The same economic arguments that failed spectacularly in the 1980s are being repackaged and presented as novel solutions today. The language is different, the political sponsors have changed, but the evidence hasn't improved. What happens when each generation of policymakers recycles the same magical thinking as their predecessors, and calls it progress?
• Economic policy has entered a cycle of repetition. Supply-side economics from the Reagan era is being replaced by demand-side economics, but both rest on identical claims about future growth paying for current spending, with virtually no empirical basis for either.
• The new proposals use the same nonexistent evidence as the old ones. Claims about infrastructure returns generating multiples of investment, jobs materializing from policy stimulus, and growth automatically servicing debt have been made and failed repeatedly, yet they're presented fresh each time.
• What's changing is which group benefits from the spell. Forty years of magical thinking benefited the Oligarchy and State apparatus that enforced it. The new spells are positioned differently, but the core mechanism of state-directed fiction remains identical.
• Politicians are consciously using the language of predecessor ideologies they once opposed. The shift from Tax Cuts to Green New Deal rhetoric isn't a genuine debate about economics. It's the same priests changing costumes while casting the same spells.
• The real danger isn't choosing between Statist Right or Statist Left. It's that we've accepted the entire premise that salvation requires state-directed magical thinking at all, when every iteration has emptied pockets without delivering promised results.
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Comments
There’s an exchange above where my first reaction is “ugh,” but then I burst out in laughter. Because it reminds me of one of my favorite little movies, “Incident at Loch Ness.” The film is a collaboration between Werner Herzog and Zack Penn. It’s not as famous as Herzog’s collaborations with Klaus Kinski, or as well-known as any of his other documentaries.
Here’s a link to the trailer on YouTube and the relevant quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPaDD9dXkhU
Herzog: Professor Karnow, do you actually believe in the monster?
Karnow: Absolutely. I mean there’s been 10,000 sightings of this thing over 1500 years.
Karnow: Show me one piece of evidence that proves this thing does not exist. They’re saying, show us the evidence. I’m saying, show us the non-evidence.
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