Speedlinking Friday: Food for Thought

I am hard at work doing research at the lab and finalizing my Austrian Scholars Conference presentation and paper, so I haven’t had a lot of time to do original writing for LCC over the past few days. However, I’d like to point you to three articles that I found enlightening this week.

First, my friend Jason from Libertarian Longhorns has written a great piece on government-sponsored filmmaking. He did a really good job with it, and he was rewarded with a feature on Bureaucrash this morning. Quote:

Until all film incentives are repealed, movies and people will suffer. We’ll be forced to watch movies that take place in Texas, but just happen to be shot in Australia. Additionally, we’ll have to watch local film communities (like Austin’s) diminish under the burden of government. It used to be that a filmmaker shot a film in a location that best suited the story and budget. Now a filmmaker selects a location for the rebate check. Only government could create such a screwy situation.

Great work, Jason!

The second is Beating Back Obamanomics by Lew Rockwell. I love the first couple of paragraphs:

It’s raining, pouring economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil.

We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the left wing: its abysmal ignorance of economic science. The ideological tendency has gone from Keynesianism to outright socialism in a matter of a few weeks.

Bill Anderson has written a very interesting article arguing that the Federal Government is deliberately blocking economic recovery through its foolish policies. Here’s an excerpt that I hope will convince you to read the entire article:

The New Deal was an unqualified economic failure, if one judges economic “success” by things like unemployment rates, private investment, real output, and the move of people from lives of poverty to lives of plenty. Unemployment stayed in double digits throughout the decade, many people lived in poverty, and the economic output never did match what it had been during the 1920s.

However, I have to add something that most people leave out of the discussion: the New Deal was an unqualified political success, and it was successful precisely because it blocked the economic recovery. This is counter-intuitive, I realize. I have heard discussion in the halls of my university that the public will lose patience with Obama and the Democrats if they don’t deliver and “political guru” Dick Morris even predicts that further economic failure will result in the Republicans gaining political strength.

Don’t count on it. During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration never had to worry about losing political power, and it held and added to its political majorities. Roosevelt even won a third term of office although the first eight years of his presidency had barely moved the rate of unemployment below what it had been during the worst days of the Herbert Hoover administration.

This spectacular run of political power did not come in spite of the economic crisis; it came because of it. The crisis never ended, and that provided vast opportunities for the political classes in Washington to add to their power over the lives of individuals.

In other news… the DOWn is below 6500 and unemployment is now over 14%. StimuLOLs!

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