@NetRunner has some ripped abs!


Round 1:

*deblankfist

De-blankfisting this video and giving it a nice hot shower - deblankfist requested by BoneRemake.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, April 28th, 2011 10:00pm PDT - promote requested by geo321.

Lyrics:

“Fight of the Century” Lyrics.

Written by John Papola and Russ Roberts

KEYNES
Here we are… peace out! great recession
thanks to me, as you see, we’re not in a depression
Recovery, destiny if you follow my lesson
Lord Keynes, here I come, line up for the procession

HAYEK
We brought out the shovels but we’re still in a ditch…
And still digging. don’t you think that it’s time for a switch…
From that hair of the dog. Friend, the party is over.
The long run is here. It’s time to get sober!

KEYNES
Are you kidding? my cure works perfectly fine…
have a look, the great recession ended back in ’09.
I deserve credit. Things would have been worse
All the estimates prove it—I’ll quote chapter and verse

HAYEK
Econometricians, they’re ever so pious
Are they doing real science or confirming their bias?
Their “Keynesian” models are tidy and neat
But that top down approach is a fatal conceit

REFRAIN
Which way should we choose?
more bottom up or more top down
…the fight continues…
Keynes and Hayek’s second round

it’s time to weigh in…
more from the top or from the ground
…lets listen to the greats
Keynes and Hayek throwing down

KEYNES
we could have done better, had we only spent more
Too bad that only happens when there’s a World War
You can carp all you want about stats and regression
Do you deny World War II cut short the Depression?

HAYEK
Wow. One data point and you’re jumping for joy
the Last time I checked, wars only destroy
There was no multiplier, consumption just shrank
As we used scarce resources for every new tank

Pretty perverse to call that prosperity
Rationed meat, Rationed butter… a life of austerity
When that war spending ended your friends cried disaster
yet the economy thrived and grew ever faster

KEYNES
You too only see what you want to see
The spending on war clearly goosed GDP
Unemployment was over, almost down to zero
That’s why I’m the master, that’s why I’m the hero

HAYEK
Creating employment’s a straigtforward craft
When the nation’s at war, and there’s a draft
If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet
We’d be at full employment with nothing to eat

REFRAIN REPEATS

HAYEK
jobs are the means, not the ends in themselves
people work to live better, to put food on the shelves
real growth means production of what people demand
That’s entrepreneurship not your central plan

KEYNES
My solution is simple and easy to handle..
its spending that matters, why’s that such a scandal?
The money sloshes through the pipes and the sluices
revitalizing the economy’s juices

it’s just like an engine that’s stalled and gone dark
To bring it to life, we need a quick spark
Spending’s the life blood that gets the flow going
Where it goes doesn’t matter, just get spending flowing

HAYEK
You see slack in some sectors as a “general glut”
But some sectors are healthy, and some in a rut
So spending’s not free – that’s the heart of the matter
too much is wasted as cronies get fatter.

The economy’s not a car, there’s no engine to stall
no expert can fix it, there’s no “it” at all.
The economy’s us, we don’t need a mechanic
Put away the wrenches, the economy’s organic

REFRAIN REPEATS

KEYNES
so what would you do to help those unemployed?
this is the question you seem to avoid
when we’re in a mess, would you just have us wait?
Doing nothing until markets equil-i-brate?

HAYEK
I don’t want to do nothing, there’s plenty to do
The question I ponder is who plans for who?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many and not by the few.

We shouldn’t repeat what created our troubles
I want real growth not just a series of bubbles
Let’s stop bailing out losers and let prices work
If we don’t try to steer them they won’t go berserk

KEYNES
Come on, Are you kidding? Don’t Wall Street’s gyrations
Challenge your world view of self-regulation?
Even you must admit that the lesson we’ve learned
Is more oversight’s needed or else we’ll get burned

HAYEK
Oversight? The government’s long been in bed
With the Wall Street execs and the firms that they’ve led
Prosperity’s all about profit and loss
When you bail out the losers there’s no end to the cost

the lesson I’ve learned? It’s how little we know,
the world is complex, not some circular flow
the economy’s not a class you can master in college
to think otherwise is the pretense of knowledge

REFRAIN REPEATS

KEYNES
You get on your high horse and you’re off to the races
I look at the world on a case by case basis
When people are suffering I roll up my sleeves
And do what I can to cure our disease

The future’s uncertain, our outlooks are frail
Thats why free markets are so prone to fail
In a volatile world we need more discretion
So state intervention can counter depression

HAYEK
People aren’t chessmen you can move on a board
at your whim–their dreams and desires ignored
With political incentives, discretion’s a joke
The dials you’re twisting… are just mirrors and smoke

We need stable rules and real market prices
so prosperity emerges and cuts short the crisis
give us a chance so we can discover
the most valuable ways to serve one another

FINAL REFRAIN
Which way should we choose?
more bottom up or more top down
the fight continues…
Keynes and Hayek’s second round

it’s time to weigh in…
more from the top or from ground
…lets listen to the greats
Keynes and Hayek throwing down

*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, April 29th, 2011 4:08pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter blankfist.

Keynes ended a depression. Hayek created one. I'm siding with the guy that got positive results.

Also, this is a great opportunity to mention Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

The New Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hayes, In These Times, November 9, 2007

In the early ’80s, as Margaret Thatcher attempted to hack away at England’s substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn’t fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile’s aggressive model more faithfully.

In her reply, Thatcher explained tersely that “in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a higher degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times, the process may seem painfully slow.”

The Hayek/Thatcher exchange is one of many revealing historical nuggets unearthed in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein’s ambitious history of neoliberalism. Hayek isn’t the star of The Shock Doctrine—that dubious honor goes to his protegé and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. But Klein’s totemic, capacious and brilliant alternate history of the last three decades of global political economy can best be understood as a latter-day response to Hayek’s classic right-wing manifesto, The Road to Serfdom.

More of this review here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/new-road-serfdom

@dystopianfuturetoday, Hayek was in defense of Classic Liberalism, so you can't call him Left or Right in the way you understand the two. He's certainly not either, not in the conventional understanding of right vs. left politics, which is vague to say the least. Some think fascism is leftist and others rightist. That's largely because the entire paradigm is based upon the French Revolution, which doesn't fit eloquently into world political positions.

Naomi Watts, the author of the Shock Doctrine, is certainly left-leaning, so I could see how she'd label him rightist in misguided error.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Keynes ended a depression. Hayek created one. I'm siding with the guy that got positive results.


Totalitarian is a stable form of economics.

@blankfist - Everyone else on this site knows you are conservative. Everyone else but you. Come out of the closet already. Don't you notice how JesusFreak and QM fawn over your comments and posts. It's no coincidence. It's cool. Let your inner confederate flag fly.

Back to the topic. Hayek is the poster child for right wing economics. He was the darling of right wingers like Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in deregulation, privatization and austerity, and he wasn't opposed to shedding a little blood to make it all happen.

Great comment, buddy. You must have spent hours working out that little beauty.

(PS: I think the first word is missing an 'ism'.)

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Keynes ended a depression. Hayek created one. I'm siding with the guy that got positive results.

Totalitarian is a stable form of economics.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Great comment, buddy. You must have spent hours working out that little beauty.
(PS: I think the first word is missing an 'ism'.)
>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Keynes ended a depression. Hayek created one. I'm siding with the guy that got positive results.

Totalitarian is a stable form of economics.



Indeed on the ism! I do highly recommend late night drinking comment drive-bys, you never regret them.

Forgive the drive by commenting @blankfist, but David Frum has pretty much what my response to this will be: http://www.frumforum.com/dont-get-punked-keynes-won-this-rap-battle

>> ^NetRunner:

Forgive the drive by commenting @blankfist, but David Frum has pretty much what my response to this will be: http://www.frumforum.com/dont-get-punked-keynes-won-this-rap-battle



I'ma let you finish, but Hernando de Soto Polar is one of the more interesting economists in the world!

So, listening to it myself, I gotta say I'm in total agreement with Frum on this one.

To make my own personal observation, even to a pro-Hayek ideologue, don't you notice that he doesn't actually propose any economic theory at all? Not a hint of "I think if X happens, Y will result"? The only things he says are the usual political demagoguery of "if government does something, we're all doomed!"

The bumper-sticker version of Keynes's theory is that if a recession comes about from a slump in demand, government should try to step in and create demand by spending money. The Hayek answer given here is essentially "we don't understand economics," with the full meaning being "so when a major depression or recession hits, just bend over and take it like a man."

Keynes essentially says that economics is worthless as a science if it can't tell us what to do in crises like the Great Depression. In fact, that's the meaning of his "In the long run we are all dead" quote, when read in proper context:

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

Great article. I wish VS had a place to post article links. >> ^NetRunner:

Forgive the drive by commenting @blankfist, but David Frum has pretty much what my response to this will be: http://www.frumforum.com/dont-get-punked-keynes-won-this-rap-battle

>> ^NetRunner:

So, listening to it myself, I gotta say I'm in total agreement with Frum on this one.
To make my own personal observation, even to a pro-Hayek ideologue, don't you notice that he doesn't actually propose any economic theory at all? Not a hint of "I think if X happens, Y will result"? The only things he says are the usual political demagoguery of "if government does something, we're all doomed!"

But he does propose a theory, that humans are too complex to quantify en masse. Central authorities cannot account for every complexity in human behavior, so it's ineloquent to set monetary policy from the top down. It should be placed in the hands of the people to decide how the economy should work.

>> ^blankfist:

But he does propose a theory, that humans are too complex to quantify en masse. Central authorities cannot account for every complexity in human behavior, so it's ineloquent to set monetary policy from the top down. It should be placed in the hands of the people to decide how the economy should work.


Right, but that's just a mix of right-wing populism and saying "we don't know anything about economics." It's mostly just a failing of the video, not of actual Hayek.

Real Hayek had a pretty solid argument for why markets are better than centrally planned economies. In fact, it's Hayek's argument in particular that makes me a pro-market liberal, and not some sort of more left-wing radical. But that has to do with the inability for people to express information about preferences in some non-market way that a central planner could use to match up demand with supply appropriately.

The problem with that rearing its head in a conversation about Hayek vs. Keynes is that it doesn't apply to Keynes's theory at all. He isn't taking away the market mechanism and replacing it with a central planner.

The problem is that Hayek was never big on coming up with actual theoretical models for how economies react to certain things. Instead, he was just big on coming up with narratives about how he thought government doing things to the economy always led to folly. That's the whole Austrian "school" of economics in a nutshell though -- they aren't interested in modeling things like scientists, just telling stories like historians or philosophers. Maybe they're right, maybe they're not, but there's no real way to use data to validate or refute them, and that's the way they like to keep it.

*doublepromote

Post cannot be double-promoted by blankfist because blankfist is the original submitter.

Well, can I *promote it please?

Self promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, May 1st, 2011 6:01pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter blankfist.

fact: Keynes is the patron saint of the neo-liberals who love what's happened to workers in the last 30 years.
fact: quantitative easing is the definition of Keynesianism and central planning
fact: Democrats love Keynes because he provides a rationale for government spending, that Republicans never contest.

As Hayek would say, spending in the wrong place won't create growth. Just like the "stimulus" hasn't increased anyone's welfare (there are exceptions). As Obama fucks over black neighborhoods with 40% unemployment, he's doing it while listening to Keynes.

DFT, you mention how bad chile got it,
Chile is growing steadily today while Great Britain is in a depression in all but name.
Ironic?

>> ^marinara:

fact: Keynes is the patron saint of the neo-liberals who love what's happened to workers in the last 30 years.
fact: quantitative easing is the definition of Keynesianism and central planning
fact: Democrats love Keynes because he provides a rationale for government spending, that Republicans never contest.
As Hayek would say, spending in the wrong place won't create growth. Just like the "stimulus" hasn't increased anyone's welfare (there are exceptions). As Obama fucks over black neighborhoods with 40% unemployment, he's doing it while listening to Keynes.


None of the "facts" listed are true. Including the one about Obama following Keynes.

Isn't he the one saying the neo-Hayekian Republican party is right that now is the time to balance the budget?

I agree that fucks over everyone, and blacks will be disproportionately disaffected by it, but you can't really call that Keynesian at all.

"Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem has been added as a related post - related requested by Trancecoach on that post.