSON: So I can go to work.

FIRST PERSON: Why do you go to work?

SECOND PERSON: So I can eat breakfast.

As I read Krugman's column this morning, I get that same sense of circularity, as he claims that we should be spending now to get the economy out of depression. Saving, he argues, can come in the future: "The responsible thing, then, is to spend now, while planning to save later."

Of course, when he speaks of "saving," he means government budget balancing, as though government were the only legitimate economic entity. In Krugman's view, government spending is a net plus; there is no real opportunity cost to borrowing and printing money. Instead, it is what Keynes called, "Turning stones into bread."

Furthermore, whatever the Congressional Budget Office presents (since Congress is controlled by Democrats) is taken as Gospel Truth:

At the moment, as you may have noticed, the U.S. government is running a large budget deficit. Much of this deficit, however, is the result of the ongoing economic crisis, which has depressed revenues and required extraordinary expenditures to rescue the financial system. As the crisis abates, things will improve. The Congressional Budget Office, in its analysis of President Obama’s budget proposals, predicts that economic recovery will reduce the annual budget deficit from about 10 percent of G.D.P. this year to about 4 percent of G.D.P. in 2014.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Even if the government’s annual borrowing were to stabilize at 4 percent of G.D.P., its total debt would continue to grow faster than its revenues. Furthermore, the budget office predicts that after bottoming out in 2014, the deficit will start rising again, largely because of rising health care costs.

This whole thing is predicated upon the Keynesian "solution" of massive borrowing and printing of money actually bringing about a recovery. However, what if this continues to make things worse?

He gives healthcare costs as a future problem, but what is his solution? Give the state more power:

So America has a long-run budget problem. Dealing with this problem will require, first and foremost, a real effort to bring health costs under control — without that, nothing will work. It will also require finding additional revenues and/or spending cuts. As an economic matter, this shouldn’t be hard — in particular, a modest value-added tax, say at a 5 percent rate, would go a long way toward closing the gap, while leaving overall U.S. taxes among the lowest in the advanced world.

Again, he speaks of lowering costs as being an administrative issue, as though government can simply order "costs" to be lower. That is nonsense. Costs are opportunity costs, but Krugman treats them as simply numbers that government can order to be lower, and that's that. Once again, he sees an economy simply as an administrative entity that can be controlled by fiat.

It is true that while he calls for a five percent Value Added Tax, he does hold to his Keynesian roots in saying that this is not the time for new tax increases. Yet, I have seen him writing NOTHING critical about current attempts by Congress and state governments to raise taxes, and he even has hinted that perhaps we should go back to the old rates that existed before 1981. (He told a public gathering at the Southern Economic Association meetings in 2004 -- in response to my question -- that the old rates were "insane," but he seems to have been backtracking some since then.)

So, while Krugman is being somewhat consistent with Keynesian thinking, he has not dealt with the problem of massive malinvestments in the economy, made worse by government policies. To Krugman, of course, there is only spending, so there can be no malinvestments -- by definition. There is only the administrative, fiat economy.

Krugman: F.A. Hayek Wants You to Lose Your Job

One of the reasons I started this blog was to highlight the real differences between Keynesian "economics" and the economics of the Austrian School, and to defend Austrian concepts against the missives coming from Paul Krugman of Princeton University and the New York Times. Thank goodness, mine is not the best or most articulate voice from the Austrian camp, and I have highlighted others, including Robert Higgs, who I believe is infinitely a better economist than Krugman.

Krugman over the years has refused to explain the Austrian viewpoints in anything but outright caricatures and exaggerations. For example, here we get what he calls the "Hangover Theory," which outright misrepresents everything written by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard on the subject of business cycle theory.

In this June 14 post on his NYT blog, Krugman once again refuses to take a serious look at what the Austrians claim, deciding, instead, to place them in a false light in order to make them seem as though they are united by one thing: hatred of humanity. He takes the following quote from Hayek as his example of Austrian cruelty:

…still more difficult to see what lasting good effects can come from credit expansion. The thing which is most needed to secure healthy conditions is the most speedy and complete adaptation possible of the structure of production.If the proportion as determined by the voluntary decisions of individuals is distorted by the creation of artificial demand resources [are] again led into a wrong direction and a definite and lasting adjustment is again postponed.The only way permanently to ‘mobilise’ all available resources is, thereforeto leave it to time to effect a permanent cure by the slow process of adapting the structure of production.

If one reads Hayek carefully, he is saying that when governments hold down interest rates to artificially low levels, they actually BLOCK the economic recovery, yet all Krugman can see is "persistent high unemployment." Krugman writes:

These days, relatively few economists are willing to say straight out that they regard persistent high unemployment as a good thing. But they find reasons to oppose any and all suggestions to use government policy — including monetary policy — to alleviate the slump. Same as it ever was.

Notice that Hayek has not said any such thing, but to Krugman, free markets and an economy not steered by government must by definition have "persistent high unemployment," although he does not explain why that would be so. (In fact, Krugman seems to believe that he really is above any such explanation, as his declaration alone should be regarded as ex cathera.)

In claiming that economists like Joseph Schumpeter and Hayek were champions of depression, Krugman (and his partner-in-crime Brad DeLong) violently misrepresent the Austrian viewpoint. The Austrians don't claim that the Great Depression was a "good thing," but rather the Great Depression occurred precisely because governments intervened in the economy to prop up malinvestments and to keep the necessary liquidations from occurring. Because of those policies, the economy got both liquidation AND high unemployment.

Unfortunately, Krugman and DeLong never see that simple point. In the Austrian view, we have EITHER liquidation of malivestments or long-term high unemployment, with any high amounts of unemployment coming from the liquidation process being temporary. Krugman and the Keynesians, on the other hand, believe that once the liquidation process begins, the economy never recovers. Ever.

As Robert Higgs writes about these "vulgar Keynesians":

With their great, simple faith in the efficacy of government spending as a macroeconomic balance wheel, vulgar Keynesians disregard malinvestment, past and future, and support government spending in excess of the government’s revenues, the difference being covered by borrowing. Of course, they favor central-bank actions to make such borrowing cheaper for the government. In fact, they chronically prefer “easy money” to more restrictive central-bank policies. As noted previously, they prefer easy money not only because it lowers the cost of financing the government’s deficit spending, but also because it induces individuals to borrow more money and spend it for consumption goods ― such increased consumption spending being viewed as always a good thing, notwithstanding the recent near-zero rate of saving by individuals in the United States. Reflecting on the vulgar Keynesian attitude toward Fed policy, I keep recalling a old country song whose refrain was: “older whiskey, faster horses, younger women, more money.”

Vulgar Keynesians do not spend much time worrying about potential inflation; on the contrary, they are obsessed with an irrational fear of even the slightest hint of deflation. If inflation should become an undeniable problem, we may count on them to support price controls, which, they are convinced on the basis of sketchy knowledge of such controls during World War II, can be made to work well.

I think that pretty much says it.

Is it "Austerity," or is it Responsibility?

If the Keynesian cat were not out of the bag already, Paul Krugman's series of blog posts the past couple of days totally have smoked out his position: Only massive government spending can keep the economies afloat. Like another Paul of centuries ago, Mr. Revere, Krugman is on his horse (Named Mr. Keynes?) crying out, "The recession is coming back! The recession is coming back!"

Now, I tend to find myself in rare agreement with Krugman, except for different reasons. As I have written many times before, Krugman sees an economy simply in terms of spending: when people spend money, times are good, and if they stop spending money, it creates bad times. When people don't spend, then it is up to government to pick up the slack.

But what happens when governments decide not to increase their massive debts and slow their own spending? Krugman (and all Keynesians) believe that such action will create the conditions of the "double-dip recession." Whether it is Canada or Germany or whatever, the message always is the same: spend, spend, spend, or we are doomed, and anyone who disagrees is just plain wrong.

The problem I have with Krugman's protestations is twofold: first, I think that he has his causality wrong in that I believe people stop spending because the economy is in recession; and second, there is no mechanism by which people themselves start spending in order to keep the recovery moving. As I recent wrote in this blog post:

Contra Krugman and his employer, recessions don't occur because people spend less; people spend less because the economy is in recession. Furthermore, the only way to get OUT of the recession is to permit the fundamentals to get back into balance. This is not some sort of Zen "balance," but rather a reflection of the real opportunity costs of the factors of production.

Second, it is clear that Krugman and Collins and Company are clueless on what it will take to end this crisis, as they believe that the way to END the crisis is to continue upsetting the economic fundamentals, as though they did not matter. We have to face the issue that if this spending spree continues, we are headed for disaster, as the economy slowly but surely will deteriorate and our ability to repair things in the future will be even more difficult.

We also have to keep in mind that no government on earth is engaging in true fiscal responsibility. The European governments have huge welfare costs that have undermined the productive capacity of the Continent for years, and China still has massive numbers of unproductive state-run enterprises that not only drag down the economy, but force resources in the directions where the markets never would send them.

What Krugman calls "austerity" really is nothing more than some modest spending cutbacks by governments around the world. Furthermore, the huge spending sprees that governments have been creating, financed by debt and printing money, only have extended and expanded the malinvestment of resources, and the only way we can have a true recovery will be the liquidation of those malinvested resources and transferal to those uses that follow the directions set by consumers.

I am not speaking of a morality play in which we now need "austere" policies. Instead, I am speaking of the simple fact that the unsustainable booms of both the Clinton and Bush years pushed the economy in the wrong direction, and until we are able (and willing) to permit the fundamentals of the economy to get into balance, we are going to see these recessionary conditions continue.

It is true that in the short run, so-called austerity will result in even more unemployment, but if we don't stop this fiscal foolishness soon, we are going to have those rates of unemployment -- and worse -- anyway. The cure will be painful, but if we listen to Krugman, there will be no cure, only more disease.

Liquidity Trap or Malinvestments?

One of the standard Krugman-Keynesian beliefs is that assets are homogeneous, and that the only thing that matters in an economy is spending. (This is separate from real-live purposeful consumption, which is the end of all productive activity.)

In this line of thinking, a "liquidity trap" view of things makes perfect sense, and Krugman is fond of claiming that the U.S. economy, like Japan 20 years ago, suffers from such a condition. In his post on inflation and Japan, he repeats the old canard that deflation is the enemy and that inflation means nothing, at least at the present time.

(I find it interesting that in yesterday's post, he claims that "inflation did have to be brought down," although he does not specify what that was so, given that at the time, the nation's rate of unemployment was unacceptably high. There is no real consistency here, except to throw out partisan political barbs of "Democrats good, Republicans bad," which is acceptable at DNC headquarters, but I do not think is such when coming from a supposed Nobel Prize winner in economics.)

According to Krugman-Keynesian doctrine, an economy is in a "liquidity trap" if interest rates have a lower bound of zero or near-zero, yet businesses are not borrowing at a rate necessary to keep the economy going at the boom rates. That is why Krugman is fond of repeating his contention that current government borrowing only is replacing lost business borrowing, as though all borrowing has its use ONLY in the money spent.

When the economy is in such a "liquidity trap," according to Keynesians, then the only thing that can "stimulate" an economy is more government spending. That is because, according to Keynesians, there is no mechanism within a market economy that will allow economic activity to be generated, as though it were a dead battery that needs to be "jump-started" from the outside.

In a recent post on the Freeman Online, I take issue with the Keynesian approach, pointing out that the real issue we face -- as did Japan two decades ago -- is that government intervention has generated massive amounts of malinvestment. Our current situation is not a "liquidity trap," but rather is one in which the government has kept the malinvestments alive through the intervention via the Federal Reserve System.

For example, the huge amounts of resources poured into propping up the banks and other financial houses, along with keeping General Motors and Chrysler alive, drain the economy of productive capacity. Furthermore, the Obama administration clearly has shown itself to be hostile to real productivity and profitability, labeling profitable firms as being the cause of our problems and calling for higher taxes and other measures to cut the healthy firms down to the level of the unhealthy ones.

The real problem that Japan faced was that its economy had generated malinvestments during its previous boom, and those malinvestments needed to be liquidated, not propped up. Instead, the government tried to keep everything afloat and the result was the "lost decade." Likewise, we are seeing the same thing here.

Krugman, as a True Believer, does not see that. Instead, he really seems to hold that all assets are homogeneous, profits are a drain on the economy, and high taxes and the iron hand of the state will guide us to prosperity. This will not be the case, but I doubt seriously that he will change his tune, given the public worship that intellectuals and the political classes have bestowed upon him.

No Paul, Austrian Economists are Not Self-Hating Keynesians

In a follow-up to his earlier anti-Austrian missive, Paul Krugman gets it wrong again (and again, and again...). First, Krugman's own words:

As predicted, many of the comments to my Austrian economics post are of the form “Well, of course employment rises when investment is expanding, and falls when the investment is falling — in the first case the economy is booming while in the second it’s slumping.”

As I tried to explain, however, that’s assuming the conclusion; there’s no “of course” about it. Why do periods when the economy is investing more correspond to booms, while periods when it’s investing less correspond to slumps? That’s easy to understand in Keynesian terms — but the whole Austrian claim is that they’re an alternative to Keynesianism. Yet I have never seen a clear explanation of this central point.

Actually, Austrians have explained this issue, but Krugman is not going to listen, and his way to argue is to create a straw man and then claim it is the real thing. The thing to keep in mind is that during a boom, there is malinvestment going on, not "more investment." There is a huge difference.

Austrians are saying that when government artificially holds down interest rates (something Krugman supports), investments are moved into areas that correspond well to the change in time preferences that are reflected when interest rates fall in a free market, due to increases in savings. However, when the government engages in artificially lowering the rates, then the investments do not match the spending patterns of consumers, and ultimately a crisis occurs, followed by a bust.

Krugman, on the other hand, believes that it is good for government to hold down the rates, but then apply regulation to stop potential bubbles. Here he is in his own words:

But did I call for low interest rates? Yes. In my view, that’s not what the Fed did wrong. We needed better regulation to curb the bubble — not a policy that sacrificed output and employment in order to limit irrational exuberance.

This is more telling -- and more contradictory to the Keynesian arguments than what Krugman will admit, for he is hinting that low interest rates can lead to a bubble, which is what Austrians would call malinvestments (or maybe malinvestments on steroids). However, he believes that government can head off such malinvestments through regulation.

This is very interesting, for on one hand, he claims that it is all aggregate demand, but on the other hand, he is saying that forcing down interest rates can have consequences if government does not try to regulate away the excesses. However, he cannot have it both ways. Indeed, he is accusing us of employing back-door Keynesianism, but then tries to do the same with Austrian theory.