Good ammo indeed. You guys don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about. You’re griping about Bush’s deficits, around 2.5% of GDP. During WWII, the government ran massive deficits, peaking at over 30% of GDP in 1942.
All WWII proves is that you can borrow a lot of money and spend it, and temporarily boost the economy. It was not an endorsement of central planning, and it was not sustainable.
You want better models of how central planning has worked? Compare and contrast:
East Germany ca 1990 to West Germany.
South Korea to North Korea.
Taiwan to mainland China.
Hong Kong to, well, just about anyone else in Asia.
The performance of the heavily-managed British economy in the 1970’s to the much freer British economy of the 1990’s.
The United States economy in 1990’s after 15 years of deregulation and tax cuts, to the U.S. economy of the 1970’s, with highly graduated taxes and much more regulation.
The state of New Zealand agriculture when it was heavily managed, regulated, and subsidized by the government, to the state of New Zealand agriculture after the subsidies were removed and the regulations and price controls lifted.
Compare the economic performance of Singapore after it adopted free market reforms to its performance when the state controlled everything.
I could go on, and on. In every case I can think of, where two countries were fairly similar in location, population, and resources, the one that adopted the freer, more market-friendly economy dramatically outperformed the one that tried to manage its economy.
For that matter, let’s have a look at the Chinese. They aren’t Stalinists - the Chinese government sincerely tries to do right by the Chinese nation as a whole, even if it means trampling on an individual from time to time. They try to manage industry to maximize growth. They’ve tried all sorts of big socialist ideas for managing the means of production. Yet when did the Chinese economy start to take off? When it adopted free market reforms.
Planned economies fail. They always have, they always will. And for good reason: No central planner has the information needed to make rational decisions. There’s far too much of it, it changes far too rapidly, and without the incentive of prices much of it isn’t even knowable because it remains locked inside the people who lack the incentive or ability to act on it.
As a recent example, the U.S. Congress recently passed an energy bill that mandates a certain amount of ethanol in fuel. And to make sure the supply is there, ethanol gets big government subsidies. Now tell me how in hell a few hundred guys in Washington are supposed to have the foggiest notion of whether this is the right thing to do or not. Do you think they considered that they might make ethanol production so popular that they’d divert significant corn crops away from food production, driving food costs up? Did it occur to them that forcing ethanol as a solution could crowd out better solutions? That subsidizing ethanol production, then guaranteeing a market for it by mandating its use, would screw up the market, prevent prices from working, and make our energy production less efficient? They talk about energy independence, but now they’ve tied not just energy but food to the price of oil, making Americans even more sensitive to price changes in oil.
No, they didn’t consider any of those things. What they considered was:
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The politicians from the Midwest considered that they could buy a lot of votes and get support from Archer Daniels Midland if they voted for the bill.
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The politicians from the coasts, with large environmentalist constituencies, saw a program they could vote for and get enviro-cred, without having to raise taxes or the deficit, by pushing the costs onto 3rd parties (people who buy food, and people trying to compete with ethanol, mostly).
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The rest of them saw a popular issue of the day, and saw a no-cost-to-them way of jumping on the bandwagon.
The actual technical merits of the bill are almost irrelevant. Most of the Senators who voted didn’t even read the damned thing.
This is what central planning in a democracy looks like. It’s fundamentally incoherent and inefficient. And you want to replace a vast, interconnected web of experts, consumers, and an intricate flow of information between all interested parties in the form of prices, which allows them all to weigh the real costs and benefits of their decisions, with these yahoos. So long as they spout the right platitudes and push your little happy buttons with promises to the poor and downtrodden, you’ll vote them into office and vote to give them the power to run your lives.
If that’s what you want, fine. Just don’t pretend that it will be anywhere near as efficient at creating wealth or making the average person’s life better as will the market if you control freaks would just leave it the hell alone. And that means keeping your grubby hands off the property of others, no matter how much you want to take it from them.
