spyxbckn…

Economics This Week’s Data The August Empire State Manufacturing Index came in at 12.1 versus expectations…

2. I’m quite sure you would appreciate it were I to stop calling you stupid,

3. Making stupid statements makes you look, well, stupid.

Have a wonderful day.

Exactly what have I been incorrect on and what have a backpedaled on? That I don’t buy your measure of regulatory burden? An appropriate response might be to justify WHY it’s a good measure, rather than calling me stupid. It’s like people who use number of patents as a measure for innovation. It doesn’t work. There’s absolutely no effort to engage the qualitative differences between regulations.

Further – it promotes the inaccurate idea that people who seriously consider regulatory options think that any regulation is a good regulation. Nobody is promoting that idea.

I’m continually amused by your stupidity, but you have grown tiresome.

I don’t know why objectivists would object to the FED.

I didn’t say a libertarian couldn’t serve on the FED, I said you can be certain one would never be appointed to the FED.

Lots of people have called themselves libertarian. Even Bill Clinton once suggested that he was libertarian. So has Bill Maher.

So how does one tell if a person actually is libertarian?

Having identified myself as libertarian since 1980, I do have some qualification on the subject.

You have my argument exactly backwards, S Andrews. Go back and reread it. Of course during the war years the GDP growth was the strongest because it was during the war years that deficit spending reached unprecedented peaks. What FDR and Hoover did before the war spending was child’s play and didn’t get us out of the slump. The war spending vindicates Keynesianism. Now, because of the NATURE of war spending and it’s reliance on rationing, there was no shortage of aggregate demand afterwards (as Samuelson feared there would be).

RE: “Who cares whose program it is, so long as it is part of regular dive that keynesians take into psychbabble, which often happens when they can’t explain economic phenomena”

I’m not sure what you’re even trying to say here. All I was saying was that Keynesian fiscal policy doesn’t necessitate rationing. It just happened during the war because of the conditions of the war.

RE: “Question is not whether one would expect unemployment, but why it didn’t turn into a “wage/price spiral”.”

Inflation was up – how could their be a wage-price spiral if aggregate demand was strong despite the government pull-back (for reasons I mentioned above), and inflation is up. What possible factor could push us into a wage-price spiral?

Maybe you just misunderstood my answer: there is good reason to expect some unemployment – but they’re all reasons for frictional unemployment, not structural unemployment.

As you say, they are disciplined by the price mechanism and the possibility of competition.

Anything the government does is anti-competitive by nature.

I saw him a couple months ago on Connecticut Ave., the day of his Congressional testimony where he admitted he messed up. In retrospect, I should have yelled something at him or at least said hi, but I was a little star-struck. Not every day you see someone like that.

I’m not sure who here has said that everything can be measured and the future can be predicted with a large degree of accuracy. And I’m not sure why it’s the “easy route” to recognize the limits of what we’re able to measure easily.

That doesn’t mean you can’t talk intelligently about a subject.

No, the straw-manis the alleged “free”, not unfree, subsidies the author claims protectionists are up-in-arms about.

“Who benefits? The subsidized industry and their customers ( around the world, large number of them in this country)”.

Ok, so at least on the first part of your statement, we agree: the Chinese-subsidized industries ARE benefiting from the subsidies. Take it a step further, however; U.S. companies in the same industry are being harmed because of that.

Take it further: U.S. customers are really NOT benefiting from Chinese subsidization. Sure, they may be able to save an extra fifty-cents here-and-there on certain products, but the almost bottomless costs of losing vast swathes of domestic industry to cheap foreign competition outweighs those 50-cent “savings” by an almost immeasurable scale. What would you rather have? A solid blue-collar or middle-class job, while paying $14 for a plastic bucket, or having an $7.50/hour Wal-Mart position, while paying $13 for a plastic bucket? A home accurately valued at $500,000 — or a $500,000 home whose value is reduced by 1/3 due to economic disaster catalyzed in large part by your neighbors’ lost jobs/lowered wages and resultant foreclosures? (This, of course, is the 1/2 of the housing bubble’s cause). An army of corporate-funded economists may try to obfuscate the masses, but, in the end, they can’t change reality.

There have never been any policy changes that have negatively affected incumbent wealth.

And Alan Greenspan was not a libertarian.
He was part of the Ayn Rand circle for a time and she hated libertarians.

All your favorite straw men are to blame, it seems.
No objective analysis here.