I don’t get it. You must have missed something, Phil. I don’t see any reason to outlaw pornography, but I do see a problem with using government computers to do stuff which is in no way connected to the work for which the computers were bought (not just pornography, but many other things as well). THIS forced the Democrats to withdraw? “We’ll fund science only if the computers bought with that funding can be used to view pornography.” ??? I don’t get it.

If you want all the details of how much Hoover increased spending and intervention, policies which were merely intensified by FDR and which prolonged the recovery for another decade, I’d recommend America’s Great Depression, by Murray Rothbard, available in .pdf here.

That is completely wrong. What happened during the Great Depressions is the exact opposite of what you’re describing. Hoover tried every form of intervention you could ask for, and we got the Great Depression.

You ever hear about the Depression of 1920? No. At that time there was a stock crash even worse than the one that kicked off the Great Depression, but because wages were allowed to fall and taxes and expenditures were both reduced, the situation was resolved within a year.

Then, in 1929, there was another crash and Hoover started the New Deal. The results of that are well known.

I know that anyone into physics is going to be used to the idea of true things being counter-intuitive, but economics is ultimately the study of human behavior, which, unlike high energy physics and general relativity, our brains did in fact evolve to deal with. In fact, social competition is the ultimate driving force for an evolutionary arms race for intelligence, so you could say that intuiting human behavior is what most of our advanced capabilities are for. As such, it should be expected that sometimes things that are counter-intuitive in economics are counter-intuitive because they are stupid, and Keynesian economics is the ultimate example.

You don’t have to rely on your intuition, though, because the idea that you can spend your way to wealth is easily shown to be wrong logically, as well. The holes in the theory are numerous enough to write books on, as indeed have been written, but for starters, the theory ignores that if everybody did start saving “excessively” (as though there are never actually times when the wise move is to wait and see), it would drive down interest rates and naturally make borrowing to invest more attractive and further savings less attractive. Further, any drop in total demand would tend to drop prices, making it increasingly tempting for people who have simply hoarded cash to buy things. The so-called “deflationary spiral” is averted by the simple fact that people do have to eat, at the very least, and so cannot hoard everything indefinable, and the equally simple fact that, all else being equal, people prefer to consume now rather than latter, which puts a limit to how long a person will wait for things to get cheaper.

There are numerous methods that make any mass drop in demand self-correcting without government invention. What government invention does do, however, is often to prop up the very mal-invested businesses structures that led to the drop in the first place, preventing any real recovery for the sake of short-term satisfaction of the urge to DO SOMETHING that so pervades political discourse.

It is very unfortunate that this line of “thinking” is taken as correct by so many people, and the GOP and Fox News keeping egging it on. I hear this one, too: My family has to balance its budget; so should Uncle Sam.” What nonsense. And such economic experts will be voting in droves this November.

We’ve done this before. Yes, let the banks fail. And as the recession deepens, cut gov’t spending in order to offset the reduced inflow of taxes. We did this in 1930. It’s called Hooverism. JJ and his tea-bagger friends are trying to repeat history. I guess they’d like another Great Depression.