KINKY SEX, AGAIN | 2000-06-17
Longtime readers know what this means. I used to be professor of economics, so I know that if you want to say anything about economics, you should never warn your reader about it. So I title anything about economics "kinky sex."
I learned my economics in graduate school, but I got a postgrad course in lying in politics.
People are STILL giving politicians credit for the record-breaking length of the economic boom we are experiencing, and it's ridiculous. The reason for this boom is obvious if you just take off the ideological blinders.
There was a long economic boom after World War II, and nobody had any trouble saying why that was. The entire economy of Europe had been destroyed in the war, and had to be rebuilt. All that capital had to be bought, and those huge capital purchases caused a sustained period of good times in the postwar United States.
Nobody had any trouble with that, because all that destruction could be blamed on a right-wing dictator, Adolph Hitler.
Our boom today is exactly the same. For over fifty years, the third world remained in a state of inhuman poverty. Econometric studies have shown that people in the third world were much, much poorer after World War II than our ancestors were in the depths of the Dark Ages. The average black person in Africa lives far, far more poorly than the average slave in the Old South ever did.
But with the end of the Cold War, these countries -- except Africa -- began to grow economically for the first time. All that had been holding them back were the socialist policies they had learned from our Western "intellectuals." As soon as the market economy was adopted with the collapse of Communism, the horrible misery of those countries began to end.
With the end of socialist planning, most of the third world is growing into a human standard of living.
The third world is importing capital at rates greater than Europe did after World War II. They are growing fast, and we are benefiting from those purchases.
So why is this obvious point never mentioned? The reason is simple: it is no longer a right-wing Hitler who can be blamed for over half a century of misery in the third world.
Fifty years of desperate poverty are the direct result of leftist policies. Billions of lives were destroyed by it in the third world. More horror than Hitler and even Stalin produced, many more times, is the direct result of socialist planning and its failure around the world.
So the real reason for our economic boom is something you will only read here. That sounds incredible, but it's true. The left doesn't want to discuss the incredible misery they caused, and so respectable conservatives will never discuss it.