Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Bartlett Calls for More Money Printing, Then Attacks Henry Hazlitt!

You can't deny it, when Bruce Bartlett flips views, he really flips. The one time Ron Paul aide (Can you believe it?) is out in today's NYT with a column where he writes:
... a more aggressive Federal Reserve policy is needed to turn the economy around. Additional fiscal stimulus would also help.
He then goes on to attack Henry Hazlitt:
....Henry Hazlitt, an editorial writer for The New York Times, and Benjamin M. Anderson, an economist with Chase National Bank, who also said people should just suck it up, that unemployment was only caused by excessive wages and greedy workers and that inflation was a cure worse than the disease, even as the price level fell 25 percent from 1929 to 1933.
Hazlitt, for the record, was a keen critic of John Maynard Keynes and wrote The Failure of the "New Economics," a line-by-line critique of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory.

Although Bartlett seems to want to boost the economy by printing more money and disses Hazlitt for believing people should just suck it up, in a revealing interview, Hazlitt, as quoted by Lew Rockwell, explains how you really get a job if you don't have any skills and the government isn't interfering:
I had no skills whatever. So I would get a job, and I would last two or three days and be fired. It never surprised me or upset me, because I read the Times early in the morning, went through the ads, and I'd practically have a job that day. This shows what happens when you have a free market. There was no such thing as a minimum wage at that time. There was no such thing as relief, except maybe there were places where you could get a soup handout for something, but there was no systematic welfare. You had a free market. And so I usually found myself at a job the next day, and I'd get fired about three or four days after that.... I didn't have the skills. But each time I kept learning something, and finally I was getting about $3 or $4 a week.
As for Bartlett, the man sees no price inflation. He writes:
...the risk of inflation is now as low as it’s been since the 1950s...
He writes this I remind you, when there is a steady increase in producer prices.

The Producer Price Index (PPI) for finished goods jumped to an annualized rate of 9.8 percent in September.The 12-month growth rate in the PPI at the end of September was 7.0 percent.

Amazing.

3 comments:

  1. "even as the price level fell 25 percent from 1929 to 1933."

    And that is exactly why it was such a disastrous policy for President Hoover to cajole major industries into freezing their wage rates.

    But, oh well, at least all the people who ended up unemployed because of this would find more productive things to do... like digging holes and filling them back up again. Thanks, government!

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  2. What a disgrace. The Callahans, Selgins, and Bartletts of the world are true Benedict Arnolds. Can you do a show on them one day with your podcast?

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  3. It's the spirit of domination and subjugation, coupled with a monomaniacal vainglory...

    or something.

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