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Paul Krugman and Anatole Kaletsky, call your office The next time Gordon Brown, or his counterparts mock free marketeer “Austrians” such as myself for our opposition to Keynesian monetary expansionism and huge state debt, perhaps they could explain why, after all the vast spending that there has been, we get figures such as this. Just asking.
For those unaware, Mr Kaletsky is an economics writer and supposed investment guru who fully supports the Keynesian view. I assume most readers have heard of Mr Krugman.
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Well obviously it’s all your fault Jonathan. You and all the other Austrians and free-marketeers. Your scepticism is dragging down the economy and poisoning the green shoots of recovery.
What we need you to do is clap your hands above your head and chant; “I believe in Keynsianism. I believe in government run economies”
Believe Jonathan! Or Tinkerbell dies!
cue cries from our leaders of “if we hadn’t acted it would be even worse” and “that didn’t work so lets do it more”…………
The idea for all the wild government spending (and the vast money supply corporate welfare from the Federal Reserve in the United States and the Bank of England here) was to create a temporary boomlet (to make Obama look good and to help Mr Brown with the election) – and hang the long term consequences.
For as J.M. Keynes said “in the long run we are all dead” – trouble is this is the long run, and although Keynes is dead the rest of us are not.
The capital structure of both the American and British economies has been twisted to an extent that I find difficult even to describe – and the present fiscal and monetary orgy has made the twisting even worse.
In short if you think now is a problem – look out over the next few years. “Without the wild spending and printing things would have been even worse” – for a little while perhaps (for example there would have been no phony summer stock market boom – predicted on the Glenn Beck show back in Feburary of course), but also the Hell on Earth of the next few years would not have occured.
Whoever wins the British election next year has no chance – the economy is already smashed, these are actually the good times (before the bills fall due – on all that government and consumer spending).
I suppose what Mr Brown has done is what is known in the corporate manager world as taking a poison pill – pile up vast amounts of debt so that no one wants to take over the company (and fire the managers who take on the debt).
As for Paul Krugman:
Anyone who says his favourate part of economics is “the paradox of thrift” is no economist – because the “paradox of thrift” (the idea that saving is a bad thing in recessions) is drivil.
As for Paul Krugman enjoying teaching “the paradox of thrift” “more than any part of economics” to his students – I guess he just gets a kick out of shitting in young minds.
Any economist (like Paul Krugman) who recommends: print, print, print more money, is a raving lunatic.
Alas, most economists are in this category now.
If you need any more evidence that Nobel Prizes are totally political now, just examine Krugman’s.
Kaletsky is a joke. He changes his mind every week.
I think it is time for ordinary, hard working citizens to seriously question the entire house of cards that our reliance on these “experts” has become.
For the last century and more, the elites of the academic and political establishments have been wrong repeatedly, wandering the US and Europe into a continuous series of wars, recessions, depressions, and enormously wasteful and ineffective statism.
Proclaiming their progressivism and adherence to “scientific planning”, these self-aggrandizing fools have come marching out of various prestigious universities on both continents, calling upon us poor, uneducated bumpkins to cast aside every commonsense rule we had learned about how to run businesses, raise families, and just live our lives in an orderly fashion.
And what have we been led into instead, what great, uplifting crusades have the experts urged the nations of the west to embark upon?
Barbara Tuchman wrote a book a few decades ago that she entitled “The March of Folly”, and I cannot think of any better term for the lunacy we have seen since the “experts” declared that they should be allowed to refashion western society according to their newly discovered, scientific principles.
Regardless of whether it was eugenics, or the corporate state, or the socialist state, or the fascist state, or the marxist state, or the welfare state, or the nanny state, or, now, the ecological state, the common denominator has always been the state.
It is a call for government of the state, by the state, and for the state, in dozens of languages, in uncounted books and treatises, in classrooms, in legislatures, in newspapers, radios, and TVs, the costumes change but the song remains the same—the state, the state, and the state.
How many wars, recessions, depressions, collapses, famines, camps, how many broken lives, shattered dreams, and mass graves must we endure before we finally say “Enough is enough, you don’t know what you are talking about, you never have, and your day has ended.”
I admire any man or woman who strives to learn and master any subject, except those for whom the only subject is power, more power, and yet more power.
For them, it is time to say, as someone said long ago, “Get thee behind me, satan.”
Krugman’s Nobel prize was nowhere near as inappropriate as the Merton/ Scholes award in 1997 for valuing options with the magic Black-Scholes formula.Within a year the formula was shewn not to work in the Long Term Capital Management Crisis which nearly brought down capitalism,something which American business practice seems prone to..
As this site seems to be a nest of Austrian stalwarts (with spelling problems) perhaps somebody can explain how reducing UK interest rates from 5%(Feb) to 2% in April 1932 by coming off the Gold Standard led to the building of 3 million houses by 1939 with all the attendant boost to demand for new carpets ,furnishings ,white goods etc?
It wasn’t long ago that Kaletsky was advocating that the State should seize the savings of private individuals. I think it was in the same article that he declared “I am not a socialist”.
Note that we didn’t even seize private savings in the darkest days of fighting Hitler. GDP drops by a few percent under Labour and suddenly Anatole wants War Communism imposed to save the regime.
I could take Kaletsky being wrong all the time – in this he is no different from any other economist. But that article was deranged and he went from being just another buffoon to being quite sinister.
DBC Read,
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy. Still, I’m glad to see you’ve honoured the internet convention of including a spelling mysteak (“shewn”? How old are you?) in a post lamenting the spelling of others…
It may be the case that Mr. Kaletsky left the SU too early in his life to get a taste of his own medicine.
@Simon Jester
I’m old enough to use an older convention of spelling “shewn” ,(notices used to say “Tickets must be shewn” at London railway termini),and also to notice that you’ve not addressed the issue of the Gold Standard and interest rates.
BTW you’ve spelled my name wrong,so earning the Samizdata Victor Ludorum award for not being equal to a debate on economics,not being able to spell and being rude.
DBC Reed,
Hence the question asking how old you are. The point about the post hoc logical fallacy was a direct answer to your assertion that coming off the Gold Standard led to the building of 3 million houses etc, while the misspelling of both your name and the word mistake were an example of the internet convention that I cited.
To summarise: fail, fail and fail again.
As for being rude: sweets to the sweet.
So its an Internet convention to be gratuitously rude to people, is it? I have only found this on the Samizdata site.
Similarly the brandishing of Latin tags in the hope that all the nasty economic facts will go away is very typical of the kind of alleged argument that is put up by denizens of this site.
You need to explain how coming off the Gold Standard and the building of 3million houses by the private sector were unconnected.
Or is making unsupported statements ,(and not developing them but repeating them), another convention that I am too old to understand?
DBC Reed,
On the subject of rudeness, I suggest you extract the beam from your own eye first.
As for the connnection between coming off the Gold Standard and the building of 3million houses by the private sector, the onus is on you to prove that they were connected. Until you bother to do so, I shall assume you are simply trolling.
Making unsupported statements (and not developing them but repeating them) seems to be your personal forte.
As us internet types say, ROFLMAO. Clearly you don’t surf the net much. Samizdata is an bastion of civility, mate. If you think the commentariat on this site is gratuitously rude, I suggest you try Obnoxio or Guido or Harry’s Place and go comment there and see what happens.
DBC, you cited the 1930s experience in the UK, but for a start, you need to take account of how public spending was far lower as a share of total GDP than now; second, only the south of the UK really enjoyed much of a recovery in the mid-1930s – much of the rest of the country was in a lousy state right until and through the war. The governments of McDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain sought to achieve a balanced budget – again, very different from now. As for how the Gold Standard operated, its main effect was on the exchange rate; arguably, there was a need for sterling to achieve a more viable level. Interest rate cuts may have been a factor but it is odd that such cuts have not worked now in the UK or in Japan during the 1990s. That needs to be explained.
As for the LTCM case, it is certainly true that blowups happen to hedge funds and other highly leveraged vehicles, no matter how smart the guys running them think they are or whether they have won academic prizes. The problem with LTCM was how the Fed decided to inject huge sums into the financial system in the late 90s, a process that contributed to the dotcom mania of that time and to the subsequent crash.
@albion Perhaps you should surf the net more.A glance at Obnoxio’s site will show my name under High praise indeed (in a side panel) .It has been there for months.
I find the other sites a bit boring.Old age I suppose.
@Johnathan Pearce.Many thanks for engaging with the issues which are indeed fundamental: I only raised the point about the low interest rates from 1932 onwards because I was surprised to see the strength of their correlation with increased building houses for sale by the private sector up until 1939.Previously building was more directed towards buy to let.
The difference between our own experience with low interest rates is ,as you imply, very perplexing.
I would suggest the difference lies in the fact that in the 30’s there was, thanks to the Depression, a lot of cheap land ,which big firms could develop en masse with unskilled labour techniques which they had researched in the US.
A few days ago a Times leader suggested that
housebuilders have for a long time “sat on large banks of land in expectation of higher returns tomorrow .” A reader promptly wrote to suggest that, in that case, it was time for LVT.
This is the modern case for LVT: it is needed to block low-interest rate money disappearing into a land-price bubble , justifying the land-bankers’ “expectation of higher returns tomorrow”
You may well be right about LTCM: I was merely trying to shew an extreme case of Nobel prize misalignment.
I would suggest that cheap money also rattled around dot-com shares before being hedged into property by not just the “useful idiots” who invest in shares but the public in general who all need houses (and thus LVT).
Maybe I’m missing something, but when I clicked on the link, neither Kaletsky nor Krugman were mentioned in the very brief article.
Quentin, I mentioned them in the headline because these two men are prominent advocates of printing money to deal with the current situation.
Oh and DBC, I have not the faintest desire to get involved in yet another slug-fest with you or any other Georgist over the argument about LVT. Leave it.
Trying to micro-manage an economy via the tax code has been, and always will be, a mug’s game. The lower and flatter the taxes are, the better.
Austrian School man with a spelling problem – that sounds like me (as I am the only dyslexic on this site).
Well DBC Reed – first Britain was not “on gold” in 1931.
If the currency had been gold how could the currency have been overvalued in terms of Gold?
And it was overvalued – and had been since at least the (fictional) “return to gold” in 1924.
Trying to pretend that the Pound in 1924 was worth as much in terms of Dollars as it had been in 1914 (in spite of the much greater inflation there had been in Britain over that ten years) does not sound very gold-as-money to me.
However, you are right in thinking that British economic performance in the 1930’s was much better than American economic performance in the 1930’s – but the end of rigging the exchange rate in 1931 was only a small part of that. The main part was avoiding much of the “New Deal” folly that kept America in Depression.
As for Long Term Capital.
Letting it go bankrupt would not have “destroyed capitalism” – on the contrary, the bail out was one of the several bail outs by which Alan Greenspan built the debt bubble that has just gone pop.
Please get a clue my dear Reed.
See numerous quotes/ references to Gold Standard Amendment Act passed September 1931.
Greenspan wrote a highly Rand influenced paper on Gold Standard in which he said you could get the same financial discipline and control of value without it.
DBC, but that does not answer Paul Marks’ point, which is that the gold standard that applied in the post-WW1 period was a very different animal to what existed prior to 1914, and that was the crucial mistake made. By re-entering the gold standard in a way that took no account of Britain’s desperate economic conditions, it is no wonder that it had the detrimental effect that it did.
As for the more general point that Alan Greenspan made in his essay, “Gold and Economic Freedom”, he was arguing – ironically given his later career – against the idea of fiat currencies where money is not based on anything that relates to the stock of savings.
Money is, or should be, a claim on resources, not a paper fiction. If you want to defend the current central banking/fractional reserve banking system of the West that has proven so problematic, good luck with that!
If you are going to use economic judgement to fix your currency at the the exact right value in respect of gold,which is what I take it you and Paul Marks are suggesting,then you may as well rely on your judgement to determine the value of the currency in respect of the value of goods and services in total which is what Keynesians try and do .
Perhaps this is what Greenspan is talking about when,after some on-the-job training (he started as a swing band saxophonist I believe), he said Fed policy mimicked the gold standard (Google: Greenspan mimicked the Gold Standard).
According to your argument Churchill was wrong to go back on Gold Standard because the gold convertibility was too high; Roosevelt was also wrong to slash gold convertibility of the dollar in 1933.
You are both ignoring all the nineteenth century problems with gold standards which nearly elected W.J.Bryan on strength of his Cross of Gold speech.
But I don’t favour a gold standard as set by the government; I favour a true private, competitive market for currencies in which legal tender laws are banned, so that a person can refuse to accept payment in a currency he or she does not trust. There is no “right” or “wrong” price for gold or “correct” conversion rate for a pound note and a pound of gold. I have no idea what such a “correct” rate should be; all I do know is that in a reasonably efficient market, the total money supply should remain constant over time, and that interest rates should reflect the constant shifts in the demand and supply of savings.
The gold standard before WW1 was, relatively speaking, fairly consistent with such an approach, but after the huge inflation, costs and massive rises in government spending of that war, any attempt to rejoin such a standard was bound to impose an artificial straightjacket on economies. I am not a “gold bug” – there are other ways of keeping banks on the straight and narrow other than use gold.
But you raised the issue, arguing that the departure from the GS in the early 1930s made possible big interest rate cuts, and hence boosted the UK economy. But that is, as Simon Jester said, a question-begging point, since big rate cuts in Japan in the 1990s and or in the UK now are not working. You haven’t answered these points.
I thought I had answered ” these points”: that interest rates cuts allowed the private sector to build 3 million house after 1931 because there was a lot of cheap land.And the only way to replicate that situation nowadays was to get the still inflated price of land down with LVT.You rather lost it at that point remember?
I cannot see any advantage in doing away with the concept of legal tender.Free of state monopoly, people would be victims of local monopoly so you could be paid in company tokens only redeemable at the company store.You would n’t have any say in it.The Truck Acts were brought in to stop rich people paying in anything they liked.
Property prices also crashed in Japan in the early 90s, and there was therefore “lots of cheap land” there also, but Japan’s very low interest rates of the time have not revived the economy, or at least not very quickly.
And try and explain how deliberately reducing or suppressing land prices by the blunt instrument of LVT would help an economy to recover. If entrepreneurs feel that any of their actions will face a heavy tax, I fail to see how that will benefit. One might as well champion “windfall profits” as a way of encouraging business.
As I have already pointed out at great length to the Georgists, trying to micromanage an economy by taxing things considered to be sinful, like land speculation, is a mug’s game. I did not “lose it”; I have read enough of the Georgist argument and the many demolitions of it to not want to rake over the coals of the Georgists’ mistaken views any more.
As far as I am concerned, they make a fundamental mistake in their understanding of economics which, alas, obscures some of their better arguments (such as on free trade, of which George was a champion).
Oh, talking of free trade, William Jennings Bryan, whom you mention, was a shallow ideologue, an ardent protectionist, hater of big business, champion of prohibition, and denouncer of hard money. In short, wrong on most of the big economic and social issues of the day.
Ayn Rand was correct to throw her dinner in Alan Greenspan’s face.
So please no B.S. about Alan Greenspan being a hard money guy Reed – he may have been once (back in the day) but he had not been for decades by the time he became the head of the Fed.
As for 1931 – I repeat……
Britain was not really on a gold standard from 1924 to 1931 (if it had been the exchange rate between the Pound and gold would have been quite different – to take full account of the inflation of the currency in the period 1914 to 1924).
But like J.P. I do not even favour the gold standard of 1914 anyway – because it involves fraud.
Not much fraud perhaps – but enough to cause harm (and, besides, I do not like fraud).
Either the gold is the money or it is not.
And under a gold “standard” it is not – as there is always more in bank notes (let alone bank deposites via the fractional reserve shell game) than there is gold in the vaults.
In the case of the Bank of England (although not the Bank of Amersterdam or the Bank of Hamburg in the same period) that was true right from 1694.
By the way the only way that an “easy money” (i.e. monetary inflation) policy can work to reduce unemployment over a period of years (as opposed to a few months as a con trick) is either to keep expanding the rate of the monetary expansion (till one goes into open prices-in-the-shops inflation at a very high leve) or to limit wage rises by government power.
The latter approach was used in National Socialist Germany and is the reason that Nazi Germany had very low unemployment in the 1930’s.
J.M. Keynes accepted this in his introduction to the German edition of his “General Theory”.
Of course such a policy of wage controls (and, later, price controls) causes economic damage in other ways.
Paul, good points all. Indiscriminately attacking the gold standard without understanding what one is talking about is, alas, a common mistake made by a lot of supposedly “modern” macro-economists; you know, the geniuses that have brought us to our present pass.
Right.It was the great Objectivist Greenspan who did much to bring us to the present pass moving from defending the Gold Standard to claiming, correctly I would have thought, that the actions of the Federal Reserve mimicked the Gold Standard .
I came to this site ,being a nest of Austrians, to hear the Austrian view of the pre-war UK building boom and some kind of defence of the Gold Standard .JP and PM have instead disavowed the Gold Standard ,stating preferences for abolishing legal tender (JP) and bank notes (PM).There you go.
But the idea that a central bank that floods money into the system endlessly is somehow copying a gold standard is a joke. Many of us gave up on Greenspan some time ago. Just because he claimed he was mirroring his idea of a gold standard does not mean that he was genuinely doing that. He was bullshitting.
And this sort of remark makes no sense at all:
No; you came to this site bringing your own proconceptions of what contributors to this site think, and having tried to assert, without evidence, that the abandonment of the post 1918 Gold Standard caused the UK building boom of the 1930s, got huffy when various people, such as Simon, called you on that. Your responses have shown a repeat pattern: assert something, then fail to respond, or if you do respond, fail to deal with the flaws in that response, etc. Does nothing ever go in to that little noggin of yours?
Your nonsensical remark about the legal tender issue is demonstrated by the fact that various champions of free banking, such as Professor Kevin Dowd of Nottingham University, have accepted that legal tender laws are a problem. If people did not have to accept currencies they did not trust, then Gresham’s Law (bad money drives out the good), would be reversed.
Here is an article(Link) on the issue on legal tender, for those – probably not DBC – who might be interested.
I have not made any “nonsensical remarks about legal tender”. I said you proposed its abolition which is true.I had earlier pointed out that the truck system of payment in tokens was a good ,possibly the only ,example of private currencies (an oxymoron surely?) in the UK. These had not worked in the general interest and had to be suppressed by numerous Acts of Parliament.You studiously ignored this point which, on further consideration, strikes me as central to the discussion.
I really did come to this site to find out more about the Gold Standard 1925-1931 but have been told (i) it was n’t a proper G.S because it used notes and (ii) there are other ways to skin the cat.I had previously been informed that it was pointless the GOV managing either the monetary system or the fiscal system. It is very difficult to hold a discussion with such nebulous concepts.( Free banking which has recently surfaced is fairly clear and just what the world needed when the global financial system collapsed post Lehmann Bros,NOT)
On the legal tender point, DBC, I will add this:
The reason why parallel currencies have not had much practical experience in the UK is for the simple reason that, since time immemorial, governments have sought to monopolise currencies for their own, inflationist purposes, to finance wars, for example.
In fact sometimes they are quite open about it; during the Bretton Woods period, for instance, western governments tried to ban people from holding gold, lest they get the wicked idea of doing business in something other than fiat money.
In practice, of course, it is usually convenient for most people to transact in the same currency, for the same reason that people want things like software in computers to be compatible, or to have the same electric sockets, and so on. But consider this point: if banks know that consumers are not forced to accept a currency if they don’t trust it, then banks will, in a proper market, have to work like hell to establish a solid reputation for their money. Which of course is why central governments hate the idea but free marketeers should champion it.
The Keynesian system relies on people not really trusting the currency: so they get rid of it as soon as possible by spending.The problem comes when large numbers of people try and hedge the money into out-of-the-loop assets like houses and quantities of supposedly high velocity money gets diverted into the ox-bow lakes of economic inactivity.Your system encompassing no LVT and restricted credit encourages hoarding of land ( by developers and ordinary people) and money (by banks and potential customers).
It is also a bit frivolous.And not in a good way.
That is absolutely correct and that is also why Keynesian economics is so much bollocks because, by destroying savings, such an approach robs those dependent on a fixed income, rewards borrowers at the expense of the thrifty, etc. And inflationism, to work as you suggest, has to be constantly ratcheted up until a currency is destroyed. And as we found out in the 1970s, you can end up with the worst of both worlds: high unemployment, high inflation.
Hayek once likened Keynes to a quack. He was being too polite, which was one of his failings.
Oh, and DBC, how on earth is a LVT going to contain the damaging impact of a big increase in a money supply? Even assuming that money does not, as a result of LVT, pump up land prices (which frankly I do not believe, but anyway), the money will still bid up other factors of production, including labour, which will trigger an inflationary spiral, such as has existed in the past. LVT will merely divert a flow of money into something else. One might as well try and overrule the law of gravity.
This obsession with land as something that is “hoarded” for irrational reasons, as the Georgists claim, is part of a huge error that this school of thought makes: as I have said at tedious length before, while the supply of land is, in a trivial but true sense, fixed, the supply of sellable land is not; if demand for land skyrockets, you get skyscrapers, reclamation efforts, etc. And if a speculative land bubble gets out of hand, you get crashes. As I pointed out in an earlier comment – but you did not answer – property values in Japan crashed in the early 90s, but that did not help in any way when the Bank of Japan moved to a almost zero-rate interest rate policy in that decade.
In between replying to yourself would you explain why now, with huge demand for houses,so few are being built by the private sector in comparison with, I hardly dare mention it , 1931-9?
If houses were reduced to an average of 70 thousand pounds a time by bringing down the price of land,are you seriously saying that all of that disposable income saved on mortgages ,would be wasted on wage inflation?
But of course the passwords are:house price inflation good; wage inflation bad.
Planning laws have a large role in this, for a start. If you cling to the idea that landowners hold onto land in the blind faith that prices will never go down, then you need to explain why, during periods such as the 19th century when there was nothing like a LVT or indeed heavy taxes at all, by modern standards, housebuilding rocketed, as it did in the US, etc.
The fundamental problem is that we don’t have a genuine market in land and housing in this country, but a sort of mixed mishmash; I fail to see how penalising owners of land for the capital gains of any rise in said is going to encourage more building or growth, or free the market up. If landowners are the legitimate owners of their land and they are entitled to the values of what they own, then using a tax to somehow create an “optimum” amount of development ignores how intervenionism has often led to unintended results in the past.
This sentence is downright dotty:
“If houses were reduced to an average of 70 thousand pounds a time by bringing down the price of land,are you seriously saying that all of that disposable income saved on mortgages ,would be wasted on wage inflation?”
Come on, even if an LVT led to a big fall in the average price of land, then many of the owners of property would obviously lose a large lump of their equity, which would hardly galvanise the market for housing into action. And you are naive in the extreme to suppose that a big rise in the money supply, even if it did not boost land prices, would not lead to a disastrous wage-price spiral. The idea that we can create wealth by printing money so long as we have some restraints like an LVT is utter folly and I don’t think that even the most extreme Georgists take such a cavalier approach to money and banking as you seem to be doing.
Or maybe you are just trolling, as Simon Jester suggested.
“Planning laws constraining housebuilders all desperate to provide houses for eager young households.”
Is that the Times headline?
Or how about “Housebuilders drip feed new homes to prevent further price falls”?
I’d say it was the latter would n’t you in this fallen world where developers want to manage supply in their own interests.
Google it and see.
If you can be bothered to take a bit of trouble you can find a defence of the Royal Town Planning Institute by its president Jim Claydon who says much the same about land banking at an earlier date.
If you wish to contest these claims please quote from an equally neutral source (as the Times not the RTPI).
It is hard not to suspect the objectivity of something published in the Libertarian publication you last cited
DBC, that was really lame. To dismiss the whole of state planning in a sneer about the Times is pathetic.
If “hoarding” is such an inherent feature of a market in land (it isn’t), then explain how we had a massive housing boom in the 19th century when no LVT or any such thing existed or was used.
Hoarding did not pose an issue there, because it is a non-issue. Hoarders will only hoard if they think that there is a good chance that their land will inexorably rise in price; they would be rational to take such a view in times of inflation of the money supply; but if the supply of money is held roughly constant, and there are no artificial government restrictions on land use, then that delusion of ever-rising prices will disappear. The hoarding thesis is nothing more than an assertion put around by haters of private land ownership. And the property crashes in countries such as Japan, Ireland, UK, US and many other places are surely sufficient warning to property speculators not to get cocky. You seem to write that property prices will only fall due to direct state action.
And the idea of yours that we can simultaneously inflate the money supply to boost activity in one part of the economy, while curbing inflation in a specific part (land) with no overall ill effects proves to me that you are either a wind-up merchant, or a troll. I have never heard such nonsense proffered in a debate like this before, not even from some Georgists, although my opinion of that school of thought has sunk even lower than I thought possible only a few weeks ago.
As for the objectivity of my sources, I have quoted quite a few sources back at you from different perspectives. But the facts that I have cited (Japan’s long period of deflation and its property crash, the Gold Standard, 19th century housebuilding) are matters of public record, easily checkable. As is Weimar German hyper inflation, or the long period of inflation that took hold in the West after the Keynesian doctrine kicked in during the post-war period. All facts, all checkable.
Of course, I don’t expect a reasoned response, so I will not be bothering with this further. Bear in mind that if you want to comment on this site’s posts in the future, that I have been patient beyond measure with you. Others won’t be.
My lame attempts to make ironic reference to a Times headline notwithstanding, the sale of UK houses is now 25% what it has been on average over the last ten years; sales are 50% down on this time last year.I was attempting to contrast this with the millions of houses that were built and sold between 1931 -9.
There is now evidence of a dearth of bank lending as well.
You are right in discerning that my ideas of increasing credit while blocking it from going into land are not the norm ,even for Georgists who,as you know cover the spectrum from Geo-libertarians to the Morning Star.
But there is an issue here,whether my prognosis is sensible or not.