From JustMeHere's sister thread
This is one of several articles sent to me by a TRUMP SUPPORTER.
This article is about how Trump is in support of nuclear war between Japan and North Korea because it would help the US economy.
I don't even have any more words. All words, gone. I am speechless.
Dead Link Removed
Help the US economy?
Ok-------this sort of thing highlights the fact that there is no concern whatsoever about the loss of human life-----innocent human life! It all boils down to money. Millions of lives would be lost to fix our economy?!?
Are people really this stupid?
Well spotted and unfortunately yes, there are some otherwise extremely bright individuals including some Nobel prize winners in economics, who really are that stupid.
When was the last time there was a war of this proportion that the US didn't get involved in?
The various parts of the leadership just cannot seem to keep out of wars. It's very much what Eisenhower warned of in his speech about the military-industrial-intellectual complex.
When there is political opposition to wars, with very few exceptions, it isn't a principled opposition to war (Ron Paul is one of the few who genuinely was principled in his opposition), the opposition is more that it isn't a war that appeals to neocons (ok, that might be difficult, neocons seem to worship wars more than they detest political opponents) or it's a war that doesn't appeal to progressives.
When was the last time that a war helped our economy?
WWII-------but that was a very VERY different time.
I'll make the argument a little further down, that WWII certainly did not help "the economy" in the sense of the word that I'm guessing we probably both use it -
that is; an economy as the informal network of people making things and doing things that other people want to make their lives more comfortable and enjoyable; food, clothes, cars, houses, furniture, books, films, shops selling things, people doing things that other people like - acting, singing, serving meals and drinks with a friendly smile. Doctoring, nursing, therapy-izing, insuring, mending.
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The idea that war or any other destruction (hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, plagues...) make us richer, is the
Broken Window Fallacy, writ large.
If Trump, Paul Krugman or anyone else thinks that destruction makes us richer - rather than inflict destruction on people like us; why don't they employ someone to Blow the trump and or Krugman house up? torch their own car? or destroy some of their other stuff?
Amanda summarises the broken window fallacy and its application to war with chapters 2 and 3 of Hazlitt (for anyone who hasn't seen it already)
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So how can people be confused, that they think war is good for the economy?
Historical background
From the time of Francis Bacon (1561 - 1629), there has been a school of thought that knowledge can only be gained by measuring things, and collecting masses and masses of data.
It sort of ties in with John Locke's "Tabula Rasa" (blank slate) theory of mind, that "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses"
Leibniz added "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except for the intellect itself"
We have to know what data it is relevant to collect before we can draw any conclusions from it, for example, we are able to know before we start that we are never going to find data showing that 2+2 does not equal 4, even if we are looking at male and female rabbits, or hungry lions and tender lambs.
In late nineteenth and the early 20th century, the Progressive era ushered in the idea that the economy needed to be planned, that important decisions could not be left to the vagaries of an anarchy of production.
Pressure for that came from several directions;
Big businesses and financiers, looking to regulate competition out of existence or to bring competitors under their control (the Morgans and Rockerfellers, and others (eg Mc Cormic) had been attempting to create cartels or monopolies on the unhampered market, respectively with railroads, standard oil and agricultural machinery, and in each instance they had failed to keep cheaper competitors from springing up, so they never got to reap the monopoly profits that they wanted)
Well meaning social reformers, looking for improved conditions, for production of more of something, or less of something else (less liquor for example).
Academics and technocrats - maybe they were not going to manage to be Plato's philosopher-kings but they could certainly have power and prestige as philosopher to the king, and managing the new bureaucracies.
and of course politicians who would get their names on the laws that would need to be enacted in order to force these plans to happen.
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What data was chosen
Ammongst the technocrats were people like Irving fisher, who sought to gather statistics in order to plan the economy
(it all begins to sound a bit like like Borat's; "...for make benefit great nation..."
One of the statistics which emerged, coming to especial prominance after Bretton Woods was Gross Domestic Product (
GDP)The nerdy stuff is at the link,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Expenditure_approach
That single figure contains both the money spent on the things which make life better, ice creams, washing powder, trips out, a holiday, new curtains...
and whatever government spends money on, which might be good, bad or indifferent as far as our lives go
What get's done with that dumb aggregated figure?
The theory which Keynes pretty much summed up in his "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", but that people like Hoover and FDR had been implementing before Keynes gave it a fake veneer of intellectual backing was;
that a government should print money and spend it on absolutely anything in order to rescue the economy from the supposed perils of falling aggregate expenditure.
suggestions for what the government
should spend money on have included;
- employing people to dig holes in the ground and fill them in again
- building Pyramids (John Maynard Keynes seemed to have a real fascination for pyramids)
- and of course war time production of bombs and killing people
None of those contribute to the things which support life, make it easier, or more enjoyable to live
Instead they take the raw materials and human labour that would have gone into making the things which we'd choose to buy,
and funnel them into destruction
but we can all rejoice because a stupid feckin number has increased - and to dumb feckin mathsturbating econometricians, that means that the economy has "
recovered"
It really is that stupid
