Economic Creationists

When I first came across the Interwebs I also came across actual real to goodness Creationists for the first time.  I'd rather assumed that they were relegated to the same dustbin of daft ideas as the flat Earthers, but nope.  There they were.  All over various fora, and newsgroups like talk.origins.  It was a shock.

The key thing I had to remember is you're dealing with completely faith based reasoning.  The starting point is the assumptions, not the evidence.  Therefore, you start with biblical 'facts' and work backwards from that point, twisting reality and logic into weird little pretzel shapes as you go.

I was reading Jay Lake's posts over the last few weeks on Conservativism, and noted the responses from Jordon Bassior, and others, and realized that, economically speaking I was seeing a similar set of behaviours.

A few weeks ago Paul Krugman appeared on the BBC show Newsnight where he was placed up against 2, yes, two, he was outnumbered on the discussion (take that socialist BBC!) leading conservatives who took him to task for his position on Keynesian economics and what we ought to be doing in this crisis.  One of the Conservatives explained, at some length, that the real problem was the size of the British state and how it was crowding out private money… it's a common argument from the neo-liberal economic consensus of the last 30 years.  Krugman, sighing, asked how, in that case, could they explain current 'star' of prudent fiscal management, Sweden, where the state accounts for a much larger proportion of the economy than the UK… if crowding out isn't happening there, nor for that matter in Germany, why was the UK a special case?  He reasoned further, that based on the evidence, it was more likely that other factors were at work which had a much simpler explanation.

And that's rather the point. 

We've had over 30 years now to test out if the Austrian economic schools of thought actually work.  However, realistically, we've seen bugger all evidence that they do.  The average earner has got worse off in that period.  Any 'gains' made were mostly an illusion brought about by insanely irresponsible fiscal mismanagement and essentially covering up the lack of real growth with an insane explosion in personal and national credit.

We're now in a situation where the richest people are controlling more of the wealth in the West than at any time since the Gilded Age and demands for austerity are based on balancing the economy on the backs of the poorest members of society.  

We've now reached a point where a moderate conservative president is labeled "socialist" for doing things that just a few decades ago were mainstream conservative orthodoxy.

Something has to give.

By stint of a bit of luck, hardwork and the right career choices I'm solidly top 10% and I suspect I'll be a 1%er at some point in the next decade - all things being equal with my startup and the like, but that's hardly the point.  A society needs a broad base of wealth to survive otherwise we will end up in one of our Science Fictional dystopias.   I despair of modern 'conservatives' - they're nothing of the kind, they're libertarian radicals who're buying into a set of unproven, untested beliefs which have no basis in fact, and certainly shouldn't be used to manage nor run a modern economy.

Hugo Update

There is no update.

I am slogging through the Hugo Packet.

I did read Redshirts.  Sadly, I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

That is all.