After the heroes of HHGG steal a completely black space ship (“when you press this button, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to tell you that you’ve done it”) they are completely unable to control it. It veers around so violently that Arthur Dent approaches the point of nausea (“go right ahead, we could do with the colour in here”).

Finally – and recall this is a radio series, so we are dependent on dialogue to communicate what is happening – someone yells out “Ahh, that’s better. Have you finally mastered the controls” to get the response “no, we’ve just stopped fiddling with them”.

This seems like a wonderful analogy for politicians running the economy.

1. It doesn’t belong to them. They stole it.
2. They don’t understand it.
3. They are making everyone sick.
4. It would be better if they just left everything alone.

The crisis we’re seeing right now ultimately devolves to lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back during a time when everybody was encouraging everyone else to do so, and then taking that debt obligation and wrapping it in an abstraction and selling it as an AAA bond-level investment.

What I hear is infantilism, not Keynesian economics (misrepresented or otherwise). The prescriptions we’re hearing for the economy have a childishly naive quality about them… an apparent belief that “leaders” know how to “fix” the economy. And that once they do, there will be rainbows and singing birds.

To my mind it most closely approximates the faith that children have that their parents can make anything bad go away. For most of 2008, the media was looking for (and tried to sell us) the Daddy who would give us back our allowances, after the mean BushMonster took them away.

After all, to hear the media tell it, as soon as Obama is sworn in he will push the secret magic button that will make the rainbows come out and the birds sing. Bush does not do this now because he is a Republican and he wants us to suffer.

Missing from all this is the frightening (but adult) knowledge that there exist systems that are so complex that no one, anywhere, knows how to “treat them as a technical challenge” without making things even worse.

It is extremely disturbing to realize that no one is going to “fix the economy” because no one knows how to fix an economy; it is beyond human capability to do such a thing. Children cannot abide this idea. There must be, somewhere, a Mommy or a Daddy who can make the bad recession go away.

I don’t hear ‘Keynesian’ prescriptions so much as I hear one group of children trying to reassure other children that Daddy is coming and will make the owie go away.

This is why I am an adherent to Austrian free-market economics (arch-rivals of the Keynesians), as championed by the likes of Ludwig von Mises, Carl Menger, and Murray Rothbard. This school of though starts with the basic idea that “human’s act” and go from there. It is not convoluted modeling and dry formulas, but an examination of how human beings act and react to the world.

The work of the Ludwig von Mises Institute has been great is destroying the work of Lord Keynes.

Somewhat contrary to the MSM’s misrepresentation of Keynesian principles/theories is the following statement from Keynes himself:

“When the capital development of the a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

In addition, Keynes clearly specified the importance of the so-called “fundamental theory of value” that the market supply-demand interactions should be fully linked with. The “present” market must fully incorporate what we really value based on the “changing views of the future” (i.e., expectations).

These “moral” elements of Keynes’ works are generally ignored by the self-proclaimed experts.

My main points are the following:

1. I find the MSM and liberals’ characterization of Keynes to be “highly flawed” and self-serving. I don’t want to be a part of such shadow effort in maligning a great thinker like Keynes,.

2. MSM and Liberals’ theories are always “skewed” and adulterated. For example, the sham “Poverty Economics” as a branch of social science has been established through the incessant brainwashing by the MSM and the “liberal” sector of the academe.

My Conclusion;

NEVER LISTEN TO MSM AND LIBERALS ESPECIALLY WITH REGARDS TO THE MATTERS OF SCIENCE, POLITICS, RELIGION, AND MORALITY.

Giving loans to people who were not credit worthy and many who were very likely in the country illegally was not a good idea. Yes I have first hand knowledge of how the lending was done, and to whom. As long as the fees and commissions were paid, no one cared what happened to the eventual crap sandwiches — They just moved them up the food chain.

However, it would not have stopped a speculative bubble, unfortunately there is nothing short of eliminating the free market that would do away with those.

This is what Marx reacted to. Marx understood that markets are prone to boom and bust cycles. Marx thought that it was better not to have a market at all rather than just to put up with it.

That is why our present so called leaders are intellectual descendants of Marx. They also are doing all they can to do away with the business cycle.

But the cycle is very necessary. Just as you cannot live unless you have times of sleep, you cannot have a market without corrective phases.

As I’ve said before, one good way to prevent it from happening again is to start making an example of the people who allowed it to happen by shooting them in public.

As Minsky made clear, no permanent answer exists. But recognition of the systemic frailty of a complex financial system would be a good start.

The crisis we’re seeing right now ultimately devolves to lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back during a time when everybody was encouraging everyone else to do so, and then taking that debt obligation and wrapping it in an abstraction and selling it as an AAA bond-level investment.

A permanent answer most certainly does exist, and did exist before anyone who was truly a Conservative was systematically purged from the banking system in this country. They knew that you shouldn’t lend money to people who can never pay it back, and you should never encourage people to get in over their heads by taking out second mortgages on their homes to pay for vacations and braces and throwaway luxury items.