The immense amount of corruption that we are getting to see clear as day because the establishment thinks that everyone is on their side and so agrees with what they're doing is incredible.
Obviously we kind of have to take Trump's word on the threat to imprison his son, but given what we've already seen why wouldn't we? 6 months of releasing violent riders back into the streets for one side of the political spectrum, and apparently Donald Trump ends up getting every single one of the indictments that should have belonged to the rioters slung right at him. Magically somehow law and order matters when it's a hated political opponent.
As for a fake dossier, we now know that the Steele dossier was fabricated for the purposes of trying to mess up the election, so if they would probably develop a fake dossier for one trump, why wouldn't they do the same thing for another?
Obviously we kind of have to take Trump's word on the threat to imprison his son, but given what we've already seen why wouldn't we? 6 months of releasing violent riders back into the streets for one side of the political spectrum, and apparently Donald Trump ends up getting every single one of the indictments that should have belonged to the rioters slung right at him. Magically somehow law and order matters when it's a hated political opponent.
As for a fake dossier, we now know that the Steele dossier was fabricated for the purposes of trying to mess up the election, so if they would probably develop a fake dossier for one trump, why wouldn't they do the same thing for another?
Why would they have a parade for june 19th nowhere near June 19th? Is this really what he's saying it is?
The only thing that's really notable is that he realizes what the wind is blowing like outside of the room he happens to be in at the moment. There aren't a lot of people in the Hollywood or Washington bubble who find themselves outside of the room they're in often since it's a really nice room.
Sorry for the long post, but it's the answer followed by some pontification about related stuff.
To answer that question, let's look at each, where it came from, and what was its downfall..
Eugenics: It is a theory based on evolution that essentially says you can engineer the human species into becoming a better human race. Although evolution is sound science, the problem with eugenics is that it's tied up in politics. Who gets to choose what is a superior human? In the times it was in vogue, what individuals considered the "superior human" was people like themselves. You can't play God and succeed. We know today that many things we used to think made humans inferior can actually be traits that cause survivability. For example, sickle cell trait gave people in Africa increased protection against malaria, and traits that look bad can be highly survivable such as traits that skew people towards obesity can cause humans to survive famines which are surprisingly common on timelines going back mere centuries. Its political expediency is ultimately what made it popular, and its downfall is that it was self-evidently used in anti-scientific ways to legitimize the state's treatment of people.
Prefrontal lobotomies: It is based on a theory that if you damage a specific part of the brain it will improve behavior. There is some science behind it, and early on it had some clinical success. It is something that actually can help in very specific cases as a last resort and is even used today. The problem is that it is incredibly easy to do, essentially requiring someone with minimal training to insert an implement through the socket of someone's eye and tapping it a bit with a hammer. What ended up happening instead is that state run mental health hospitals started using it as an "off switch" for disruptive patients as dramatized in the famous movie "One Flew over the Cuckoo's nest". Private practices tended to make use of the procedure after years of trying other treatments, whereas public medicine used the procedure shortly after patients were admitted. Ultimately, public mental health facilities ended up completing something like 96% of prefrontal lobotomies because performing a technique that could make people compliant was easier politically than asking the public to pay more tax to fully fund the mental health system. Its ease and political expediency is ultimately what made it popular, and its downfall is that it was0 used in anti-scientific ways to simplify the state's treatment of mentally ill people.
Bloodletting: A practice derived from medical treatises developed by the ancient Greeks. Those treatises suggested that the body contained a number of humors, and it is the balance of those different humors that where the primary determinant of a person's health, and so many issues were caused by an excess of one of those humors, and so various treatments sought to reduce the excess. Now there is a rational basis for this idea, just imagine if you're sick you feel like you need to throw up, and if you didn't know what the body was doing you might assume that for some reason the body was producing an excess of vomit. After all, once you successfully vomit you often feel a lot better. I think another bile is essentially feces as it moves through your digestive tract, and so a lot of the time medical issues do boil down to trying to remove excess feces from your digestive tract. One is green bile, phlegm, which obviously forms in your lungs, nose, throat, and sinuses when you are sick or as a protective mechanism for the regular basis, so too much green bile obviously feels like crap you have a runny nose or you're all stuffed up and coughing. The final of the biles is red bile, or blood, and it was assumed that certain illnesses were made better by releasing the excess blood that you had. So there was obviously a rational basis for this theory, but what really made it prevalent for a long time was the fact that there were religious taboos against digging into the human body to figure out how it worked. It wasn't until just a couple hundred years ago that rather than just trying to come up with treatments based on things that had a rational basis we started studying the body and trying to figure out what was actually wrong. That, paired with a new understanding of germ theory ended up leading to the development of treatments that actually resolve problems rather than symptoms. Once we did that, we realized that many of our treatments were wrong, and the case of something like bloodletting where people would end up being cut up on a regular basis for something that had no therapeutic value, it was considered downright barbaric.
So now we come to the matter at hand. What we know from her scientific basis he's pretty limited, but everyone kind of agrees something is going on, people have some kind of thing going on where they want to behave in a certain way, and they long to look a certain way, and that there's a dissonance between that desire and reality. But we also have is a political philosophy in postmodern neo-marxism that really wants there to be no such thing as the biological. Given a political and almost religious conviction that everyone is exactly the same, it is an extremely convenient belief to think that unalienable parts of a person's biology can be changed. Therefore, when someone wants to be changed politically and philosophically the right thing is to just do it for them, regardless of whether it's empirically and scientifically the right thing to do.
In this way, it is in many ways like the three things that I mentioned. Like eugenicism, the primary purpose of the intense attention paid to this certain thing is to advance the political cause rather than medical treatment. Like the prefrontal lobotomy, handing someone a bottle of pills (or even setting up an appointment for a brutal surgery, although the surgery itself is a current-day miracle of impressive skill and knowledge) is something relatively easy to do, and for certain aspects of the state it is convenient. Like bloodletting, it has a limited scientific basis, and mostly lives in the minds of the philosophers rather than in real empirical studies, and there are quasi religious taboos which have limited good study on it. Given the limited basis for the treatment, the highly politicized nature of its selection, and the fact that we end up engaging in Acts that would be considered atrocities at all points in human history if they aren't being done to help people, that's why I think it's likely that after the current era is over people will look upon the transiting as kids the same way as these other treatments, if not worse.
It's interesting to note that each of them could actually be helpful under certain circumstances. Though rare, prefrontal lobotomies are still very occasionally done. For some very rare conditions, removing excess blood is the modern treatment, and for people with rare genetic disorders, they may willingly choose to not have kids knowing that the future will not have as many opportunities for that disorder. In the same way, there may in fact be a small number of individuals for whom gender affirming therapy is the objectively correct course of action, but the political nature of what's going on right now will sour the whole enterprise.
Another thing (which I won't get into much here) is I think the near future will be much poorer, and much more conservative. Moon and Whatifalthist on youtube have made videos which help explain why the future will be poorer in their videos on population collapse or why the next century will look like the 30 years war, and as for why it would be more conservative, it seems logical -- the more "progressive" stuff includes killing your babies in the womb, not having kids due to climate change, moving to dense urban environments that tend to be high stress and anti-natalist, as well as stuff like child sex changes which sterilize their victims -- If you have two groups, and one of them is trying to survive and thrive, and the other is trying to commit suicide, of course the former will build the future no matter how much power the latter has in the present. Think of it like the process described in "idiocracy", but instead of intelligence, it's political affiliation which research shows is somewhat correlated to your parents.
At the moment, many western countries are importing many Muslims. Progressives seem to falsely believe that Muslims are progressive because most of them are beige and anyone who isn't a straight WASP is considered progressive by default in proportion to the amount they're not that thing, but Islam has been a highly conservative religion since the end of the Islamic golden age, and there's little evidence to suggest that's going to change because some western progressive tells them to. I'm sure you can find individual Muslims who are western progressives since populations are made of individuals and there's variation within such, but I'm talking about populations as a whole from a statistical perspective, and what happened after the Islamic golden age should be a warning to all of us. I don't think the future will look like anything even the most "far right conservative" among us wants to see.
To answer that question, let's look at each, where it came from, and what was its downfall..
Eugenics: It is a theory based on evolution that essentially says you can engineer the human species into becoming a better human race. Although evolution is sound science, the problem with eugenics is that it's tied up in politics. Who gets to choose what is a superior human? In the times it was in vogue, what individuals considered the "superior human" was people like themselves. You can't play God and succeed. We know today that many things we used to think made humans inferior can actually be traits that cause survivability. For example, sickle cell trait gave people in Africa increased protection against malaria, and traits that look bad can be highly survivable such as traits that skew people towards obesity can cause humans to survive famines which are surprisingly common on timelines going back mere centuries. Its political expediency is ultimately what made it popular, and its downfall is that it was self-evidently used in anti-scientific ways to legitimize the state's treatment of people.
Prefrontal lobotomies: It is based on a theory that if you damage a specific part of the brain it will improve behavior. There is some science behind it, and early on it had some clinical success. It is something that actually can help in very specific cases as a last resort and is even used today. The problem is that it is incredibly easy to do, essentially requiring someone with minimal training to insert an implement through the socket of someone's eye and tapping it a bit with a hammer. What ended up happening instead is that state run mental health hospitals started using it as an "off switch" for disruptive patients as dramatized in the famous movie "One Flew over the Cuckoo's nest". Private practices tended to make use of the procedure after years of trying other treatments, whereas public medicine used the procedure shortly after patients were admitted. Ultimately, public mental health facilities ended up completing something like 96% of prefrontal lobotomies because performing a technique that could make people compliant was easier politically than asking the public to pay more tax to fully fund the mental health system. Its ease and political expediency is ultimately what made it popular, and its downfall is that it was0 used in anti-scientific ways to simplify the state's treatment of mentally ill people.
Bloodletting: A practice derived from medical treatises developed by the ancient Greeks. Those treatises suggested that the body contained a number of humors, and it is the balance of those different humors that where the primary determinant of a person's health, and so many issues were caused by an excess of one of those humors, and so various treatments sought to reduce the excess. Now there is a rational basis for this idea, just imagine if you're sick you feel like you need to throw up, and if you didn't know what the body was doing you might assume that for some reason the body was producing an excess of vomit. After all, once you successfully vomit you often feel a lot better. I think another bile is essentially feces as it moves through your digestive tract, and so a lot of the time medical issues do boil down to trying to remove excess feces from your digestive tract. One is green bile, phlegm, which obviously forms in your lungs, nose, throat, and sinuses when you are sick or as a protective mechanism for the regular basis, so too much green bile obviously feels like crap you have a runny nose or you're all stuffed up and coughing. The final of the biles is red bile, or blood, and it was assumed that certain illnesses were made better by releasing the excess blood that you had. So there was obviously a rational basis for this theory, but what really made it prevalent for a long time was the fact that there were religious taboos against digging into the human body to figure out how it worked. It wasn't until just a couple hundred years ago that rather than just trying to come up with treatments based on things that had a rational basis we started studying the body and trying to figure out what was actually wrong. That, paired with a new understanding of germ theory ended up leading to the development of treatments that actually resolve problems rather than symptoms. Once we did that, we realized that many of our treatments were wrong, and the case of something like bloodletting where people would end up being cut up on a regular basis for something that had no therapeutic value, it was considered downright barbaric.
So now we come to the matter at hand. What we know from her scientific basis he's pretty limited, but everyone kind of agrees something is going on, people have some kind of thing going on where they want to behave in a certain way, and they long to look a certain way, and that there's a dissonance between that desire and reality. But we also have is a political philosophy in postmodern neo-marxism that really wants there to be no such thing as the biological. Given a political and almost religious conviction that everyone is exactly the same, it is an extremely convenient belief to think that unalienable parts of a person's biology can be changed. Therefore, when someone wants to be changed politically and philosophically the right thing is to just do it for them, regardless of whether it's empirically and scientifically the right thing to do.
In this way, it is in many ways like the three things that I mentioned. Like eugenicism, the primary purpose of the intense attention paid to this certain thing is to advance the political cause rather than medical treatment. Like the prefrontal lobotomy, handing someone a bottle of pills (or even setting up an appointment for a brutal surgery, although the surgery itself is a current-day miracle of impressive skill and knowledge) is something relatively easy to do, and for certain aspects of the state it is convenient. Like bloodletting, it has a limited scientific basis, and mostly lives in the minds of the philosophers rather than in real empirical studies, and there are quasi religious taboos which have limited good study on it. Given the limited basis for the treatment, the highly politicized nature of its selection, and the fact that we end up engaging in Acts that would be considered atrocities at all points in human history if they aren't being done to help people, that's why I think it's likely that after the current era is over people will look upon the transiting as kids the same way as these other treatments, if not worse.
It's interesting to note that each of them could actually be helpful under certain circumstances. Though rare, prefrontal lobotomies are still very occasionally done. For some very rare conditions, removing excess blood is the modern treatment, and for people with rare genetic disorders, they may willingly choose to not have kids knowing that the future will not have as many opportunities for that disorder. In the same way, there may in fact be a small number of individuals for whom gender affirming therapy is the objectively correct course of action, but the political nature of what's going on right now will sour the whole enterprise.
Another thing (which I won't get into much here) is I think the near future will be much poorer, and much more conservative. Moon and Whatifalthist on youtube have made videos which help explain why the future will be poorer in their videos on population collapse or why the next century will look like the 30 years war, and as for why it would be more conservative, it seems logical -- the more "progressive" stuff includes killing your babies in the womb, not having kids due to climate change, moving to dense urban environments that tend to be high stress and anti-natalist, as well as stuff like child sex changes which sterilize their victims -- If you have two groups, and one of them is trying to survive and thrive, and the other is trying to commit suicide, of course the former will build the future no matter how much power the latter has in the present. Think of it like the process described in "idiocracy", but instead of intelligence, it's political affiliation which research shows is somewhat correlated to your parents.
At the moment, many western countries are importing many Muslims. Progressives seem to falsely believe that Muslims are progressive because most of them are beige and anyone who isn't a straight WASP is considered progressive by default in proportion to the amount they're not that thing, but Islam has been a highly conservative religion since the end of the Islamic golden age, and there's little evidence to suggest that's going to change because some western progressive tells them to. I'm sure you can find individual Muslims who are western progressives since populations are made of individuals and there's variation within such, but I'm talking about populations as a whole from a statistical perspective, and what happened after the Islamic golden age should be a warning to all of us. I don't think the future will look like anything even the most "far right conservative" among us wants to see.
Geez I wrote too much on this one....
Wind is one that can be useful, but is variable and so isn't going to be great for baseload, just supplementation. For that reason, saying a certain % power is generated by wind or solar is a bit misleading because it implies if you increased your install base by the inverse % then you'd be able to produce all your power that way, when in reality you'd just be producing excess power on the good days and you'd be burning gas on the bad days. By contrast, hydroelectric consistently runs some jurisdictions 100% 24/7/365 -- Manitoba, Quebec, and Norway being examples.
As I've mentioned in other cases, jurisdictions with high levels of hydroelectric tend to have low electricity cost, and this has a double effect on reducing carbon emissions -- the low carbon emissions of electricity generation means electricity is better, and the inexpensive electricity will offset use of fossil fuels for home heating or industry. With already mature technologies such as electric rail, streetcars, and trackless street cars, inexpensive electricity can also break into transportation sectors.
for that same reason, it's important to choose green strategies that will reduce electricity costs. If you end up in an Australia situation where electricity costs go from some of the least expensive on earth to some of the most expensive on earth, then it might feel really good, but people will switch to fossil fuels because they can't afford not to.
In Ontario Canada, the IESO (one of Ontario's power industry regulators) has some really good data on hourly electricity generation: https://ieso.ca/power-data
The second tab is the one with the power mix.
Today the majority of baseload in the province was mostly nuclear, a good chunk was hydroelectric, there was a pittance of biomass, and a decent chunk was wind which lasted all day, but if you go back to June 3-9, you'll see that the nuclear and hydroelectric continued to provide consistent baseload generation every day, but on June 3rd the wind was as little as 5% of the consistent level we saw today. On those days, the difference was made up by running the gas power plants. The solar power is interesting in just how little there is (it appears that there is a lot more installed capacity connected to local grids rather than transmission grids), but also the characteristic of the generation.
The characteristics of each form of electricity generation are fairly interesting seen through the lens of the data.
Some people point to potential battery systems to mitigate the problems with solar in particular, but also wind to an extent, but just look at Ontario -- I can't help but think that the amount of batteries required to store 20GW of electricity overnight (so it's not entirely correct since solar is sinusoidal not off/on) but let's say 240GWH of storage) and then enough wind/solar to produce enough electricity during production periods to charge those batteries would be absolutely absurd, and have a cataclysmic environmental impact compared to finding some more big rivers for some run of river dams or places a traditional hydro dam could be built.
That being said, chemical batteries are probably just not the right choice, but pumped water storage might be... The largest pumped water storage system in the world is the Bath County pumped storage station, and at 24GWH of storage and a maximum generating capacity of 3GW, then 10x of these roughly 3.85 Billion dollar facilities could store power overnight for just the province of Ontario, and the physical footprint of that facility is surprisingly small for the amount of power it can store. (By contrast, the largest battery electric storage facility in the world is orders of magnitude smaller)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
A big difference between chemical and pumped water storage systems is that water is essentially eternal, whereas chemical batteries die in a decade or two and so even if you make the investment you'll need to redo everything shortly afterwards, and depending on the battery technology it may or may not be recyclable -- lead acid batteries are highly recyclable, but lithium batteries are significantly less so.
For longer term issues like no wind, you might need much more storage -- rather than storing enough energy for the day, you might need enough for a week or a month, which would take an overwhelming investment and turn it into something virtually impossible for the economy to support (I suppose maybe they could store a lot more instantaneous energy by just building bigger reservoirs mind you so you wouldn't need to increase the costs by 14 or 60)
And then there's the fact that you'd need to build enough intermittent energy generation to charge the batteries or fill the reservoirs in addition to running things at the time, so at that point you'd need potentially need not 100% but 200% or more of the total amount of energy generation.
So all of that suggests it makes sense to try to build sources of energy that can handle baseload sources and consistently provide electricity every day. The 40 billion dollars to build the pumped storage system alone could potentially produce enough hydroelectricity to power the entire province and much of the nearby US states.
Wind is one that can be useful, but is variable and so isn't going to be great for baseload, just supplementation. For that reason, saying a certain % power is generated by wind or solar is a bit misleading because it implies if you increased your install base by the inverse % then you'd be able to produce all your power that way, when in reality you'd just be producing excess power on the good days and you'd be burning gas on the bad days. By contrast, hydroelectric consistently runs some jurisdictions 100% 24/7/365 -- Manitoba, Quebec, and Norway being examples.
As I've mentioned in other cases, jurisdictions with high levels of hydroelectric tend to have low electricity cost, and this has a double effect on reducing carbon emissions -- the low carbon emissions of electricity generation means electricity is better, and the inexpensive electricity will offset use of fossil fuels for home heating or industry. With already mature technologies such as electric rail, streetcars, and trackless street cars, inexpensive electricity can also break into transportation sectors.
for that same reason, it's important to choose green strategies that will reduce electricity costs. If you end up in an Australia situation where electricity costs go from some of the least expensive on earth to some of the most expensive on earth, then it might feel really good, but people will switch to fossil fuels because they can't afford not to.
In Ontario Canada, the IESO (one of Ontario's power industry regulators) has some really good data on hourly electricity generation: https://ieso.ca/power-data
The second tab is the one with the power mix.
Today the majority of baseload in the province was mostly nuclear, a good chunk was hydroelectric, there was a pittance of biomass, and a decent chunk was wind which lasted all day, but if you go back to June 3-9, you'll see that the nuclear and hydroelectric continued to provide consistent baseload generation every day, but on June 3rd the wind was as little as 5% of the consistent level we saw today. On those days, the difference was made up by running the gas power plants. The solar power is interesting in just how little there is (it appears that there is a lot more installed capacity connected to local grids rather than transmission grids), but also the characteristic of the generation.
The characteristics of each form of electricity generation are fairly interesting seen through the lens of the data.
Some people point to potential battery systems to mitigate the problems with solar in particular, but also wind to an extent, but just look at Ontario -- I can't help but think that the amount of batteries required to store 20GW of electricity overnight (so it's not entirely correct since solar is sinusoidal not off/on) but let's say 240GWH of storage) and then enough wind/solar to produce enough electricity during production periods to charge those batteries would be absolutely absurd, and have a cataclysmic environmental impact compared to finding some more big rivers for some run of river dams or places a traditional hydro dam could be built.
That being said, chemical batteries are probably just not the right choice, but pumped water storage might be... The largest pumped water storage system in the world is the Bath County pumped storage station, and at 24GWH of storage and a maximum generating capacity of 3GW, then 10x of these roughly 3.85 Billion dollar facilities could store power overnight for just the province of Ontario, and the physical footprint of that facility is surprisingly small for the amount of power it can store. (By contrast, the largest battery electric storage facility in the world is orders of magnitude smaller)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
A big difference between chemical and pumped water storage systems is that water is essentially eternal, whereas chemical batteries die in a decade or two and so even if you make the investment you'll need to redo everything shortly afterwards, and depending on the battery technology it may or may not be recyclable -- lead acid batteries are highly recyclable, but lithium batteries are significantly less so.
For longer term issues like no wind, you might need much more storage -- rather than storing enough energy for the day, you might need enough for a week or a month, which would take an overwhelming investment and turn it into something virtually impossible for the economy to support (I suppose maybe they could store a lot more instantaneous energy by just building bigger reservoirs mind you so you wouldn't need to increase the costs by 14 or 60)
And then there's the fact that you'd need to build enough intermittent energy generation to charge the batteries or fill the reservoirs in addition to running things at the time, so at that point you'd need potentially need not 100% but 200% or more of the total amount of energy generation.
So all of that suggests it makes sense to try to build sources of energy that can handle baseload sources and consistently provide electricity every day. The 40 billion dollars to build the pumped storage system alone could potentially produce enough hydroelectricity to power the entire province and much of the nearby US states.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vA5NQjBONw
Eatons was one of Canada's biggest department stores for the longest time, with history going back I believe centuries. Unfortunately it faced fierce competition and by 2000 had been bought by sears, and by 2002 the brand was no more.
Whenever I see or hear Aubergine, I'll always remember this ad campaign (I never actually saw -- I heard about it through a radio show about advertising called Under The Influence which used it as a good example of how great advertising can't save a product that's already doomed to die)
Eatons was one of Canada's biggest department stores for the longest time, with history going back I believe centuries. Unfortunately it faced fierce competition and by 2000 had been bought by sears, and by 2002 the brand was no more.
Whenever I see or hear Aubergine, I'll always remember this ad campaign (I never actually saw -- I heard about it through a radio show about advertising called Under The Influence which used it as a good example of how great advertising can't save a product that's already doomed to die)
What they're opposing here will be seen the same in 50 years as eugenics, prefrontal lobotomies, and bloodletting.
Randomly dug into a post on my feed and found an epic conversation the likes of which is exactly why I'm on the fediverse.
God bless you guys.
God bless you guys.
"c'mon man, I'm fighting the little guy! I mean, I'm attacking the little guy! I mean I'll lock up the little guy forever! I mean, I'm fighting for the little guy!"
I've talked about this a lot recently, and he's right -- trees became locked down carbon for geological timescales during the carboniferous period before fungus learned to break down cellulose. After that old wood just got digested back into CO2. If you want to lock up carbon you need to keep it out of the air somehow.
I wrote about opportunity in The Graysonian Ethic, and that of course it's unequal. Equality of opportunity isn't possible.
In the 12th chapter, "success", I wrote: "This fact cuts both ways. It means that in your life you are likely to get opportunities that other people will not get, but it also means that you are certain to not get opportunities that others did get."
Many of the rich people in silicon valley happened to be at the right place at the right time. People who weren't there at the time will never have a chance to go back or to go there. Silicon valley today isn't the same place it was when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were building their empires, they just have different opportunities than you. There's nothing any of us can do about it. billions of people never got the opportunity, and there's nothing any of us can do about it.
In the 12th chapter, "success", I wrote: "This fact cuts both ways. It means that in your life you are likely to get opportunities that other people will not get, but it also means that you are certain to not get opportunities that others did get."
Many of the rich people in silicon valley happened to be at the right place at the right time. People who weren't there at the time will never have a chance to go back or to go there. Silicon valley today isn't the same place it was when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were building their empires, they just have different opportunities than you. There's nothing any of us can do about it. billions of people never got the opportunity, and there's nothing any of us can do about it.
In a joking way, you could consider Keynesian economics to be similar to "Don't worry, take meth when your marks are getting too low, and just stop taking meth when your marks are ok! That way you smooth out your marks without having problems!"
The point of Keynesian economics is to stabilize economic cycles by stimulating the economy when it is slow and then paying back the stimulus when times are good. This is the fundamental idea at the root of Keynesian economics.
Debt based spending by the government is an economic stimulant. According to economic models, one dollar spent by the government will result in many dollars of GDP as the money bounces around the economy. The idea then is that a small amount of deficit spending can cause a large amount of economic activity, and it increases GDP.
Meth is a neurological stimulant. A small amount of meth can make someone very energetic. It can be (and in some areas of the world such as Thailand regularly is) used to enhance concentration and energy so students can study more and get higher grades.
Meth is also very addictive. The feeling of being on meth is good.
Debt based spending is also very addictive. It lets you promise things to people without having to pay for them, which is politically great, and people like getting "free" stuff.
Meth feels terrible when you quit it. You get both physical and mental withdrawal symptoms.
Debt fueled spending also feels terrible when you quit it. Government programs shut down, taxes rise, and the same economic multiplier that helped stimulus work then works in reverse with multiple dollars taken out of GDP for every dollar taken out of circulation.
In my joke, I talk about doing meth just until your grades improve then quitting. Doing meth because your grades is bad is in my analogy similar to debt fueled stimulus during the bad economic times, in that it can help and feels good. Quitting meth afterwards is very likely not to happen however because once your marks have improved you keep using it thinking you'll get even higher marks, and quitting will feel really bad likely negatively affecting your grades, which leads to students who use such a strategy to addiction.
Compare with debt fueled government spending during hard economic times. The politicians enjoy spending the money, and when economic times turn they don't want to stop because they think they can get even better economic times and because it hurts to cut spending. Such a strategy has led to government debt addiction, such as the present 34 Trillion dollars in US debt.
The time period between the end of the great financial crisis and the covid recession was widely called the longest economic expansion on record. Despite this, the federal debt doubled because the government has been fully addicted since the 2001 dot com bubble burst recession.
Some people argue that we successfully used Keynesian economics after the world wars until Ronald Reagan came into power.
The postwar period isn't good for proving Keynesian economics work for a variety of reasons.
First, the postwar period in the US is one of the biggest economic booms in world history. It's easy to not fall into the pitfalls of economics which only really kick in during economic crashes during a period of economic expansion. I can "prove" that drinking cyanide helps cure covid if I never get covid and thus never drink cyanide.
Second, while the debt/GDP in America went down in the postwar period due to a growing economy because America was providing most stuff to most of the planet since most of the planet has been blown up, the nominal debt didn't go down after a short postwar demobilization period when a lot of capital assets and surplus equipment were sold off. This means that contrary to Keynesian economics the period of growth debt should be paid down, instead the debt stayed the same. The growing economy should have increased tax revenues (and did), and so extra revenue coming in should have funded budget surpluses which would have paid off debt from previous spending (but didn't)
I'm going to call the period starting with Reagan "Hyperkeynesianism", where government debt is massively increased to stimulate growth. This is a contrast to pre-Reagan Keynesian economics which may be considered as "real Keynesian economics" according to people who think the postwar period was evidence that Keynesian economics can work.
Third, consider the collapse of the Breton woods system to be evidence that while the nominal debt stayed the same, problems were occurring during the "real Keynesian economics" environment. Breton woods was a monetary system after world war 2 where the world moved off the gold standard, and instead agreed to use US dollars which were then convertible into gold. If everything was fine and the dollar was indeed "good as gold", then we would still be on this system today, but in the early 1970s, Nixon ended gold convertibility, ending the Breton woods system. To ensure the dollar didn't totally collapse, Nixon worked out a deal with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful oil producer in the world at the time, so they would work only in dollars. This meant that while the dollar might not be convertible into gold, it could be converted into black gold in Saudi Arabia. It shows that things were not great prior to that point, and America was already struggling.
Fourth, consider that the size of government compared to GDP essentially went up non-stop from the end of the postwar demobilization. This isn't what you'd expect if we saw Keynesianism implemented properly. You'd expect to see government rise and fall countering the real economy.
"But wait," you say, "I already said it's not real Keynesianism!" In fact, you're showing that real Keynesianism has never been tried!"
Well, indeed that might be the case, but my argument doesn't need something to be "real Keynesianism" for my argument to be true and correct. You see, I am analyzing Keynesian economics through the lens of economics.
Economics is at its heart, the study of incentives. Macroeconomics tend to try to describe the behavior of incentives in aggregate, looking at entire economics, and microeconomics tends to look at economic calculations made by individuals in individual situations. The two are often looked at separately, but they do in fact intersect. After all, macroeconomics is just the sum result of many microeconomic decisions.
So where you going to end up with a problem is if you have a macroeconomic model that requires someone to make microeconomic decisions they are not going to make because the microeconomic incentives are against making the right choice.
To understand what the incentive structures are, you don't need to listen to me, but listen to the various criticisms of democracy in Plato's Republic. In book 8, Plano explains how people become under democracy, and what happens. He explains how politicians will single out the rich for punishment for being rich, because the rich people are in the minority and you're trying to get a majority of votes. Very importantly, he describes the democratic man as someone who ends up running up massive debts, create mobs who live in fear of oligarchy, until led around by clever demagogues using that fear to lead the people into tyranny.
Throughout most of its history, the United States was intended to be a Republic, and parliamentary democracy was also supposed to be operating as a republic of sorts. Both phones government did have elements of democracy, but the raw corruptibility of democracy was supposed to be tempered by forces of aristocracy. In case of British parliamentary democracy that would be the house of lords and ultimately the king, and under American Democratic republicanism, be short lived democratically elected Congress would be tempered by a senate originally chosen by the governors of each state and the judiciary appointed for life. The idea would be that the land owning people who had a stake in the nation would have a say, and that say would be quite democratic with elections happening every 2 years, but would be tempered by a senate representing the interest of the individual states and representing merit.
So why does all of this matter? Well, over the last century or so many of the non-democratic elements of these republics have been minimized. What was originally votes by land owning heads of families ultimately ended up becoming universal suffrage, and what was originally people of merit selected by their states to represent the interest of their states became just another popularity contest except happening every 6 years instead of every 4. The concept of democracy took over the idea of the republic, and we got to see this in terms of the significantly lower levels of language used in debates for the office of president. Instead of trying to select the best man, at some point we started trying to select the most likable man. All of this means that we are constantly dealing with a popularity contest, and so decisions need to be made based on that popularity contest. You don't have a choice as to whether to be principled, because for virtually anyone who could put a damper on a decision to spend more money, or to take a second look at a decision to make spending cuts, everyone is worried about their next election.
Keynesian economics is untenable in a democratic system because during the hard times you end up giving something to people that in the good times you end up taking away. Politicians who wish to survive therefore will simply be voted out of office for someone who does promise to just keep on spending, and since everyone gets a vote not just the people who have a stake in the success of the country by virtue of leading households and owning land, the prophecy Plato expressed has occurred, with Keynesian economics as the masthead.
Now you might say that the system has been corrupted, but it is designed to be corrupted by virtue of what you're asking politicians to do. You create massive constituencies of people getting money directly from the state, and those people are quite happy to be getting money, and then during the good times you are expected to erase those massive constituencies of people, and those people vote and they also donate to political parties, and their bosses also donate to political parties. Of course people who become powerful during downturns by accepting government money are not going to give up their government money without a fight, and in bad enough downturn the constituency of people getting free money from the government is of course going to become a powerful lobby. Particularly in close races, such a constituency will be the difference between winning and losing, and thus everyone is incentivized to spend in the bad times and continue spending in the good times, which is one reason why the government went from 10% of GDP at the turn of the 20th century to at times over 50% of GDP in the last few years.
The point of Keynesian economics is to stabilize economic cycles by stimulating the economy when it is slow and then paying back the stimulus when times are good. This is the fundamental idea at the root of Keynesian economics.
Debt based spending by the government is an economic stimulant. According to economic models, one dollar spent by the government will result in many dollars of GDP as the money bounces around the economy. The idea then is that a small amount of deficit spending can cause a large amount of economic activity, and it increases GDP.
Meth is a neurological stimulant. A small amount of meth can make someone very energetic. It can be (and in some areas of the world such as Thailand regularly is) used to enhance concentration and energy so students can study more and get higher grades.
Meth is also very addictive. The feeling of being on meth is good.
Debt based spending is also very addictive. It lets you promise things to people without having to pay for them, which is politically great, and people like getting "free" stuff.
Meth feels terrible when you quit it. You get both physical and mental withdrawal symptoms.
Debt fueled spending also feels terrible when you quit it. Government programs shut down, taxes rise, and the same economic multiplier that helped stimulus work then works in reverse with multiple dollars taken out of GDP for every dollar taken out of circulation.
In my joke, I talk about doing meth just until your grades improve then quitting. Doing meth because your grades is bad is in my analogy similar to debt fueled stimulus during the bad economic times, in that it can help and feels good. Quitting meth afterwards is very likely not to happen however because once your marks have improved you keep using it thinking you'll get even higher marks, and quitting will feel really bad likely negatively affecting your grades, which leads to students who use such a strategy to addiction.
Compare with debt fueled government spending during hard economic times. The politicians enjoy spending the money, and when economic times turn they don't want to stop because they think they can get even better economic times and because it hurts to cut spending. Such a strategy has led to government debt addiction, such as the present 34 Trillion dollars in US debt.
The time period between the end of the great financial crisis and the covid recession was widely called the longest economic expansion on record. Despite this, the federal debt doubled because the government has been fully addicted since the 2001 dot com bubble burst recession.
Some people argue that we successfully used Keynesian economics after the world wars until Ronald Reagan came into power.
The postwar period isn't good for proving Keynesian economics work for a variety of reasons.
First, the postwar period in the US is one of the biggest economic booms in world history. It's easy to not fall into the pitfalls of economics which only really kick in during economic crashes during a period of economic expansion. I can "prove" that drinking cyanide helps cure covid if I never get covid and thus never drink cyanide.
Second, while the debt/GDP in America went down in the postwar period due to a growing economy because America was providing most stuff to most of the planet since most of the planet has been blown up, the nominal debt didn't go down after a short postwar demobilization period when a lot of capital assets and surplus equipment were sold off. This means that contrary to Keynesian economics the period of growth debt should be paid down, instead the debt stayed the same. The growing economy should have increased tax revenues (and did), and so extra revenue coming in should have funded budget surpluses which would have paid off debt from previous spending (but didn't)
I'm going to call the period starting with Reagan "Hyperkeynesianism", where government debt is massively increased to stimulate growth. This is a contrast to pre-Reagan Keynesian economics which may be considered as "real Keynesian economics" according to people who think the postwar period was evidence that Keynesian economics can work.
Third, consider the collapse of the Breton woods system to be evidence that while the nominal debt stayed the same, problems were occurring during the "real Keynesian economics" environment. Breton woods was a monetary system after world war 2 where the world moved off the gold standard, and instead agreed to use US dollars which were then convertible into gold. If everything was fine and the dollar was indeed "good as gold", then we would still be on this system today, but in the early 1970s, Nixon ended gold convertibility, ending the Breton woods system. To ensure the dollar didn't totally collapse, Nixon worked out a deal with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful oil producer in the world at the time, so they would work only in dollars. This meant that while the dollar might not be convertible into gold, it could be converted into black gold in Saudi Arabia. It shows that things were not great prior to that point, and America was already struggling.
Fourth, consider that the size of government compared to GDP essentially went up non-stop from the end of the postwar demobilization. This isn't what you'd expect if we saw Keynesianism implemented properly. You'd expect to see government rise and fall countering the real economy.
"But wait," you say, "I already said it's not real Keynesianism!" In fact, you're showing that real Keynesianism has never been tried!"
Well, indeed that might be the case, but my argument doesn't need something to be "real Keynesianism" for my argument to be true and correct. You see, I am analyzing Keynesian economics through the lens of economics.
Economics is at its heart, the study of incentives. Macroeconomics tend to try to describe the behavior of incentives in aggregate, looking at entire economics, and microeconomics tends to look at economic calculations made by individuals in individual situations. The two are often looked at separately, but they do in fact intersect. After all, macroeconomics is just the sum result of many microeconomic decisions.
So where you going to end up with a problem is if you have a macroeconomic model that requires someone to make microeconomic decisions they are not going to make because the microeconomic incentives are against making the right choice.
To understand what the incentive structures are, you don't need to listen to me, but listen to the various criticisms of democracy in Plato's Republic. In book 8, Plano explains how people become under democracy, and what happens. He explains how politicians will single out the rich for punishment for being rich, because the rich people are in the minority and you're trying to get a majority of votes. Very importantly, he describes the democratic man as someone who ends up running up massive debts, create mobs who live in fear of oligarchy, until led around by clever demagogues using that fear to lead the people into tyranny.
Throughout most of its history, the United States was intended to be a Republic, and parliamentary democracy was also supposed to be operating as a republic of sorts. Both phones government did have elements of democracy, but the raw corruptibility of democracy was supposed to be tempered by forces of aristocracy. In case of British parliamentary democracy that would be the house of lords and ultimately the king, and under American Democratic republicanism, be short lived democratically elected Congress would be tempered by a senate originally chosen by the governors of each state and the judiciary appointed for life. The idea would be that the land owning people who had a stake in the nation would have a say, and that say would be quite democratic with elections happening every 2 years, but would be tempered by a senate representing the interest of the individual states and representing merit.
So why does all of this matter? Well, over the last century or so many of the non-democratic elements of these republics have been minimized. What was originally votes by land owning heads of families ultimately ended up becoming universal suffrage, and what was originally people of merit selected by their states to represent the interest of their states became just another popularity contest except happening every 6 years instead of every 4. The concept of democracy took over the idea of the republic, and we got to see this in terms of the significantly lower levels of language used in debates for the office of president. Instead of trying to select the best man, at some point we started trying to select the most likable man. All of this means that we are constantly dealing with a popularity contest, and so decisions need to be made based on that popularity contest. You don't have a choice as to whether to be principled, because for virtually anyone who could put a damper on a decision to spend more money, or to take a second look at a decision to make spending cuts, everyone is worried about their next election.
Keynesian economics is untenable in a democratic system because during the hard times you end up giving something to people that in the good times you end up taking away. Politicians who wish to survive therefore will simply be voted out of office for someone who does promise to just keep on spending, and since everyone gets a vote not just the people who have a stake in the success of the country by virtue of leading households and owning land, the prophecy Plato expressed has occurred, with Keynesian economics as the masthead.
Now you might say that the system has been corrupted, but it is designed to be corrupted by virtue of what you're asking politicians to do. You create massive constituencies of people getting money directly from the state, and those people are quite happy to be getting money, and then during the good times you are expected to erase those massive constituencies of people, and those people vote and they also donate to political parties, and their bosses also donate to political parties. Of course people who become powerful during downturns by accepting government money are not going to give up their government money without a fight, and in bad enough downturn the constituency of people getting free money from the government is of course going to become a powerful lobby. Particularly in close races, such a constituency will be the difference between winning and losing, and thus everyone is incentivized to spend in the bad times and continue spending in the good times, which is one reason why the government went from 10% of GDP at the turn of the 20th century to at times over 50% of GDP in the last few years.