Too Big to Bail

I would first of all like to apologise for the relative hiatus in my activity since November, with university course and project work time has been scarce, and even now seems to be getting scarcer. Nevertheless, the important things in life bear repeating, and since we are coming to the close of a year of horrible government interventions in the economy and moreover in violating property rights; it would be worth reflecting before Christmas on a simple truth taught by a great French man over 150 years ago.

This post is adapted from part of an essay I am currently in the process of writing.

Much of academic economics is filled with jargon, difficult to communicate and is itself rather conceptually muddled. Without entering into a discussion of its specific attributes and the reasons for its flaws, it should become fairly clear that the same cannot be said for Bastiat’s simple lesson of the broken window. Indeed try to think how many government interventions in the last year or so resemble the adoption of the simple fallacy in this tale.

Science is united in its use of logic and deductive reasoning. What may differentiate the sciences and characterise them, will of course be the facts and material that are the focus of their investigations, as well as the particular methods used to gain accurate statements across their subject matter. This would not of course mean, and never has meant that any science is necessarily restricted to utilising one form of procedure with which to build its theories.

The nature of logic is formal. Also, despite the intuitive nature of human inference, in the sense it can can correctly be considered a neurological and psychological process; the relation of implication it can grasp between propositions remains objective and formally governed by the principle that an argument based on true premises cannot yield a false conclusion.

It is perhaps an easy mistake to deny the cognitive value of reasoning from false premises. Yet there is scarcely anything more common than to regret and reflect on what could have been, but was not true. This is precisely what allows us to recognise the lesson of Bastiat’s parable of the broken window.

The hapless shopkeeper, who must repair the window broken by his son must enlist the services of a glazier paying him 6 francs. Many would falsely believe that this type of intervention is beneficial, since we are artificially spurring demand for goods and services, causing money to be spent, and flow around the economy. As Bastiat points out, this is rather facile and short sighted. If such an incident did not befall him, our shopkeeper could have spent the money buying shoes from the shoemaker while maintaining his window as part of his real capital. The former scenario on the other hand, ensuring the destruction of capital, is a negative sum game since the glazier gains at the expense of the shopkeeper losing his capital and the unseen shoemaker’s potential profit.

There is no need to artificially “spur” demand, the resources would have been utilised one way or another. All the intervention has achieved is to divert their use towards repairing damage of destroyed capital instead of furthering the consumption or capital investment(Bastiat notes the money could have been spent by the shopkeeper buying books for his library) that could have occurred instead.

Taken to its logical conclusion as an economic program, one could accurately portray the fallacy identified to advise widespread destruction, violent robbery and theft as a means of economic progress. Such is the wisdom of John Maynard Keynes. This is also the unfortunate reality of what is presently considered good economic policy, whether the fashionable buzzwords to mask it are fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing, cash for clunkers or “too big to bail” corporate welfare.

Indeed as the Keynesians seems to miss over and over again, the entire point of economising is not to boost aggregate expenditure or income but to ensure the correct resource utilisation and capital structure to meet consumer demand. With central banks buying government bonds with their counterfeited money, artificially increasing the money supply making money a “cheaper” commodity for bondholders, as well as lowering the interest rate at which banks borrow the counterfeited money from them; market interest rates were artificially lowered, also distorting their connection to consumer time preference and saving.

Their interventions with interest rates for the previous half decade helped distort this structure away, preventing the proper functioning of the price system two-fold.

The artificially lowered interest rates first of all distorted profit and loss, making longer term investment projects in higher order stages of production more attractive.

Subsequently, this artificially raised investment demand for scarce resources toward higher order stages of production, raising to an unsustainable level the prices of these scarce resources. This occurs precisely since increased investment does not coincide with increased savings and lower short term consumption demand from consumers for consumer goods ultimately derived from these scarce resources. As a result, this places inflationary pressures on all related goods, including consumer goods that are derived from these scarce resources, creating the much ignored impoverishment that occurs during the boom phase but is fashionably ignored by most financial commentators. During the housing boom, first time home buyers were more deeply disadvantaged, and many even went into debt further compounding the problem of capital consumption, in order to catch the trend.

With simply an economy of one person,  investing resources for a long term project at a rate that cannot be sustained since he has not reduced his rate of consumption; the error is easy to see, he is consuming his resources at an unsustainable rate. The only difference in our case is the way the mistake is realised. The losses made by businessmen at a later stage, indicate that the funds and capital diverted to long term projects were mal-invested precisely since they were not accompanied by the increased savings of consumers. Since consumer demand never shifted sufficiently away from present consumption, the savings necessary to enable them to purchase the products of these higher order processes were not gathered; losses were the inevitable result.

Yet these losses are the correction process, allowing the structure of prices and interest rates to correctly adjust to reflect the actual scarcity of capital. They are precisely the process that allows for the correct structure and distribution of capital to form; the one that correctly matches consumer demand as far as possible, and precisely for this reason allows for real, sustainable growth and progress.

Yet the same Keynesian economists, interventionist politicians and central bankers that created this problem are also the ones who appoint themselves the task of correcting it. Not only have they slashed interest rates so low they are practically negative, further preventing correction of this coordinating price mechanism, the coordinating function of which they had earlier broken; they also tell us to bail out the failed sectors using the money and capital that is diverted from the healthy parts of the economy, burdening the consumer who is the taxpayer and obligated user of their debased currency even further. They increase spending of course for their own political projects with no regard for what people actually want, since if they actually cared about that they would allow the market economy to function with the profits reflecting what people actually want.

They are nothing more than smiling murderers and robbers in expensive suits. To add insult to injury, those foolish enough to buy their scam think schemes like “Cash for clunkers” will help, when they are destroying capital and creating something worth less as dictated by its value on the market.

The apologist doctrines used to support these programs are of course complicated and convoluted. Yet once one understands the simple truth forwarded by Bastiat’s parable, one is able to pierce through much of this nonsense and see it for what it is. The truth, as is often the case in science has a real simplicity and beauty. Perhaps the reader shall enjoy reflecting on this lesson for a moment while enjoying their holidays.

Merry Christmas everyone.