"We Are All Socialists Now"

Gulp. This is going to be a long four years.

Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same. Much of that economic growth was real, but for the past five years or so, it has borne a suspicious resemblance to Bernie Madoff's stock fund. Americans have been living high on borrowed money (the savings rate dropped from 7.6 percent in 1992 to less than zero in 2005) while financiers built castles in the air.(*)

In other words, Americans want big government without big government. They want to have their cake and to eat it too.

Please wake up, friends to the south. You're being slipped the roofie of socialism and it's going to give you one hell of a hangover. Take it from a country that knows about expensive social programs and the damage that welfarism can do.

H/t Darcey

Reducing The Burden Of Government

The following is an excellent Center For Freedom & Prosperity video hosted by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. Mitchell lucidly explains the theoretical and practical failures of the Keynesian economic model and helpfully delineates some of its greatest negative consequences in the American context, with special reference to the Great Depression and the results of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations' commitment to statism.



As Mitchell says at the end of the video, your guess is as good as mine as to why Keynesian economics has remained so popular. What's worse, it's no longer merely the crusading socialists who embrace its assumptions and methods. Witness the massive growth in government size in recent years in the United States under an allegedly conservative administration.

Perhaps by continuing to expose the fallacies of Keynesian economics we will succeed in weaning North Americans off their diet of statism and help them develop an appetite for freedom.

H/t TSC