Jim Powell, on continuing failed attempts to rehabilitate FDR’s Depression record:

Black commits one of the most familiar fallacies by reciting a litany of New Deal projects — libraries, schools, public works, and so forth — as if their funding came out of thin air. But government doesn’t have any money other than what it gets by (a) taxing people now, (b) borrowing money now and taxing people later, or (c) inflating the currency, which is another form of taxation. Every New Deal project on Black’s list meant that less money was spent elsewhere because it was taxed away. New Deal economics basically involved robbing Peter to pay Paul, with added inefficiencies along the way and a net loss for everyone.

Remember, too, that the New Deal was mainly paid for by the middle class and the poor, because the biggest revenue generator for the federal government during the 1930s was an excise tax on cigarettes, beer, chewing gum, and other cheap pleasures enjoyed disproportionately by those two groups. Until 1936, the federal excise tax generated more revenue than the federal personal income tax and the federal corporate income tax combined. Not until 1942 did the personal income tax become the biggest source of federal revenue. You can look it up in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, volume 2, page 1107.

Perhaps Black is suggesting that politicians have a special talent for spending other people’s money in a way that will do more to stimulate the economy than if those people had spent it themselves. That proposition is laughable. All the available evidence verifies the common-sense truth that people are less careful with other people’s money than they are with their own. That’s true even when their intentions are good and their motives are pure — which was rarely the case in the New Deal. FDR’s spending programs stimulated a mad scramble among political bosses for control of the loot and the patronage.

This is an important debate to continue, because mindless and ahistorical worship of the New Deal lies at the heart of the current disastrous policies.

A free-market solution to health care. Of course, it doesn’t pass the litmus test of socializing medicine, so it will be a non-starter with this administration.

A lot of discussion of the impact of the president’s plan to punish anyone making over a quarter of a million bucks. What is particularly disgusting is all of his lies and rhetoric about the free market providing jobs, and the importance of small business and entrepreneurs. Watch what he does, not what he says.

[Update in the evening]

Carl Pham in comments suggests a variation on Martin Niemuller’s famous quote: “First they came for those making $250,000, and I said nothing, because I didn’t make that much…”

[Update a little while later]

If you work less to avoid taxes, are you a tax dodger?

I think it’s worse (or will be worse) than that. You’re an enemy of the state.

[Update a few minutes later]

Planned impoverishment?

It’s certainly a theory that fits the facts.

[Update at 7 PM Eastern]

Going John Galt.

Paul Hsieh thinks that it should be. I have to agree with the commenter, though, who thinks that Hayek is a better bet.

Apparently, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have thrown Keynes under the bus, too, even though they don’t realize it:

…it is true that government direction of capital is something Keynes advocated. But the current direction of capital by government is being conducted in a manner that flies in the face of Keynes’s underlying justifications for such state involvement.

For example, the stimulation of investment has thus far been ad hoc. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have infused capital into some firms but not others. In the case of financial firms, the rationales have been to promote liquidity or prevent insolvency or both. The government has moved on to direct capital into the troubled automobile industry. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are buying mortgage-backed securities, thereby making more credit available to the housing industry. The construction trades are expecting a huge infusion of capital under the rubric of “infrastructure” spending. And now an enormous list of other industries has been approved for temporary stimulation by the Obama administration.

It is difficult to imagine that Keynes would be enthusiastic about these temporary and discretionary policies given his diagnosis of the fundamental problem.

The historical record is helpful here. Keynes opposed immediate, short-term stimulus in 1937 when the British unemployment rate was 11 percent—much higher than we are experiencing today. Furthermore, he opposed temporary reductions in the short-term rates of interest because he believed that variability of interest rates sent the wrong long-term message. As he argued in “How to Avoid a Slump,” an article in the Times of London newspaper, “A low enough long-term rate of interest cannot be achieved if we allow it to be believed that better terms will be obtainable from time to time by those who keep their resources liquid.”

Of course, most of these people are far too economically illiterate to even understand Keynes. Instead, they simply adulate him as a god and use him as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway, regardless of whether or not it’s truly Keynesian.

[Update early evening]

More historical ignorance: Barack Obama versus Henry David Thoreau. Now, Thoreau was actually sort of a loon, and his “wisdom” is highly overrated, as P. J. O’Rourke has amusingly pointed out in the past, but the notion that the small-government philosopher would have approved of the “stimulus” plan is ludicrous.