David Stockman reports:
It is fortunate that Paul Krugman writes a column for New York Times readers who want the party line sans all the economist jargon and regression equations. So here is the plain English gospel straight from the Keynesian oracle: The US economy is actually a giant bathtub which is constantly springing leaks. Accordingly, the route to prosperity everywhere and always is for agencies of the state—especially its central banking branch—to pump “demand” back into the bathtub until its full to the brim. Simple.
There's more:
True enough, the housing and credit bubbles did burst. But that’s exactly where the rubber meets the road in the debate between Keynesians and Austrians. The latter see bubbles as an artificial expansion of economic activity owing to cheap credit and the malinvestments which flow from it.
When bubbles inevitably burst, therefore, the artificial bloat in investment, output, jobs and incomes is eliminated—or in the old fashioned phrase, liquidated. Moreover, liquidation is the equivalent of purging a cancer; it removes a malignant growth, but does not reduce the true wealth of society or the sustainable living standard of the people.
The reason for this proposition is Say’s Law. That is, sustainable demand must originate in production; valid “spending” must be derived from the income earned in the process of supplying real goods and services. That includes spending that is financed by savers out of their own current incomes, and spending by transfer payment recipients that is financed by taxes on producers.
In that context, “money” is just an intermediary: it facilitates efficient exchanges between producers, but does not give rise to incremental “demand” that is independent of goods and services already delivered. Accordingly, when a credit bubble bursts there is no loss of honest, production-based aggregate demand. What disappears is artificial monetary demand that was originally enabled by the central bank and the financial system, not the productive main street economy.
Check out David Stockman's impressive charts in the article.
