Red-Pill Economics

Welcome to the Paradise of the Real:

The Nation yesterday published a hilariously illiterate essay by Raúl Carrillo, who is a graduate student at Columbia, a Harvard graduate, and an organizer of something called the Modern Money Network, “an interdisciplinary educational initiative for understanding money, finance, law, and the economy.” All three of those institutions should be embarrassed. Mr. Carrillo is the sort of man who thinks that 40 pieces of candy can be divided and recombined in such a way as to arrive at a number greater than 40. His essay, “Your Government Owes You a Job,” argues that the federal government should create a guaranteed-job program, “becoming our employer of last resort.” Mr. Carrillo’s middle-school-quality prose must be read to be appreciated — “Would jobs for all skyrocket wages and prices, spurring inflation? Such unfounded belief holds the jobless hostage to hysteria” — but his thinking is positively elementary. It does, however, almost perfectly sum up the symbolism-over-literal-substance progressive worldview: “You need dollars to eat,” he writes, “and unless you steal the dollars, you generally have to earn them.”

But you do not need dollars to eat. You need food to eat. Experiment: Spend six months locked in room with nothing other than a very large pile of dollars; measure subsequent weight loss.

Mr. Carrillo’s intellectual failure is catastrophic, but it is basic to the progressive approach. Mr. Carrillo argues that a guaranteed-job program would “pay for itself,” mitigate deficits, empower women, strengthen communities, liberate us from Walmart and McDonald’s — I half expected him to claim that it would turn a sandwich into a banquet. But the question he never quite gets his head around is: Jobs doing what? Americans in guaranteed government jobs “needn’t construct trains or solar panels,” he writes. Instead, they could be employed in “non-capital intensive” sectors such as “child-care, eldercare, and” — focus in here, kids — “community gardening.” Experiment: Offer for sale at a price of $250 a voucher entitling its bearer to one year’s worth of meals at McDonald’s, one year’s worth of groceries at Walmart, or one year’s worth of produce from your local community garden; compare sales figures.

Read the whole thing.

7 thoughts on “Red-Pill Economics”

  1. Men’s inflation-adjusted average wages peaked in 1973, and inflation-adjusted household incomes for much of the middle class have shown little or no growth in some time.

    I wonder if going off the gold standard had something to do with that?

    DN Guy — Nixon was a republican!!!! It’s all your fault!!!!

    On second thought, DN Guy isn’t smart enough to know Nixon took us off the gold standard

    1. Yeah, I’m waiting for dn-guy to get back from his Mensa meeting and weigh in on this subject. He probably thinks Carrillo is an economics genius. Which, compared to the Douchnozzle, he may very well be.

  2. “Work For the Dole” was replaced in Australia with “Suffer Bureaucrats For The Dole”.

    Why? They found that it was counterproductive to suggest to people that “make work” was actually worthwhile. Those people would never get a real job because in a real job you’re expected to add value. All the benefits of Work For The Dole – making people actually get out of bed in the morning, showing up to somewhere on time, being presentable, learning to write legibly (no, really), etc, etc, could all be achieved by having a bureaucrat set people on the dole these little tasks.. or they don’t get paid. Thus we got the “case worker”, and the “work clothing allowance”, and the “dole diary”, along with the old system of shuffling people into training programs.

  3. In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

    By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

    But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

  4. It’s amazing that there are people who believe in both redistribution economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I do know the reason for that: the Robert Reich Left thinks that money earned by The Rich somehow leaves the otherwise closed system (i.e. the economic sphere).

    1. If Progressives and Greenies truly understood the Laws of Thermodynamics, we’d be able to get free from OPEC, and “ecologically” move to where they want to go: Burning fewer hydrocarbons, and those we do burn would be “cleaner.”. But nuclear energy is EVIL. Fracking is EVIL. Solar energy and wind farms are GOOD (as long as NIMBY).

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