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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (520444)	11/7/2012 8:38:45 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793834

Debt is not the question. The question is whether governments can create wealth. It is very common to meet people who make the absurd claim that governments can in principle never create even a penny of wealth, because only the private sector can create wealth. How do people get that nutty? Both the private sector and the public sector are simply organizations of individuals who can engage in any active of commerce, using similar tools, and with similar levels of knowledge, etc, so it should be obvious to anyone but a moron, that either 1) no commerce can create wealth, or 2) governments can create wealth. What is so difficult about understanding this? The only way to disprove this is to show that a certain class of activities is impossible for a government entity (i.e. government employees) to perform, but for some reason private individuals can do it. What function would that be? Further you would have to show that only such functions create wealth, and all others can't. The only way I know to do that is simply by declaration of what wealth is. Which is of course not something any sane person would have an interest in discussing.