Earlier this week President Obama articulated how he understands the concept of employment, explaining that, in his view of the universe, bureaucratic regulations are a good way to create jobs:
Obama Says ‘EPA regulations create jobs’
“When we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs building and installing all sorts of pollution-control technology.”
Yes, seriously, he said that. The President of the United States said it.
Obama’s fundamental misapprehension of employment economics reminds me of an intriguing paradox I observed first-hand just a few months ago when I visited a relative who lived in a suburban tract:
Twice a week, my relative hired a “gardener” to clean up the front yard. I put “gardener” in quotes because this young hardworking immigrant didn’t actually know anything about plants or gardens; basically his only task was to get rid of the leaves that fell from the trees in front of the house. He achieved this very quickly and efficiently by using a gas-powered leaf-blower. Perhaps when he was first hired his technique was to blow all the leaves into a big pile which he would then load into his truck for removal. A few may have gone into the neighbors’ yards, but hey, they were out of my relative’s yard, so problem solved. I imagine that over time, as he got hired by more and more people in the tract due to his low rates, he worked quicker and quicker and sloppier and sloppier, until the day I observed him, when he no longer even made a pretense of gathering the leaves into a pile; instead, he just blew them all into the neighbors’ yards, and then hopped into his truck and drove off to his next client. At three or four yards per hour, he was (metaphorically at least) raking it in.
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But here’s where the paradox begins. The neighbors would come back from their jobs at the end of the day, and see all the leaves on their lawns, and they’d call up their own gardeners who would proceed to do the exact same thing in reverse — blow all the same leaves back into my relative’s and adjacent neighbors’ yards. This cycle would go on across the entire tract, because the same leaf-shedding trees had been planted along every street: everyone would hire gardeners to blow the leaves back and forth from yard to yard. At the end of each week, exactly nothing had been achieved: all the leaves were back where they started. And then the cycle would begin again.
A normal person would look at this situation and say, “What a monumental waste of effort. So much human labor for no purpose whatsoever; after all those man-hours, nothing has changed. All the leaves are back in their original positions.”
Obama would look at this same situation and say, “How can you claim that nothing was achieved? Forty-seven gardeners are now fully employed!”
But I look at it and see what the radical theorists see: It’s not true at all that nothing has changed. Maybe the leaves are all in their original positions, but a great deal of money has been transferred from the middle-class homeowners to the immigrant gardeners.
If you think that “economic redistribution” from the middle-class to the “working poor” is desirable, then you see the Leaf-Blower Paradox not as a paradox at all but as a neat mechanism for extracting money from the more-well-off and giving it to the less-well-off.
But then the question arises: Why bother with the leaves at all? A simpler way to achieve the same thing would be for the “gardeners” to just drive very slowly through the neighborhood and each homeowner would toss $20 bills in the backs of their pickups trucks. The end result would be exactly the same.
Yet even this ludicrous scenario is not satisfactory for the true radicals. Why even bother with the pickup trucks? The Obamas of this world can (and do) produce the same result by instituting a tax — let’s call it the “Unemployed Gardener Tax” — and utilize the government as a middleman to transfer money from the employed to the unemployed. The gardeners can just sit at home watching TV all day, while the IRS collects extra taxes from the middle-class workers and doles it out as benefits to the would-be gardeners.
In fact, we can just drop the “Unemployed Gardener” part and just call it “Taxes” and — voilà! — we have Obama’s understanding of economics. In his view, the role of government is to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor. And don’t imagine that this is just for the purpose of helping the poor; rather, the main purpose is to punish the wealthy, for the crime of, well, being wealthy.
Some mainstream economists have in the past argued in favor of the Leaf-Blower Paradox as a valid way to stimulate the economy. FDR and his advisors famously created millions of low-level government-financed manual labor jobs in the mid-1930s as a way to “put America back to work” during the Depression; while these “Civilian Conservation Corps” and similar jobs weren’t quite as useless as blowing leaves in circles, they were a sort of inefficient busywork whose main goal was not to get anything essential done but rather to get food in the belly of millions of unemployed Americans, and to get the money flowing in the economy again.
Dear zombie, you left out one vital component of Obama’s plan. The regulators will be the college certified environmental studies majors and their ilk. In his eyes and theirs, this is only right and proper. Too few will be like the young regulator success upon the industrialist in Atlas Shrugged, who truly was both an idealist and competent.
Yes, another purpose to his shenanigans is to create a large employment space for the otherwise unemployable brainwashed Obama-worshipping soft-major college graduates. And yes, our only saving grace is the (at least partial) incompetence of Obama’s minions. Their goal may be to destroy the economy, but Adam Smith’s invisible hand keeps smacking them around.
It’s all carefully set up so that money will be flowing OUT of the pockets of older, hard-working white conservatives (despite the fact that so many of them are members of the “working poor” these days), and into the pockets of leftists of every stripe (some of them quite wealthy already).
OUTSTANDING COLUMN, ZOMBIE. Besides VDH, you are the other PJ author I actively seek out.
In your leaf blower allegory the homeowners would need to throw borrowed $20 bills into the gardeners’ trucks. That is what President Obama is doing. He borrows money from China to pay EPA apparatchiks to stop and even to destroy wealth creation. Eventually he won’t be able to borrow Chinese money to destroy American wealth because a shrunken U.S. economy won’t be able to borrow other people’s money or service its international loans. Then President Obama will have to come up with other ways to cause economic carnage.
Zombie, have you talked to Sean lately?
If it wasn’t so darn sad it’d be amusing. Though it’s been nearly a lifetime since I read Ayn Rand’s “The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution” it seems like only yesterday. One can only wonder what will happen next. Any predictions?
Here is a pretty good one. How I wish Roger Simon or someone would pick up on the idea and write such a screen play.
Nothing new under the sun… It’s like the Bastiat’s Parable of the broken window, hey you can see all his genius here:
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
when the argument was “hey, if windows never broke, there would not be jobs for crystal sellers!”
I don’t remember where I read this, but there is also the tale of the chinese government wanting to build a navigation canal, with thousands of workers armed with shovels. When the foreigner capitalist (asked to help with the finances) told them they’d be better working with machinery, the governor contested: oh but then we will need fewer workers and many people will lose their job!
“Ì see- told the capitalist- then give them spoons instead of shovels”
“Nothing new under the sun… It’s like the Bastiat’s Parable of the broken window, hey you can see all his genius here:
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
when the argument was “hey, if windows never broke, there would not be jobs for crystal sellers!”
——————————————————————————–
The natural (and correct) counter argument to a broken window employing a glazier, was the “unseen” effect was the shopkeeper, after purchasing the window, now had less to spend on shoes, or books, or food. The grocer, cobbler, and bookseller has lost.
The counter/counter argument the left now employs is the shopkeeper is now not only free to hoard the monies he was forced to spend on the window, he does hoard it.
That’s a Milton Friedman quotation.
How about both: He’s a friggin idiot and a marxist.
Ha, yes, the two do tend to go together.
Economics for Taxpayers (Dummies):
Government Budget Numbers:
• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000
Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Equivalent Budget cuts: $385
Kinda puts in perspective….
There’s just one zero we need to remove.
Terrifying numbers, but EXCELLENT example. Your simplification strategy makes the ramifications quite clear.
Well done. This should be somebody’s core poster in the Presidential election. (I just don’t see a candidate on either side that would use it.)
this short video illustrates simple math about the debit celing and family budgets that so many fail to understand
http://debtlimitusa.org/
Generally, I fully agree with your article, but the CCC I feel did have a purpose. My whole life I have seen and used CCC or WPA constructed projects. Although not as good as private the BPA and TVA were huge investments in productive america. Yes it was a deficit spending government jobs program, but at least we got a productive asset with it.
How did the democrats decide to do all of the Urban Renewal Programs, welfare, Americorps, etc etc. Each newer program keeps getting less and less of product in turn for our $. Now Obama wants to spend $ to kill jobs.
Of course the military is also a make work program, employing lots of people and contractors. But it isn’t the left’s thing, so we want to kill lots and lots of jobs. The only problem was it is a shovel ready project and a lot of decent economic activity will dissapear.
Please NoBama in 2012
As Obama found out with his attempts at “shovel ready” infrastructure projects, the kind of large-scale infrastructure development that FDR initiated, is no longer so easy.
The EPA and the Endangered Species Act–plus our litigious society in which anyone can run to the courts for a NIMBY injunction–have slowed down any infrastructure work to a crawl.
A showpiece of the New Deal was Hoover Dam. Today, environmentalists will block any dam construction, which is why we haven’t had any for decades now.
Even liberals have admitted this. On The American Prospect, they lamented the fact that Obama seems unable to cut through all this red tape, even though the EPA reports to him.
Even in Obambus’ 2008 campaign he showed this understanding of things, his idea on technology is the same, “We just tell the scientists what we need, and they solve it.” Lit me up like a pinball machine to hear that, but he shows it every day with his “green” ideas.
btw, Obambus or not, totally agree on the leaf blower observation. damn things are outlawed in Los Angeles, but everyone still “uses” them anyway. don’t even get me started on the mentalities involved …
Great story and great analogy! In fact, these leaf blowers are overall *worse* than useless in that they create a lot of noise pollution for (in the aggregate) no benefit.
Now if, hypothetically, there were a reliable alternative energy technology that would make the US self-reliant in energy at the expense of a one-time massive investment in manpower (say, solar panels 10x more efficient than what is currently available on the market), regulations that created an incentive for people to adopt it would actually create a fair number of jobs over the short term. The fallacy here is of course that such a technology would have no trouble getting adopted in a free market as well. Severe market distortions are only required if the technology is, well, just a very expensive dud getting produced by the politically connected.
And the commenter who talked about artificially creating jobs for unemployable “0bama tromboning studies” graduates is bang on the money. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” has become “Rule of the people by the New Class for the New Class and its clients”.
Obama is not evil!
What you consider malice, his ilk consider virtue. We have different a morality thats why it appears to be evil. But Obama is absolutely convinced he is doing good. So convinced, that he cannot contemplate the negative effects. He simply can’t.
Every despot in history thought he was doing good. The problem is that some prefer to do it at the involuntary expense of others.
In the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher:
“The problem with socialism is that, at some point, you run out of other people’s money.”
As the birthrates on the European continent show you don’t just run out of other peoples’ money; you run out of other people!
Your post could have started with Hitler, or Stalin and been equally rational. I don’t know if Obama is evil, but I do know that those who support for him are.
Of course Obama thinks he is doing good “for himself and some buddies and contributors” but for the rest of this country and the world for that matter who cares as far as he is gratified.
He is a damned liar and thief and will answer to someone much more powerful than anyone on the face of this earth his fate is with one that is in fact all powerful and all knowing who in fact created him and can destroy him at will…the will of God or Jehovah will determine the next few months!
The reasons Liberals give for every program, is never the real reason. The reason is to build a loyal base of followers for POWER. He’ll have the welfare class, the senior citizens (at least the ones he’s able to scare), the endless bureaucrats, and the all the non governmental “helping” programs who feed off federal dollars, the educrats, Hollyweird, and much of sports and music.
Good article. Thanks.
I wouldn’t put FDR’s CCC or other efforts to lift the burden of the great
depression on the same page. FDR was a decent American, albeit a Democrat.
Obama is not a decent American. He’s a power-grabbing fool who appeals to a
mob of uneducated (or mis-educated) people who seem to be mezmorized by his
drone. Until we change voting rules and demand ID of every voter, we can expect to be saddled with another of Obama’s ilk.
God Help the U S A !!!!!
Interesting example. Is there a role for government in requiring the homeowners to rake up their own leaves? This would not only get rid of the leaves while saving all that money but also force homeowners to exercise more, making them healthier. Maybe the government could save the homeowners money by requiring them to let the leaves lie where they fall — or by making them cut down all the trees. For that matter, just pave over everything, saving money from not mowing grass as well as not raking leaves.
The real problem with this leaf-blowing example is that, like so many activities generated by a free market, it’s hard to justify the desired end state — green, tree-shaded, leafless lawns — as something truly rational people ought to spend good money on.
You comment, “The real problem with this leaf-blowing example is that, like so many activities generated by a free market, it’s hard to justify the desired end state — green, tree-shaded, leafless lawns — as something truly rational people ought to spend good money on.”
I ask to whom must we “justify” the decision by the homeowner to remove the leaves? And who is to find that the decision is either rational or irrational? Who dictates what people “ought to spend good (or even bad money) on”? And to whom is this “the real problem”? Surely Obama will establish a new bureaucracy to sort out all of this confusion. Possibly you will wish to apply so as to be in a position to put an end to this messy “free market” crap that so burdens our lives. Okay?
I’m really bad at satire, so for a long, horrible moment, I thought you meant your comment seriously.
Excellently done, barring that you forgot that the green, shaded, leaf-free lawns combat global warming!
Will blow your leaves into you neighbors yard for food!
“Never attribute to malice what can be more easily explained by stupidity,”
But don’t rule out malice.
“In his view, the role of government is to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor. And don’t imagine that this is just for the purpose of helping the poor; rather, the main purpose is to punish the wealthy, for the crime of, well, being wealthy.”
Zombie, the real purpose is for the government to extract a hefty portion of that tax money for itself while en route from the wealthy to the poor. Other than buying votes, Obama couldnt care less about giving money to the poor.
My apologies. I wrote too quickly and did not proofread. You noted that he cares nothing for the poor, but I doubt he cares about the rich either. The sole purpose is to take money for themselves.
I have seen numbers before on what percentage of each dollar given to government actually is spent on it’s intended purpose but I cant remember them. Thirty five cents out of each dollar comes to mind. Perhaps someone here has that number.
I underestimated.
The Cato Institute says 70 cents of every tax dollar going into welfare is spent not on welfare recipients but goes into the welfare bureaucracy itself.
Yes.
That is why I am NOT impressed when any congress critter brags about how much bacon they bring back.
I send you $1.00 and you send me back .30???
That’s great only in bizzaro liberal life
Reminds me of this old story:
It’s a slow day in a little East Texas town. The sun is beating down, and
the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and
everybody lives on credit…..
On this particular day a rich tourist from back east is driving through
town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants
to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night..
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next
door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to
the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier
of feed and fuel.
The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to
the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to
offer her “services” on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel
owner.
The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich
traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs,picks up the $100 bill,
states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves
town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town
is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more hope and
optimism..
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is
conducting business today.
“No, instead, his destructive employment program involves the hiring of bureaucrats to stifle and crush entrepreneurialism and the free market; technicians to install machinery which makes doing business more difficult and expensive; IRS agents to squeeze more and more money from the dwindling number of productive Americans; and public servants whose job is to remove as many people as they can from the employment market by enslaving them to addictive lifelong entitlements like Food Stamps and unending unemployment benefits.”
That is the basis of Obama’s fiscal policy over the last three years. And he was assisted in that by those worthless bums Pelosi and Reid, who always think that the only good job is a government job (or government welfare). Obama, Pelosi, and Reid really do want the government to be the largest employer in this country, thinking that having more and more people dependent on the government could only lead to better and better things, like ending up like Greece. What do you call people who not only follow a failed economic model like the one they have in Europe, but who actually embrace it and want to expand it? You call them liberal Democrats, that’s what you call them. November can’t come soon enough for me.
Every day I visit Memeorandum after Drudge and before PJM. Almost every day Memeorandum features an article by a complete, rabid, heartfelt, radical, regressive, and certified nitwit by the name of Paul Krugman. He is nominally an Economist, but he opines with equal pomposity and bile on any subject you might think of.
Now you may believe I’m being rude and crude to Herr Krugman, but if you have ever read some of his opinion pieces in the NYT you will recall that he is twice as insulting toward conservatives and Repubs as I have been to him. And yes I called him a nitwit. If you have never read him, I can offer proof of this. Here it is: He is the recipient of this prize, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2008).
Basically what he is selling is this marvelous product of mental creativity completely isolated from the outside world. The Obama stimulus was way too small; we should immediately begin another, much larger one; and it doesn’t matter a whit how much money we borrow to do it. Bingo, another prize in the offing?
Now, if you feel like it, apply this highly scientific work of that great personage and favorite of Memeorandum, Herr Doktor Krugman, to the analogies discussed by Zombie and the commenters above and see where his policies might fit in.
I suppose the $100 hotel room analogy would be the best fit.
The thought occurs to me that no one held a gun to the head of the homeowner requiring under penalty of law that he had to blow his leaves into his neighbor’s yard and would be held simultaneously liable when his neighbor’s leaves were in his. Such is the state of legislation today that you cannot poke your head out of your front door without being in violation of any number of rules, regulations, laws, edicts and so forth that you cannot possibly be aware of at any point in time.
Two, the first gardener that figures out the utility of adding a leaf sucker to his leaf blowing services will gain a significant advantage over his competition.
We know that Obama is a big narcissist (“possibly” the greatest president). And we know he wants to go down in history as something besides a community organizer that hit it real big. But, given the magnitude of his ambition, this malice aforethought stuff seems a little bit of a stretch. Evil is a better word; malice goes too easy on him.
Great article.
As for the question whether it is simply incompetance or deliberate malice, the matter is easily resolved by observing the results. Simple incompetance would by random chance sometimes create positive results.
You be the judge.
“When we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs building and installing all sorts of pollution-control technology.”
Reminds me of when Nancy Pelosi claimed (on more than one occasion) that the government paying out unemployment benefits was the best way to stimulate the economy.
You shake your head at the tiny little circuitous rationales that go round and round inside such peoples’ creaky neural circuits.
…the Leaf-Blower Paradox not as a paradox at all but as a neat mechanism for extracting money from the more-well-off and giving it to the less-well-off.
Sort of like the UN still trying desperately to extract reparations from rich countries to be paid to poor countries (that is, after the UN itself has ripped off its fair share for serving as intermediary in the transfer)
Nice writing, Zombie. I like this straightforward economic stuff instead of all the arcane, convoluted stuff.
“What do you call people who not only follow a failed economic model like the one they have in Europe, but who actually embrace it and want to expand it?”
You call them traitors. You call them idiotlogues.
Spain’s “green economy” going belly up didn’t slow down the Obama administration one bit, knowing full well that Solyndra couldn’t produce solar panels at a competitive price and proceeding, nevertheless, to push more than 1/2 billion of our taxpayer dollars into that company’s hands.
And structuring the deal so the taxpayer would get the short end of the stick in the (rather inevitable) event of the company going bankrupt. And Steven Chu’s energy dept. asking for another $400 billion or so to push Solyndra’s way as the company was going under.
I read in passing this week that Solyndra execs are asking for bonuses, just as execs at failed Fannie and Freddie did.
And, of course, GM has recalled the piteous number of Chevy Volts it actually sold (cost to taxpayer to produce, $250,000 per car) to retrofit those crappy lithium ion batteries with more steel so the crappy little car doesn’t catch fire in your garage and burn your house down.
Has anybody gone to jail or lost their job over these monumental and egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars ?
“And Steven Chu’s energy dept. asking for another $400 billion or so…”
That’s million. Trillions, billions and millions are all morphing together in some amorphous mass.
Yesterday, the guy who self-righteously opined against raising the debt ceiling in 2007 (“irresponsible” “unpatriotic”) and voted against it under his predecessor, asked for another $1.3 Trillion (that’s trillion with a T) to add to the $5 trillion already down the drain on his watch.
From ethanol to car pool lanes,efficiency and real costs are never considered in the green agenda.Renewable energy is worshiped,not efficient energy.Most progressives are hostile to the very concept of efficiency.
But don’t you know that the laws of nature are racist, homophobic social constructs?
/sarc
I don’t think that Obama’s destructive policies relate back to malice or envy on his part. Rather, I think he’s just too self-centered to give a damn. That and he’s not too bright. Seriously. The man is a tool. A tool OF malicious and ideologically-warped actors in the ruling-class elite.
Former colleague Prof. Epstein summarized Obama’s grasp of economics this way:
“Obama worked as a community organizer and was in many cases very constructive. He organized public/private partnerships to help the homeless and downtrodden.
But, the difficulty you get, for someone who has only worked in that situation, is that he believes the creation of private wealth is something the government cannot influence or destroy. He has many fancy redistribution schemes, in addition to his health plan and new labor laws, which are all wealth killers.
He is about to engage in a series of proposals to redistribute wealth that we do not have.”
Link: http://georgebakalov.net/former-obama-colleague-prof-epstein-on-obama (April 2009)
Epstein’s observations have proved true. It’s clear Obama doesn’t understand jobs, the economy, business, wealth creation-destruction, taxes or the productive class.
Malice or ineptitude? I’d say a healthy dose of both, coupled with a dangerous case of “smartest-man syndrome.”
Clarification: OBAMA’s former colleague, Prof. Epstein …
God, I hate leaf blowers.
This is a good column, but just another take on basic economic principles. It is most similar to the Keynesian “digging holes” concept – that government spending can stimulate the economy even if the spending is on something that isn’t productive. A dollar spent on unproductive activity (like leaf blowing or hole digging) takes away a dollar that could have been spent on productive activity (e.g., remodeling the house, buying a new car). The job creation potential is the same for both types of spending, but one increases wealth and the other does not. Another important point is that government can be seen as overhead for the economy. The private sector creates wealth, government redistribution and regulation does not. As a society becomes wealthier, it can afford some overhead (e.g., environmental regulation, welfare, bureaucracy) but to promote such overhead as a job creator is pure baloney.
Superb article! CTRL C – CTRL V – send to all my liberal friends
A good piece, but there is really nothing new when it comes to basic economic principles. This is similar to the Keynesian notion that if the government pays for digging holes, it can stimulate the economy. The first problem with this is opportunity cost, as the broken window parable demonstrates. A dollar spent to blow leaves (or dig a hole) is a dollar not spent on other pursuits. The homeowner could have, for example, bought a copy of Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” instead. In terms of job creation, the money spent on the book and the money spent on leaf blowing would be similar; however, the money spent on the book would serve to increase overall wealth while the money spent on pointless activity would not. The second problem has to do with the notion that government bureaucracy, regulation, defense spending, social welfare programs, and the like may be considered overhead for the private sector. The private sector creates wealth and some of this money can be diverted to overhead, but these funds will not be available to fuel further growth. To say that such spending on overhead is a job creator is absolute baloney, the kind that liberals so often dispense.
Sorry for posting essentially the same comment twice. It didn’t look like it “took” the first time.
Quibble: the “Steamroller” example would have been improved by mandating that the farmers “improve” their crops by doing the replanting using only non-GMO seeds. Then it would have been more closely parallel to the Obamanomics cases.
Dear Leader is spending huge amounts of money, not his money, grabbing huge amounts of power. He doesn’t need to create real, actual, productive jobs, or anything else. He gets his power. No oversight by congress or DOJ. Apparently little oversight by the public either.
So, he grabs another trillion in debt here in a few days… just another grab for more power on his part. Be it in the form of buying votes, or creating more of a crisis, it really doesn’t matter in his eyes. What do we get? Another Czar and more freedom to let government decide what is best for each of us…. as a collective. But, we will be happy in those green jobs, or government jobs, or just sitting around collecting a government check for doing nothing. Obama will assure us that we are happy.
Hope and Change? More like Hope and Fail. Unfortunately, it is freedom that is failing.
Nailed it once again Zombie!
I’d like to point out two things. For anyone who doubts whether FDR’s New Deal policies helped or prolonged the Depression, please read the book “New Deal or Raw Deal.” It is excellent and so well researched that it proves unequivocally that FDR’s policies prolonged the depression.
As to the “Leaf-Blower” Paradox, I would like to point out another disturbing trend of the “Leaf-Blowers” and today’s welfare recipient. The lack of SHAME. I bet these Leaf-Blowers go home every night and gloat about taking advantage of the dumb asses that hire them. And today’s welfare recipient gets the handout and complains that whatever they get is not enough.
Agenda 21
Leaf blowing… beautiful. I skimmed the comments and I think they are spot on as well.
But consider this. The middle class and up are not creating jobs and providing welfare payments out of the goodness of their hearts. They know that they would be more likely to be robbed and killed if there were significantly larger numbers of homeless, destitute and starving people. Employers would be too frightened to lay workers off if there was no welfare.
I was once fired from a job and was very angry since I was lied about and unfairly fired. Some people would kill the person responsible especially if it meant that they were going to be destitute and living on the street.
“Rod” forsooth!
You can’t fool ME, Lizzie Warrenbuffet. Come out with your hands up.
Zombie, to put it succinctly, Obama is ZORG- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA
There’s a need for a Hogarthian satirical drawing titled “The Rake’s Progress” somewhere in here.
Buzz, I don’t think anyone much younger than I is likely to know what you’re talking about to get the joke.
Here’s the search page results: https://www.google.com/search?q=a+rake%27s+progress+hogarth&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=oKD&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=XzoTT5vbDueoiQLHsrGdBQ&ved=0CEAQsAQ&biw=1280&bih=602
“The Leaf Blower Paradox” is almost the same as “The Broken Window” branch of economic studies.
Both are absolute failures.
In Obama’s mind, regulations will create jobs (government jobs) but not real jobs.
The main purpose is not to punish the wealthy. The orchestrators of the nanny state are themselves very wealthy. The purpose is to create an entrenched supportive bureaucracy (more useless jobs) and to shore up their own power. They literally use our money to buy votes, so they can get power (and thus wealth). An ingenious system!
Better that obama scrap all the union rules etc and employ the unemployed to fix all the things in the US that need repair…..the bridges, the potholes, the water and sewer systems, the schools with leaky roofs etc. Put some of those people on the streets to curb violence and in classrooms to help kids. Use all those ‘unemployed teachers’ to act as tutors on a 1 to 1 basis or as extra help in preschools where the kids might learn their colors instead of what is their favorite television show. When the money spent on stimuli is mentioned, it divides out into a lot of money per job. Pay the people employed in these activities a fair salary for what they are doing.
“…we have Obama’s understanding of economics. In his view, the role of government is to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor.”
Actually his role of government is to transfer funds from the unconnected not-so-wealthy small business owners and employed professionals to the connected super-wealthy such as Buffett, and Kaiser; to impoverish the middle-class and make the poor perpetually poor to give him an excuse to tax the not-so-wealthy.
Whose pockets were stimulated by the taxpayers’ billions of “stimulus” money? Billionaires Kaiser, Buffett, Perelman, to name just a few. Who were impoverished? The workers who lost their jobs when the “stimulated” companies went bankrupt, the management divided the loots from the taxpayers as “bonuses” for running the companies to the ground.
Nice post. Obama’s economic policies are one of the main reasons I decided to put all my money in gold. Here is my post about that: http://jrmidnightblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/golden-gamble.html?spref=fb
The implication of the Leaf Blower analogy is that it is a zero sum game with money transferring and nothing happening. In fact it is a negative phenomenon as the leaves could have been left on the lawn and though unsightly, would have disintegrated over the winter and act as fertilizer in the Spring. We do this all the time and actually save money on fertilizer. The analogy is to the government’s Community Redevelopment Plan, started in the Carter administration, increased in the Clinton years and ballooning this past decade leading to the Great Recession. Like a “roll of the dice” it was thought of as a zero sum game. Nothing of the sort would have happened if we had just left everything alone.
Patriots do our own lawns. We use electric mowers. We mulch the leaves in situ and feed our lawns at the same time. We keep our hard earned money AND get exercise!!!! Obama does not like fit, healthy patriots with “nature knowledge” – doesn’t fit his zombie mold. We are ready for his zombies.
I am John Doe.
EPA BASED ON SCIENCE FRAUD
An 8/11 article reported that the X-Ray and fruit fly experiments leading to the 1945 Nobel and leading to the Linear No Threshold Theory being adopted as hard science and later used as the foundation of the EPA were bogus and involved thimblerigging the the numbers to make them come out as desired. This demonized radiation by grossly exaggerating its adverse effects by using the Linear No Threshold calculations (LNT). LNT is the basis in EPA investigations. (Research Hormesis Effect). Fruit fly experiment could not be duplicated. EPA’s first crusade, against DDT, was also science fraud. The Congress was told the test animal results and not the control animal results, for example, which showed animals eating DDT got cancer. All were fed aflatoxin contaminated feed (carcinogenic). Control animals got more cancer, establishing DDT as inhibiting cancer, but reporting test results only suggests it causes it. And so on.
Using this analysis, almost all lawyers are as useless as the leafblowers, since much (most?) of the law create artificial disputes for lawyers to argue over. Same for accountants. Get rid of all the superfluous law and get rid the lawyers and accountants.
The Leaf Blower Paradox- which came first, the leaf blower or the illegal alien who wields it?
It seems to me both of these blights showed up in our society at about the same time.
Okay, I did not really attribute a proper reply to your article zombie, I added another component of Obama’s repertoire instead of addressing your analogy. It isn’t really Obama’s fault that he believes the crud that he believes. Well, kind of not his fault, he did seek out marxist and socialist instructors. They can be found through out our schools of “higher” learning. I learned while taking micro and macro economics, that professors are morons in general. I use to bring up an analogy, that I will get to in a moment, to the profs describing why busywork mandated by the government is not successful.
Misallocation of capital, by the government is problematic, it harms the greater macro economy by harming or inhibiting proper and efficient activity. Your analogy of people just moving the leaves around, is inefficient, but in the private and individuals hands, it will be remedied when the individuals realize the inefficiency. Or even if it is not realized, it is only effecting the micro, not the macro economy. Of course it will be realized, when my brother in law comes to your neighborhood, offers to mulch mow with his pull behind trailer and you are satisfied with the result. You can even keep the mulched trimmings and use them for your compost needs.
Now, the analogy that I came up with is if the government thinks they can help the economy by making busy work, why not just make a law that makes refrigerators illegal? Before refrigerators, labor was required to carry ice to all of the houses so that it could be used in your ice box. That would be a crazy idea you might say, but it already happens in thousands of different arenas. Think about it for a moment, I will give you one example that I use to tell my profs that use to really make them mad, but it is so simple of a solution, and devestating to a certain component of our country’s problems, that it will NEVER be allowed.
I speak of the tax laws. They are not to actually collect taxes only, they are to create millions of jobs for accountants, tax preparers, lawyers, etc. If the tax laws were just simple, what would be the need for all of them? Besides that they were created to control you and allow cheating by the super wealthy, they were also used to create an entire industry of leaches on the macro economy. I hear that it now costs the US economy in the neighborhood of $1.7 Trillion every year for the US economy and business to deal with regulations, how much does the tax alone cost? Think about it, how many lawyers, accountants and such could be eliminated from our economy if it was simple? Just a rough estimate of the salaries of say 500,000 people in the private sector making only 50k, that comes to 25 Billion. This is just one small component of it though. I way under estimated here just to prove a point.
Now think of all the government employees necessary to impose the thousands of tax schemes the government imposes? There is probably in the neighborhood of a million people in the government, if not more, that are involved in the institution of these tax schemes?
There are numerous other busy work schemes the government imposes on us, that are exactly like this, that destroys the productivity and capital allocation in this country.
What do you say, do you think Obama would like my idea of outlawing those refrigerators? I bet he would!
And of course we all know the leaf blower paradox works to employ all those Harvard Graduates in Government Jobs.
Zombie,
Maybe this is a waste of time, or outside your wheelhouse, but have you considered doing an article on the Primary process? Specifically, I’ve often wondered why the Republican Party holds primaries the way it does in terms of the sequence of states that get to vote.
To my mind, New Hampshire should be much lower on the list. You’d think that if the Republican Party is the party of “Conservatism” (and I know it really isn’t), then it would start its voting in Texas, Missouri, or any number of other more Conservative states.
Why start the voting in the more liberal states? The Conservative candidates end up dropping out of the race by the ti…..oh. Never mind. I just answered my own question.
Thanks anyway!