Friday 21 October 2011

For How Much Longer?

"Mortensen said Taiwan was performing fairly well among the four “Asian Tigers,” with unemployment at 4.4 percent and an inflation rate of 1.8 percent, indicating that the country has successful monetary policies."
Oh for pete's sake. Those policies (continued monetary expansion) will continue to roll along "successfully" right up until they roll off the edge of the cliff. Mortensen is the wrong person giving the wrong advice at the wrong time. Further...
"Governments have long neglected academics’ calls to pay attention to the widening wealth gap, he said, adding that global economic growth has only benefited the richest 10 percent of the population, and even if their wealth is redistributed to the poor, the poor will only become poorer."
For the thousandth and one time, income inequality is not the problem - it isn't even a problem. The actual problem with income levels is the continuing fall in the purchasing power of the currency which effectively taxes savings and pushes down real incomes - especially for the poor. As for "wealth redistribution", that's another fallacy. A government cannot "redistribute" wealth any more than they can redistribute intellect, and that is because "wealth" is not mere cash, it is the collection of human knowledge and skills necessary for producing value. All a government can do in this regard is simply shuffle cash around.
"During a panel discussion with local economists and corporate leaders in the afternoon, Mortensen said Taiwan’s education system could play a role by help students learn abilities wanted by local companies, which in turn would help the firms expand in China."
To readjust the education system to serve the needs of certain companies is a laughable conceit of central planning. Not only would such a move anger the old-skool public education socialists (what about our art teachers?!), but it concedes to the Libertarian the central point that education is not one monolithic public good, but a keenly differentiated spectrum of private goods some of which (or rather, their graduate beneficiaries) are in greater economic demand than others; that being the case, the most efficient way to coordinate the supply of all of these different goods to match variable demand is via the free market, not yet another readjusted central plan and the continuing unadjusted conceit of government.

The global economy is being driven off the edge of a cliff by systemic State intervention, and when the ketchup finall dollops out of the bottle, you can bet it'll be the "free market" that gets the blame.

It makes me sick to watch this happening.

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