David Stockman has always been a hero to me when I figured out that his episode where “Reagan took Stockman to the woodshed” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/305760/ was an indictment of Reagan rather than of Stockman. I was twenty seven at the time.

My major complaint with Stockman’s rebuttal of the Keynesian defense of Obama is that it is so very easy to explain the Keynesian argument to most lay people, while being damn-near impossible to explain the Austrian arguments to the American lay public who have no idea HOW MUCH BLATANT MANIPULATION OF BASIC INFORMATION is going on WITHOUT the Main Stream Media making any attempt to correct the deliberately created misconceptions. It is almost (not quite) as bad as when The New York Times covered the Holocaust in two inch stories, buried within the paper, rather than having it acknowledged on the front page. “Mustn’t be thought of as a ‘Jewish’ paper, must we.”

Consider how many times Stockman has to say they’re comparing apples and oranges in modern labor statistics, and measurements of the economy. Unless you are a professional economist, or someone who, unlike most ‘practical’ people, is supposedly nutty about stuff you have little or no influence over, this knowledge is totally unknown and unsuspected by most folks. Perversely, the more educated a lay person is, the MORE likely they are to believe the present fraudulent numbers!

This isn’t Stockman’s fault. I know this. And this podcast is part of the necessary effort to educate people. But the leap of imagination that we are asking so many people to contemplate is quite incredible, unimaginable, fantastic,… people who say this stuff MUST be conspiracy nuts! We live in a free country! No one could lie as completely and consistently as you libertarians claim AND NOT GET CALLED OUT ON IT!!! If the Emperor were really this nude,… wouldn’t we have all noticed by now?

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The real question is, should our government be inducing changes in behavior at all? At the end of the day, tax is force and force is not freedom.

I think people have a hard time understanding how economics should work (Austrian) because it precludes government manipulation and bailouts. Even though these interventionist policies do not benefit the average person the public is nonetheless led to believe that they do. The media serves as the propaganda arm of the government by portraying how good the economy is and how effective FED policies are. What people need to learn is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Until we address the fundamental structural problems in our economy we will continue this period of economic malaise into the foreseeable future. We are now a service based economy due to the exportation of so many manufacturing jobs overseas. We need a balanced economy where people have the opportunity to earn a decent living without disastrous FED policies that continually devalue the purchasing power of the dollar. Think about it; what is our major export? I would argue that it is the US dollar. All we do is enact free trade agreements that export jobs in favor of cheap imports. We pay for these with US dollars which are in turn used by the world to purchase oil and other items of international trade. Excess $ is re-invested back into US T-Bills so the US can circulate more dollars. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is by definition a Ponzi Scheme and it will come to an inglorious end at some point.