I am still reading a lot of poliblogs in between childrearing, just not posting much. I really should learn how to do shorter posts.
In that vein, I can't help but note how comprehensively stupid this piece is. Steve Kates, the most foolish man in Australia, not only posts complete faff from Ohanion and Cole attacking FDR's role in saving America from the Great Depression, he treats the linked press release as if it is new when it was written more than ten years ago, and the poliblogosphere's absolute smashing of the thing to pieces occurred three years ago when the authors got some undeserved WSJ publicity.
And if you don't like that repudiation, try this much similar C&O article mere days after Obama's inauguration, no doubt intended to scare him off any FDR-like heroics in the face of another Republican-created economic disaster, and compare it to actual reality since its publication in 2009. Wherever austerity has been tried, it has only exacerbated the pain. Wherever stimulus has been applied, it has worked (until, as in Japan recently, sabotaged by further austerity). Austrian economics teaches us nothing about how to solve today's problems. While no one is trying anything like the New Deal these days - more's the pity, because that's a lot of what we need right now - Keynesianism is still the best way to understand and address the situation in which we find ourselves.
It's as if Kates is not actually a professor of economics at RMIT at all, but some emaciated hermit who lives in a deep, dank hole, is fed via a bucket on a rope by Sinclair Davidson and for education is only allowed access to dot matrix printouts of Powerline and Drudge links. He's a cross between a victim of Buffalo Bill and a Japanese holdout. It's the only lucid explanation for his ongoing display of economic Aspberger's syndrome. Nobody can be that clueless.
Katesy is mad and stupid which sums up the Catallaxy readership.
ReplyDeleteThese laws were enacted in 1933. I didn't agree with them and Keynes was stridently against them!! wow you didn't read that in the article.
However in his first 4 years the USA had GDP growth almost reaching 10%. It went backwards in 1937 when both fiscal and monetary policy were reversed.
IMHO if Roosevelt had a policy of real wage reduction as advocated by Keynes ( wage illusion) the USA would have had full employment in 1936 just like Germany!
Evidence has never been a strong suit of Kastesy and never will. Mind you given he doesn't understand national accounts not basic statistics it would be hard for him to understand any evidence!