Economy

Automation replacing service, white collar workers. While nobody wants to lose a job, this is a good thing for people over all. It means people are creating wealth at lower price. That means more productivity and more wealth for everybody.

In another sign that it's 2007 all over again, the jobless rate in Ohio is lowest since 2008.

Lew Rockwell praises David Stockman's upcoming book entitled "The Great Deformation". He explains how the Fed and government intervention created the 2008 bust, and he goes back to the New Deal for his explanations. The New Deal is still harming Americans today. He explains the 2008 crash was a culmination of bad policy that had been predicted for a long time.

"If the monetary central planners have been trying to create jobs through the roundabout method of "wealth effects," they ought to be profoundly embarrassed by their incompetence. The only thing that has happened on the job-creation front over the last decade is a massive expansion of the bedpan and diploma mill brigade; that is, employment in nursing homes, hospitals, home health agencies, and for-profit colleges. Indeed, the HES complex accounts for the totality of American job creation since the late 1990s."

Yikes. I look forward to

"The sudden emergence of enormous budget deficits in recent years, Stockman explains, simply made manifest what the bubble conditions of the Bush years had concealed. The phony wealth of the housing and consumption booms temporarily lowered the amount of money spent on safety-net programs, and temporarily increased the amount of tax revenue received by the government. With this false prosperity abating, the true deficit, which had simply been suppressed by these temporary factors, began to appear."

Stockman also shatters the myths about Reagan's military build-up.

"At the heart of the Reagan defense buildup…was a great double shuffle. The war drums were sounding a strategic nuclear threat that virtually imperiled American civilization. Yet the money was actually being allocated to tanks, amphibious landing craft, close air support helicopters, and a vast conventional armada of ships and planes.
These weapons were of little use in the existing nuclear standoff, but were well suited to imperialistic missions of invasion and occupation. Ironically, therefore, the Reagan defense buildup was justified by an Evil Empire that was rapidly fading but was eventually used to launch elective wars against an Axis of Evil which didn’t even exist."

"What would actually bring the Soviet Union down was its command economy itself – a point, Stockman notes, that libertarian economists had been making for some time. "

That's a point I've made for some time, but I didn't realize it in advance. Now I realize we could have ended the Cold War as soon as it started by shrinking the burden of government instead of growing it.

"Thanks to The Great Deformation, not a shred of the regime’s propaganda is left standing. This is truly the book we have been waiting for, and we owe David Stockman a great debt."

I'm buying this book as soon as it's published.

Entertaining lessons in economics.

Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine.