More unemployment. More recession. More massive public debt. More print-more-money-and-pray quantitative easing.
More Mervyn King bleating on about the stalled economy – but failing to explain why he has missed his inflation target for years.
What passes for economic “debate” in Britain today is between those who still believe monetary stimulus is the way to engineer growth versus those who say we need fiscal stimulus.
Each time more monetary stimulus fails to produce prosperity, the fans of fiscal stimulus say we need to spend more. Each time public debt gets a little bit less manageable, those who favour monetary stimulus claim it is they who are right.
But what if they are both wrong?
If central bankers knew how to make us wealthy, the West would be booming. Instead, having handed them the macroeconomic controls, we find ourselves trapped in a decades long spiral of debt and stagnation.
It was attempts by central bankers like Mr King to engineer growth through monetary manipulation that landed us in this mess to start with. Further monetary stimulus today can no more restore us to prosperity than fiscal stimulus was able to in the 1970s. Debauched monetarism is no more the answer than debauched Keynesianism.
If you cannot engineer growth from on high, who in Whitehall is working on plans to set the economy free to grow from below?
What “winter of discontent”-style event might it take to prove that we need something altogether bolder and more radical than the current bankrupt orthodoxy.
This article was previously published at TalkCarswell.com
We need money tied to gold and a low-tax state which retreats from all areas except defence and public order. Let those who want free public services for others pay for them.
Even better we need to return to money produced by the free market. Even a gold standard can be manipulated by the Government. You will also find that when government is seperated from the production of money, it will shrink significantly.