Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (587990)	9/29/2010 2:17:20 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570976

The person who made the argument is irrelevant, I just give him credit rather than plagiarizing his points. The fact that the argument was made a long time ago is just as irrelevant. The intervening time has only given us more examples of how Bastian's insight on this issue is correct. And the point is in now way partisan. Its not about, or in support of a political party or movement. Its just a recognition that when you take money from some to give to others, the benefits the others receive are not the whole picture. If we only had to be concerned about those direct visible effects of spending, then stimulus would be trivial and highly effective, tax everyone at 100%, then spend all that money, and you create trillions or tens of trillions of new wealth. But of course that's nonsense. Its not just nonsense in the extreme (although its more obviously so), its nonsense in smaller doses as well. Government's move resources around, for their size they do little to actually create resources. That's probably a good thing in that socializing production so the government would actually create more would be a very bad policy; but its a fact that we have to recognize. The government can create or subsidize the creation of all sorts of things, but it does so by taking the resources away from other things. Tax everyone in the US an average of $10 and you will have over $3bil to spend on some project. That $3bil, can easily create something of value (or subsidize the creation of something valuable), but its not a free lunch. We can't know exactly what it would have done if it was not taxed away (which is why Bastiat called it "the unseen"), but its unreasonable to assume it would have done nothing useful, or even to assume it would have had less useful results than the new government project had.