MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘David Stockman’

David Stockman on Scientism and the New Road to Serfdom

Posted by M. C. on February 13, 2022

These claims amount to invented science based on large theories of how the world works, which are essentially goal-seeked. That is, they first posit the climate, public health and economic models that inherently require heavy-handed state intervention to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and then they array the evidence and projections to validate the predicate.

By David Stockman

It’s long past time for conservative folks to wake up. Today’s great threat to capitalist prosperity, personal liberty and constitutional government as we have known it is not Marxism, socialism or any other variant of traditional left-wing ideology.

The real threat to liberty is more generic. Rather than a specific history-rooted ideology, such as the working class socialism of the early industrial era, the foundational threat has always been the aggrandizement of the state, and the empowerment of the political classes and nomenklatura that thrive upon it, whatever the ideology upon which they justified their will-to-power.

And today the vehicle for that impulse of statist expansion is Scientism — the false claims that economic science, public health science and climate change science, among others, require sweeping increases in state intervention and control.

This proposition is not merely a grand abstraction. The recently passed $7 trillion in stimmies, bailouts and infrastructure boondoggles, the Biden Administration’s claims that we have just nine years until irreversible climate disaster, and the ongoing depredations of the COVID Virus Patrols are real time instances of Scientism at work — unnecessarily and destructively extending the long arm of the state deep into daily economic and social life.

There is no valid science that calls for either the extinction of fossil fuels, or lockdowns to stop the spread of a virus like those that have afflicted mankind since time immemorial, or massive monetary and fiscal stimulus to keep capitalism from plunging into the drink.

These claims amount to invented science based on large theories of how the world works, which are essentially goal-seeked. That is, they first posit the climate, public health and economic models that inherently require heavy-handed state intervention to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and then they array the evidence and projections to validate the predicate.

For example, the natural climate change now underway — as it has been for 4.5 billion years — is essentially benign, not catastrophic. Current warming is nothing new — it’s happened repeatedly from the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300 AD) to the Roman Warming (200 BC to 300 AD) to the Holocene Climate Optimum (7,000–3,000 BC) and on back in countless unnamed cycles reaching deep into the history of the planet.

Contrary to the false claims of the climate howlers —

  • current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too; and
  • climate cycles are a function of powerful planetary forces, such as the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, which causes ice ages in 100,000 year intervals, and solar irradiation oscillations, which modulate cosmic rays and cloud formation. These forces have shaped the earth’s climate for eons and long preceded and massively exceed the impact of industrial era CO2 emissions;

Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high cost renewable energy.

Editor’s Note: We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms.

But this is just the beginning…

Most people don’t realize the terrible things that could come next, including negative interest rates, the abolition of cash, and much more.

If you want to know how to survive what the central bankers and the Deep State have planned, then you need to see this newly released report from legendary investor Doug Casey and his team.

Click here to download it now.

Be seeing you

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David Stockman on How Trump Could Really Make US Industry Competitive Again

Posted by M. C. on January 4, 2020

The first thing we need to do is get rid of inflation targeting and try to become more competitive by allowing the market to automatically do it. If the Fed wasn’t in the way, we would have high interest rates and a deflating price system as the economy attempted to adjust to the massive new competition in China.

https://internationalman.com/articles/david-stockman-on-how-trump-could-really-make-us-industry-competitive-again/

by David Stockman

…What do you think of Trump’s trade policies and tariffs?

David Stockman: The trade policies are idiotic. They haven’t improved the trade deficit. And have caused other problems.

We got the numbers in now for 2018 and we had the largest trade deficit in history!…

International Man: If Trump was serious about making the US industry competitive, what could he do?

David Stockman: The best thing he could do is a housecleaning of the Fed.

The Fed’s policies are the number-one enemy of real sustainable growth, job creation, and the American economy.

First, the 2% target inflation is absurd.

We’re in a world where we’re competing with $5-an-hour labor in China and $15 or $18 in South Korea. We should be deflating our economy, not inflating it, because when we inflate a price level, wages go up with it, and we become just that much more uncompetitive in global trade either as an exporter or in competition with the imports coming in.

The American worker isn’t any better off because he got an extra 2% in his wage. He’s paying 2%—if not far more actually—at the grocery store, at the doctor’s office, for education costs, and for transportation.

The first thing we need to do is get rid of inflation targeting and try to become more competitive by allowing the market to automatically do it. If the Fed wasn’t in the way, we would have high interest rates and a deflating price system as the economy attempted to adjust to the massive new competition in China.

The second thing is to get the Fed out of the business of propping up the stock market in fear that if the stock market is allowed to correct, we’ll have a short run of recession—which is true.

Stock crashes lead to recession, owing to this crazy financial engineering that has become the total preoccupation of the corporate C-suites of America…

To summarize, if we started deflating, rather than inflating our economy, if we get the C-suites back into the business of running companies and investing for the long haul rather than financial engineering on Wall Street, it would eventually and slowly heal our competitive situation.

It would lead to more jobs, higher incomes, more sustainable prosperity for the American economy.

But that requires a massive change at the Fed—a housecleaning, of both the people and the models and policies that they use.

Be seeing you

Israel's Dirty Little Secret, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz ...

 

 

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Stockman Tells It Like It Is: U.S.-Mexico Trade Deal: ‘Great Big PR Stunt’

Posted by M. C. on August 31, 2018

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2018/08/stockman-tells-it-like-it-is-us-mexico.html

This is all you need to know about the current state of the economy.

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Yellen And The Feds Are Stumped

Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2016

2008 all over again for the same reasons caused by the same people.

As usual the Fed does not kinow what is happening nor what to do about it.  The difference now is that they are admitting it.  See Gerald Celente’s post here.

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials threw up their hands in January, deciding that they could not decide whether market turmoil would impede domestic economic growth.

The Fed in recent years has issued an assessment of its economic outlook after each meeting… an official account, published on Wednesday after a standard three-week delay, makes clear that Fed officials simply did not know what to say.

“Most policy makers thought that the extent to which tighter conditions would persist and what that might imply for the outlook were unclear, and they therefore judged it was premature to alter appreciably their assessment of the medium-term economic outlook,” the meeting account said. (The New York Times, 18 February 2016).

Threw up their hands? Did not know what to say? Outlook unclear? Premature to judge even in medium-term economic outlook… let alone long-term?

Is the Federal Reserve stupid, or playing stupid?

David Stockman (Reagan’s budget manager) recently called Janet Yellen a simpleton.  Read the rest of this entry »

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