Stiuulus package IV

Okay, just about everybody who isn’t bound by an oath of fealty to the democratic party knows the stimulus won’t do any good. But over at Powerline, they are asking if, even aside from the wasting of a trillion dollars or so, and burdening future generations with today’s economic idiocy, it will do actual harm. I suspect the question is rhetorical, because they probably know the answer already, but in case they really are perplexed about it -- hell yes it’s going to hurt the country now, and in the near and long term.

Ignoring the inflation resulting from the printing of mountains of new money, aside from financially strengthening the most regressive, doctrinaire, and thuggish democrat special interest groups, leaving out the moral destruction of forcing a free people to become vassals of the state in order to feed their families, the true damage of this massive transfer of treasure from private hands to the public coffers, will be the sheer destruction of wealth it represents. It is as though every home, car, computer, or book which might otherwise have been purchased, were thrown into a fire and burned. Worse – at least if they were placed on a pyre and set alight, we could warm ourselves at the flames. This way all those goods and services, and the jobs, paychecks, and creative human potential they represent, become phantoms – things which might have been, but never were.

Wealth is destroyed because Marxists, leftists, liberals, democratic politicians, and other childlike beings all love the labor theory of value. It’s easy on the brain, forms the basis of most of the courses they took in college, it's theoretically tidy, and the fact that it is completely wrong and generally leads to totalitarianism is no deterrent. Marx believed there was this stuff called raw material, and this stuff called labor. If the two were combined, iron ore became ships, wood became furniture, and cows became steak. The democratic party believes we have labor to spare, and raw materials lying around unused, and all that is necessary, is to take money from people in the form of taxes (and trust me, inflation is a form of taxation), give it to workers in the form of wages, and turn them loose to build roads, ships, and bridges – and instant recovery.

Let’s do a thought experiment: On my drive home today, I saw some guys digging a trench to install sewers. Tomorrow morning, I’ll come over to your place, dig a hole in your backyard, dump a bunch of pipe into it, and send you a bill. I have performed exactly the same tasks as the people I saw on the way home – have I created any wealth?

No fair you say. There has to be context – a third factor must be involved. The material and labor must come together at the right time and place.

Right. How about this, there are shipyards in New England that are underutilized. Give me all your money and I will give it to the workers there to build ships. Barks, brigs, clippers, schooners, cogs, and caravels, we will build thousands of them, providing good paying long term jobs to the men who build the boats. Hell we will build enough boats so, end to end; they will let us walk to Europe. Better? The nice tax collectors will be by in the morning to pick up your share.

Look, you say, no one wants that many boats. It doesn’t do any good building stuff nobody wants. You have to spend the money on things people want.

Okay then, I want a Corvette, a red one with leather interior (as if there was any other kind). And building high-end sports cars is just the kind of skilled labor job we are promoting – pony up.

Not a chance you reply, If you are footing the bill, it has to go for something you want.

Then why can’t you and I just agree to an exchange – I’ll give you something you want in return you give me something I want, and we’ll leave the government out of it. We appear to have left the labor theory back at the boatyard.

It’s funny, tell some leftwit gender is a social construct, and whatever type of plumbing you have results from the secret plots of the patriarchy, and he will take it as gospel. Tell him words mean the opposite of what they say, and the declaration of independence was really a coded call for slavery, and you will receive instant agreement. Saying the personal is the political is to speak an indisputable truth. Every one of history's huge slobbering abstractions is swallowed whole without thought, but tell the poor fool that all wealth results from the voluntary movement of things from where they valued less to where they are valued more, and he will give a look like a chimp that has just been handed a bowl of wax fruit.

The corollary is also true. Wealth is destroyed when things are moved from where they are valued more to where they are valued less. And our new aristocracy is about to involuntarily move an unfathomable amount of money from our wallets, where we value it highly, and give it to their friends and supporters who don’t think enough of it to even count it before they spend it.