The Obama Stimulus Package and Schrödinger’s Cat
by Robert Roy Pool
All the old economic ideologies were based on nothing more than logic; it was impossible to muster enough facts to prove or refute them definitively. You had to be a true believer. In those bad old days, if you were a skeptical empiricist, you were nothing. Nobody wanted to hear that most of the assertions put forward by both sides in an economic debate could not be proved. In fact, most such assertions were, by their nature, unprovable.
But President Obama seems to be a bit of a skeptical empiricist himself. I am optimistic enough to believe that my people – and by that I mean skeptical empiricists – have seized control of our country for the first time in long time. This is a revolutionary development. I hope we can hold onto this power long enough to rescue the economy.
Down with true believers! All power to the fact-based community!
It’s All False
Skeptical empiricists believe that all economic ideologies have been discredited. Marxism was discredited so thoroughly in the 20th Century that few people even bother to defend it any longer. The labor theory of value? Give me a break – simplistic and ridiculous. Marx’s analysis failed to account for almost anything that actually happened in a real market economy, and yet the Russians bought it for 70 years! The Chinese only bought it for about 30 years, but they drink less vodka. We Anglo-Americans bought Marxism for about six nanoseconds, sometime back in 1918, before it had been implemented. We never bought it after that.
But we have no justification for feeling smug. Anglo-Americans bought into what George Soros has called “free market fundamentalism” for the better part of the last 30 years. This ideology, attributed to Ronald Reagan, but traceable to Adam Smith, the first great economist, held that the free-market was self-correcting, and tended toward equilibrium. So why not trust everything – our economy, our jobs, even our children’s future – to the free market?
No economic theory was ever refuted more decisively. The financial meltdown of 2008 laid bare its absurdities. Among them: corporate executives receiving $20 million bonuses for running their companies into the ground, bankrupting their shareholders, and destroying the financial system and the world economy? Maybe the free market is not always right. And where is that equilibrium we were supposed to be tending towards? Will we reach equilibrium with the Dow Jones Average back at 2,000, and our GDP down by 50%, as in the Great Depression?
Only Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh still believe in free market fundamentalism. Everyone else has jumped ship.
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