March 21, 2009

• Unintended Consequences

  “In Europe in the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period it was often the law or custom that a man who raped a woman was forced to marry her. This law was frequently turned on its head by couples who could not otherwise get married—because of differences in their social status, for example. The man and woman would stage a rape, which would produce a social imperative requiring them to marry.”

  Retrieved from “http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/Courses/CS_461/Museum_of_unintended_consequences/Rape_as_a_marriage_proposal“

   

  Over the next week, the rhetoric surrounding the Obama Budget proposal is going to escalate.  There’s just no escaping it.  But the way your Congressional Representatives vote will have much more to do with the pressure you put on them than anything they say to each other in their dueling press conferences. 

   

  I’d like to point out a couple of things in hope that maybe you will be encouraged to contact the Representative and Senator from your district and offer your opinion.  First, there are unintended consequences to every action.  The bigger the action, the greater the consequence.  Past actions and inactions on the part of our government have contributed greatly to the current economic crisis.  The wrong actions now will make it much much worse.

   

  By the way, my son asked the other day, “What is economics anyway …” and I found that off the top of my head it was surprisingly difficult to answer him.  I wanted to talk about money, resources, labor and profit.  But it’s much simpler than that.  Economics is the science of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.  The economy is not about “money”, money is a tool used by the economy to make the transfer of goods and services easier.  Which makes all the current conversation kind of weird because we keep talking about the problem as though money is the economy. 

   

  We are indeed having a money problem though.  For a more thorough discussion of our monetary and banking system, please see my previous blog “Lives in the Balance”.  And we aren’t just having a money problem, we are also having a problem of reaction to the problem.  It’s the old horse versus barn-door paradigm.  (If you agree with me now, you can skip straight to the end, recommend me to all your friends and just leave me a great comment.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, hang in there for the long version.)

   

  Four years ago, monetary agents were lending money to each other, to companies, to consumers, and borrowing from foreign entities to make that happen.  We as a nation and an economy were encouraged in this behavior by a philosophy developed and articulated by Ayn Rand called Egosim.  She was a free-market prophet who declared that any state interference in the affairs of “the producers” is not just good economic policy (a debatable proposition at best) but an immoral act designed to prevent the capable from fully realizing the fruits of their labors while breeding a class of leeches who subsist on the ill-gotten largesse which the government has stolen from the aforementioned Producers.  Alan Greenspan was a friend and student of the late Ms. Rand and has publicly proclaimed his allegiance to her ideas since his first public appointment.

   

  He believed in and wrote policy to support a “supply side” economy.  From this philosophical perspective arose such cloying cliches as “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

   

  Ms. Rand’s position was that given free-rein, the Producers would create better, more efficient, more effective and less expensive products.  Government regulation would lead to inefficiency and waste.  Her magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged” makes this point vividly as the poor beleaguered capitalists are forced into less and less sustainable positions until they are finally convinced that they’ve lost the war.  The book ends with the hero flying West to Colorado to the last enclave of free-market culture where all the great men have fled to produce for themselves alone and to enjoy an unfettered life.  Beneath the wings of the jet, the lights literally go out as the electric grid fails and all the land is swallowed in literal and figurative darkness. 

   

  So we’ve had 30 years of economic policy designed to avoid that scenario.  Has it produced the intended result?

   

  In actual fact, Producers are no more immune to stupidity, shortsightedness, and greed than anyone else.   Instead of creating products that are better, cheaper, more efficient, and more durable, we’ve seen entire industries push the “planned obsolescence” envelope until consumers are willing to accept that the products we buy will be outdated within a few months and unsupported within a year or two.  Remember the Maytag repairman of the old commercials?  What company can you think of today that’s actively marketing it’s products as “built to last?”  What car company today is producing vehicles that get better gas mileage than the ones that rolled off the line in the 80′s?

   

  Advertisers have designed clever campaigns to convince us that we need newer, brighter, shinier, things that our grandparents would have slapped us for buying.  New _______, again?  What’s wrong with the old ones?  

   

  And as a group, we’ve been complicit in all this materialistic frenzy.  Oh, maybe not you personally, but well, yeah, probably you too because it’s pretty damn hard to live in America without thinking that I NEED something that I no more need than I need a hole in my head.  And if I’m in that boat, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone because I’ve been frugal from years before it got to be cool to be frugal.  The bottom line of all this is that our consumer debt in 2007 hit 100% of our gross domestic product.  It took from the Great Depression until the 1980′s for consumer debt to exceed 50% of GDP, but we have gone and shot the moon, baby. 

   

  You know what that means?  There is no money left in the pocket of the consumer to spend.  All the economic gurus tell us that the way to get out of a Recession is to Spend.  But I really must repeat it again since there appear to be so many politicians and talking heads who didn’t get the memo, consumer debt exceeds our Gross Domestic Product.  We don’t HAVE anything left to spend. 

   

  Now, I want to be transparent about something else before I come down to the end of this writing.  Ten years ago, five years ago, I was worried about the size of our national debt.  I thought it was a moral outrage and I couldn’t believe that no one seemed to care.  I remember a particular conversation with a very good friend (Republican at the time but has since transferred to the dark-side as a registered Independent), in which I argued passionately that the National Debt was out of control.  My otherwise responsible friend quoted to me as the concluding argument a line that came straight from Greenspan, “debt is not a problem because our economy is growing, and it will continue to grow for all the foreseeable future. We’ll grow our way out of this debt.” 

   

  The two problems with that line of thinking were that 1) it REQUIRED unabated growth and 2) it REQUIRED no increase in debt.  You’ll never outgrow something if you can stretch it to fit at each new size.    But as I said, my friend has since seen the light so clearly that I haven’t even been tempted to go back and say, “I told you so.”

   

  Now that we are in trouble, I’m hearing absolutely unbelievable calls for “fiscal restraint”.  People who had no problem with government spending five years ago have suddenly found religion, only now the times are different and they are dead wrong.

   

  The only way out of this mess is to spend, and the only place left for the money to come from is the government.  Private investment is dead.  Consumer spending is dead.  That only leaves government spending. 

   

  I don’t want you to think I’m exaggerating, but I’m afraid some of you won’t believe this next statement unless you go look it up for yourself, so I implore you to go, look it up.  The ONLY markets functioning today are those being guaranteed by the government.  If government spending stops, even those markets can’t function.

   

  It’s too late to lock the barn door, the horse is out.  The only way to get the horse back in is to keep the doors open!  It’s way past the time for a “jump-start”, pumping a few hundred dollars into the pockets of taxpayers isn’t gonna do it.  It’s way too late to tell banks to “shore up their capital position” (let me translate that for you, the newly energized regulatory agencies have been telling banks that they are increasing the capital requirement - banks are being required to hold MORE MONEY IN RESERVE! – you cannot LEND more if you are being required by regulators to RESERVE more.)  Sorry for shouting, <deep breath>.’

   

  The time to increase reserves was about 7 years ago when the markets started going off the charts.  That’s the same kind of common sense as “buy low, sell high” but although it’s easy to understand on paper, it’s hard to do in real life.  Instead of telling banks back then that they needed to increase their reserves, they lowered the capital requirement on the five largest banks and the actions that followed brought the unintended consequence of a broken economy.  

   

  Losers panic and sell low or get carried away and buy when things are at their peak.  Decreasing capital reserves in 2003 was like waiting until a certain attractive stock hit $800 a share and then deciding to buy.  Increasing the capital reserves now is like holding that $800 stock until the price drops to $3 and then selling it.  

   

  The unintended consequences of restraint now are pretty clear to see if you’re one of the little guys who was already struggling back when the people calling for restraint were telling us that the crisis was all in our heads and that we were just a nation of whiners.  Distressed banks forced to raise their capital requirements become insolvent banks with the stroke of a regulator’s pen.  An economy that’s barely limping along on Federal guarantees becomes “road pizza” (Tucker’s phrase) if the spending stops. 

   

  If you have never done it before, I urge you to use your Internet Savvy skills and find the web address where you can email your Congressman and tell him or her, “Please don’t fall for the rhetoric.  Now is not the time for the government to stop spending.”  And even more than that, if you are the kind of person who already has your Congressial Rep on speed-dial, I strongly urge you to find one person in your life who hasn’t been politically active and ask THAT person to please make a call or send an email.  We need to speak loud enough to be heard over the roar that’s been created in and around Washington by the sound of the voices of people who love to hear the sound of their own voice but are saying utter nonsense.   

   

  If in our current climate government spending stops, or even slows down, we’re all going to get a front row seat to a new show in town called “What Made the Depression Great.”

   

   

  • 8:14 am
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