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I did not make that assertion, what I said is that the advocates of government spending only shift the burden of decision making and don't really propose anythi
by Tichy 14y ago
I did not make that assertion, what I said is that the advocates of government spending only shift the burden of decision making and don't really propose anything at all. Or in other words, the claim "government spending can fix the economy" is trivially true but useless.
The link about public goods doesn't convince me that government spending on public goods is always the best choice, see example of too many roads.
As for printing money, isn't it kind of equivalent to taking on debt?
- eli_gottlieb 14y agowhat I said is that the advocates of government spending only shift the burden of decision making and don't really propose anything at all. Of course, advocates of privatization are doing the same thing: shifting the decision-making and not really proposing anything at all. Both markets and governments are voting mechanisms. Difference is, in a market, the dollars vote, and in a government, the people vote. Then we have to start talking about the signal/noise ratios of both mechanisms...
- Tichy 14y agoMarkets are a mechanism for allocating resources. Of course, there is neither the perfect market nor the perfect government. It seems to me that the potential for abuse is greater in the government, though. There is one vote every x years, and good tracking mechanisms of what is really being done don't exist yet. Signal/noise - the difference is that in the market, participants can not simply spend other people's money. They have to come up with real money somehow, which might be a pretty strong signal.