And, of course, they ALWAYS talk about how their violence and force will end up helping the children.

Give me a break.  Taking trillions more in debt will feed the children?  With what, a worthless dollar? 

IF that idiocy was right, there’d be no reason to take on more debt, because these people have taken on more than ever in history already.

Crooks.

Counterfeiting (printing money out of thin air) is a crime.

Taking money under the threat of force – to give it to others – is also a crime…of theft.

So while your positions are generally covered in nice rhetoric – saving people, helping people eat, softening the blow, and the like – the reality is far, far different.

Continuing these kinds of policies will impoverish future generations and cause their children to starve. Continuing these kinds of policies requires stealing.

So while you may claim that some principles require “polishing” for practical use in society, I could never approve of the kind of polishing that gives support to those crimes.

Period.

I’ll note that our uses of the term “under” or “overproductive” mean largely the same thing, however, that being that our national means were put to improper and wasteful uses.

At no point have I suggested that this effort does not have a high cost; I only suggest that it is the only choice we have, and is a middle ground between two extremes. Either extreme creates its own problems; problems our society is simply NOT prepared to deal with.

This will be my final comment to this thread. I have no wish to duel “Austrian” groupthink, which is all well enough in theory, but could use a little more polish in reality as put into actual practice.

I find it distinctly discomforting about “Austrians” that you must either agree with 110% of it, or you won’t be considered to agree with any of it. This is very unfortunate, if any of you wish to see any of the principles involved move beyond internet discussions. And I say this as a donor to Dr. Paul’s campaign.

People can’t eat “Austrian Economics”, and anyone who expects anybody else to tell their children “we can’t eat today because it’s bad for the economy and will only make us starve twice as much in a few years” is asking too much of their fellow human beings.

“we” have been over-spending, over-consuming – and under saving.

Savings being a requirement for capital formation and development – which is the basis for the growth of wealth.

Problems caused by too much debt, too much borrowing, too much inflation and too much consumerism cannot – ever – be solved by more debt, more borrowing, more inflation, and more consumerism.

To think this will work or “soften the blow” is sheer insanity.

The only softening is for people who have something to gain by putting it off till later….on future generations.

Our economy survived a 15% tax (on top of the real taxes) couched as “Social Security”, all of which funds were promptly spent without regard to the day those obligations would come due.

Our economy has, so far, survived relatively intact from the era of preposterously easy credit, and the “trust bubble” it created.

What our economy can not, and will not survive is a currency that cannot be trusted backing an economy that is suspect.

We work on those two things, and I really do think the rest will sort itself out, over time.

But, we all agree on this: the bills are due. We can pay ‘em all up-front, cash-on-the-barrel-head, or we can refinance them one last time.

And if we get it wrong after this refinancing, we’ll be right back where we started, so all the more reason to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire.

When, say, a GM goes under, there’s hundreds if not thousands of workers at related companies that are thrown out of work. And from there, thousands more who formerly supplied THOSE companies. You know this, of course, it’s introductory economics.

The fact that we’ve been living beyond our means as a country intrinsically means that we’ve been over-producing and over-selling as a country, too, creating infrastructure that could not reliably be supported by our actual means.

This problem wasn’t created by a “bubble” on the demand side alone; in fact it was a classic inflationary chain reaction created by too many dollars chasing still-scarce resources, which introduced wage-pressure inflation (exacerbated by this country’s exorbitant health-care costs.)

The nation’s suppliers and service companies, then, immediately started jockeying for position, creating “jobs” and infrastructure that even a undergrad economics major would recognize as inherently unsustainable.

That jobs bubble, then, fed right back into the demand bubble, growing strength as it went, because, of course, virtually nobody has been saving anything. Workers and consumers both merrily assumed that things would never get bad again.

Money in, money out, prices rise and everybody’s happy….until somebody finally goes and pulls the one card that supports the whole house.

I always figured it’d be the generational hand-off between the Baby Boomers and the Xers and Yers that would produce this return to reality; unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of Baby Boomer CEOs were cooking the books and lying about the already half-fictitious numbers they were recording.

The signs of our present doom have been clearly visible for a decade, or longer, and folks like Pete Schiff have been the guys in the wilderness screaming about the reckoning to come. And they were largely ignored, or belittled as “Chicken Littles” until you no longer needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

But the “Austrian” viewpoint doesn’t take into account the real social results of a collapse of our economy: do you really think that this time around, folks will just queue up at soup kitchens, relatively calm and collected?

I don’t: I think our cities will become bloodbaths as larger and larger numbers of people turn to crime to feed their families, to say nothing of addictions and creature comforts. And we can’t rebuild an economy in the midst of a civil war, regardless of the relative magnitude.

Accordingly, we’ve got to manage this long-overdue return to economic reality in stages.

First, we keep everything from collapsing. That means, unfortunately, taking on the bills that a bunch of greedy brokers and CEOs, and yes, frivolous and dishonest consumers, floated on our national credit.

Which doesn’t seem fair, of course, until you realize that the costs of business would quickly get factored into consumer prices if there weren’t a “stimulus”. So we’d be paying for this mess either way.

Secondly, we should focus our “stimulus” efforts on things we desperately need anyway: infrastructure and tax credits for emerging technologies, particularly alternative fuels. We should all be writing our congresscritters at all levels on that particular point. If we’re going to piss away all this money, it’s important that we have some return on our investment.

We should take a long, hard look at subsidized health care, because it’s one of the factors allowing foreign corporations to out-compete our domestic manufacturers. That said, we must equally guard against such becoming a bloated bureaucracy that eats more social value than it creates.

Thirdly, once we’ve “right-sized” our economy, then some measure of basic trust must be restored, not just in our corporations, but our people as well. Corporations that are found to be “cooking the books” should be promptly sent into receivership; people who try the same in order to cadge a few consumer gadgets, or even entire houses, should be made equally accountable.

Contracts must be made to mean something again, and corporations must be induced to honor them, just as much as consumers.

Trust, simple trust, before even manufacturing, was what created America’s economic ascendancy, and we’ll never even get close to restoring what we’ve lost without creating a new atmosphere of trust in business.

In short, we’re going to have to teach our people to live all over again. We’ve allowed a childish “keep up with the joneses” mentality to persist entirely too long. It’s important to realize that there are people coming of age who have NEVER lived through times as tough as these. These people, if left alone, would simply create another bubble, ten years down the road.

And it is here that the “Austrian” viewpoint becomes most useful, and most instructive.

Finally, and this is perhaps the most important point, we need to learn to stop letting ourselves be distracted by pointless culture-war banter and ideological battles into voting for politicians that do not deliver results.

In bad times, we should be prepared to spend the monies we wisely saved during good times. And in good times, we should be extra careful to save for the proverbial rainy day. This is all common sense, of course.

Yes, this is going to result in inflation. Yes, there are hard times coming, regardless of which path we choose. Yes, choosing the “easier” path (really a longer term of economic malaise) has it’s own liabilities, and choosing the ruthlessly Austrian path has it’s advantages.

Sorry, but I’m not aware of any situation in history in which ideology grew food, or manufactured products. Ideology is a poor substitute for reality; a fact which is as true of pure capitalism as it is of communism. Our actions must be shaped by the realities they create and which they effect.

And if we don’t get a handle on all this –NOW– we risk facing the most fundamental ideology of all: that of Us versus Them, an ideology which is defined not by any ideas, but only what one person might have, that another can take away by force.

More specifically, how do you believe this will be accomplished?

You’re not incorrect, obviously. I would just stress the need to bring things to a soft landing, after which we must start living within our national means, or we will indeed face a continuing  set of economic lurches, each worse than the last.

(Just think of all the unique economic pressures that will be created by the large wave of Baby Boomers set to start retiring soon!)

We can achieve this by one or both of two ways: We can allow the natural political tit-for-tat to occur, or we can take action ourselves to make it clear to the folks in Washington that we’ll allow only so much of this free-spending behavior.

Obviously, my money’s on the former, because those of us who actually pay attention to national affairs with a neutral, solutions-oriented eye are too few in numbers to convince the politicos to do anything but what they wanted to do anyway.

What people need to recognize is that the collapse has already happened – and delaying the painful results of that collapse only does just that – it delays it for later.

The pain is going to come, whether it’s now or a few years down the line. The problem with putting it off until later is that the government is taking on more debt, and creating more inflation to delay the pain.

so the result? It’s going to be even worse when it finally hits.