Article at The Week here. Author Morrissey misses the mark here in an article where he suggests that indeed we should have a concerned view towards "the poor"; and reject the Randian Objectivist/Libertarian synthesis, but suggests the true problem is a lack of "responsibility and sustainability" because of the typical moron view that somehow we don't want to pay for it.
Here is his warped analysis based on his own brand of a libertarian anti-authority view that our government does not possess absolute fiscal authority:
However, a couple of key elements are also necessary in this paradigm: Responsibility and sustainability. The problem facing the American welfare system and the European nanny states is that they are designed with neither in mind. Their fiscal structure pays more in benefits than it receives, a very basic form of irresponsibility and unsustainability. [Ed: It is only irresponsible and unsustainable to a stupid and blind libertarian who has no view of our government's absolute fiscal authority.]
That forces these systems to borrow massively against future production, which in essence means that these social systems pay benefits with someone else's money — the children or grandchildren to come. One could consider that theft, or at the least taxation without representation. [Ed: What a dope. Morrissey here literally asserts that our fiscal agents in government have a time machine in which they have to travel into the future in order to borrow our future society's "money" and carry these balances back to the present in order to account for our current production... what a moron.]
It's not difficult to argue that neither of the two philosophers would endorse such a system. After all, even St. Thomas Aquinas did math. Anyone with a calculator can figure this out; it doesn't take philosophers to tell us that we can't borrow money forever without risking collapse. [Ed: Now this is especially indignation inducing to those of us graced with mathematical maturity, to see such a butchering of basic mathematics. Who does this blind moron think our government is borrowing from? Moron: Where does the "money" come from you dummy? Sober up man!]
Yet we hear nearly nothing from the political class about the true costs of these programs, or the responsibility for the bills to be paid properly when incurred. [Ed: Who is not getting paid in all of this? What is this moron even talking about? What "bills" are not getting paid? This guy is a disgraced embarrassment.]
What can those other blind morons currently occupying positions of authority in our government learn from the Catholic Church? How about simply first obtaining a foundational view of the inherent authorities of our (government) institution in the first place?
Perhaps the Catholic Church at least has a view of the authority present within it's own institution which is surely lacking in our current institution of government.
If our current blind and stupid occupants of positions of authority in our government would at least become able to see the authority present within their own institution, then perhaps we wouldn't have to be treated with statements such as "We're out of money!" and "we're borrowing from our grandchildren!" from the likes of the similarly blind and stupid libertarian Morrissey here.
Remember the words of the Centurion: "For I also am a man set under authority..." To which the Lord replied: "Verily, with no one in Israel so much faith did I find."
10 comments:
Bite me, Morrissey. He's just anotherconcern troll
As is the allegedly liberal Howard Dean:
"Somebody has to tell the middle class that either your taxes are going up or your programs are going to get cut, or else we're going to go into financial oblivion."
Dean was a penny pinching governor who thought being President is just like being Governor of Vermont, except there are more pennies to pinch as President.
When people discuss the role of the Catholic Church in dispensing social welfare they never have a historical appreciation of its role as super-state. Until 1204 the Church was the premier monetary authority and was the biggest land owner after that. Social welfare was as much a function of their power as it was a question of morality. Phillip Pilkington has a post at Naked Capitalism that is apposite to your point about fiscal authority. The modern nation state was always a problematic attempt to recreate the authority of Rome or the feudal kings who came after:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/philip-pilkington-kill-the-king-why-are-we-so-scared-of-fiat-money.html
The modern nation state was always a problematic attempt to recreate the authority of Rome or the feudal kings who came after
I would move the motivation for global dominance back at least to Alexander. And that is still what the driving force of the dynamic is, with some spates of feudalism when minor powers get strong enough to exert influence.
Yes, Tom, but what I would say is that
Rome gave us the specific template of power in the West with all its physical and legal institutions, and is the one that we have by turns tried to overcome and recreate. Of course Rome was influenced by the Greeks, but Rome is the leviathan in the background that still shapes how we express our conflicting urges for freedom and order.
Absolutely
Tthe modern West is built on Greek thought, Roman law and organization, "Judaeo-Christian" religious culture, and the rise of modern science.
I put "Judaeo-Christian" in quotes to indicate that some people have issues with that concept, but I think that general idea is plain enough. Anyway, it's now I learned it in Western Civ.
right ... I always have a chuckle when the "debt" and "debasement" morons say things like: "that's how Rome fell...." while sitting in a DC studio with a video backdrop of the architecture of our most prominent public buildings...
David thanks for the Philip link... that is getting down to the nitty gritty of all of this imo...
rsp,
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Let's talk about apples...
Let me make some simplifying assumptions so we can get to the heart of the distinction between B and NB. (Yes of course these assumptions are false and unrealistic, but by excluding areas where we agree we can focus on the area where we disagree.)
Assume: closed economy; no investment or real capital of any kind; lump-sum non-distorting taxes with zero collection costs; positive real interest rate and zero real growth; exogenous full-employment level of output; apples are the only output good; apples cannot be stored; identical agents; overlapping generations; no funny stuff.
Suppose the government makes a transfer of 100 apples to the current cohort, financed by borrowing. Does that create a burden on future generations? Yes or no? B or NB?
I say Yes. I say B. It does create a burden on future generations. The only case where it does not create a burden on future generations is where Ricardian Equivalence holds. According to Ricardian Equivalence, the person in the street realises it will create a burden on future generations, and so saves the whole of the transfer payment, including interest, passes it on as a bequest to his children, who pass it on to their children, precisely because he wants to offset that burden on future generations.
The person on the street, in his unsophisticated uneducated ignorance, is basically right. The debt is a burden on his kids, or grandkids. Only if he anticipates that burden, and decides to offset it by increasing his bequests, a la Barro-Ricardo, does he eliminate that burden
No. My argument does not involve time travel. It doesn't require we can take apples grown 100 years from now, put them in a time-machine, send them back in time, and eat them today. But it is as if we could.
My argument is obvious. At least, it's obvious to anyone who has thought about overlapping generations models. And it's equally obvious to the unsophisticated uneducated rube who has never thought about overlapping generations models.
The government borrows 100 apples from each of cohort A, then gives each person in cohort A a transfer payment of 100 apples. It is exactly as if the government had simply given each person in cohort A an IOU for 100 apples. That IOU is a bond.
So far there is no change in cohort A's consumption of apples.
Cohort A then sells the bonds to the younger members of cohort B. So each person in cohort A gets an extra 110 apples (assume 10% interest per generation), which he eats. Cohort A then dies.
Cohort A is better off. Each member of cohort A eats an extra 110 apples. In present value terms, those extra 110 apples are worth 100 apples at the time the transfer payment is made.
Cohort B eats 110 fewer apples when young, but 121 extra apples when old, and they sell their bonds to cohort C. Although cohort B eats 11 more apples in their lifetimes, the present value of their total consumption of apples is the same. The rate of interest must be high enough to persuade them to eat fewer apples when young and more apples when old, otherwise they wouldn't have bought the bonds from cohort A. So cohort B is not worse off.
But (given my assumption) the debt is rising faster than GDP. The government knows this is unsustainable. It cannot rollover the debt forever, because eventually the next cohort will be unable to buy the bonds from the older cohort. So the government decides to pay off the debt by imposing a tax of 121 apples on each young person in cohort C, which it uses to buy back the bonds from cohort C.
Each member of cohort C eats 121 fewer apples.
Cohort A eats more apples, and cohort C eats fewer apples. It is exactly as if apples travelled back in time, out of the mouths of cohort C into the mouths of cohort A. (With interest subtracted as they travel back in time through the time machine.)
Yes, the national debt is a burden on future generations.
—Nick Rowe (Worthwhile Canadian Initiative)
Source for the above quote: Debt is too a burden on our children (unless you believe in Ricardian Equivalence)
Also, Overlapping generations model —Wikipedia which was mentioned in the article quoted above.
The overlapping generations (OLG) model is one of the dominating frameworks of analysis in the study of macroeconomic dynamics and economic growth. In contrast, to the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans neoclassical growth model in which individuals are infinitely-lived, in the OLG model individuals live a finite length of time, long enough to overlap with at least one period of another agent's life.
The OLG model is the natural framework for the study of: (a) the life-cycle behavior (investment in human capital, work and saving for retirement), (b) the implications of the allocation of resources across the generations, such as Social Security, on the income per capita in the long-run, (c) the determinants of economic growth in the course of human history, and (d) the factors that triggered the fertility transition.
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