It is hard to argue with Nouriel Roubini about unemployment, but his solution caught my eye especially:
There’s really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.
Shovel-ready jobs from the government are not a long term solution. Why not call those jobs for what they are: welfare. Consider this famous story:
A businessman was touring China a few years ago and he came upon a team of nearly 100 workers building an earthen dam with shovels. The businessman commented to a local official that, with an earth-moving machine, a single worker could create the dam in an afternoon. The official’s curious response was, “Yes, but think of all the unemployment that would create.” “Oh,” said the businessman, “I thought you were building a dam. If it’s jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons!”
Instead of welfare Obama should go on TV and make this point in some eloquent manner:
- Citizens of America the game has changed permanently. You can no longer depend on the 1950s way of life — security is dead.
- Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that will provide you nothing.
- The government jobs we are creating now are busy work jobs that offer you NO long term future.
- Use the internet to make money now before someone else does and leaves you behind.
- If you are waiting for the government to fix your finances you will end up as the poorest of all Americans.
- Stop whining about the Chinese or whomever. Get over it.
Those would be a start to an honest dialogue.
November 17th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
From “Against Intellectual Monopoly”,2008 Cambridge University Press. Full book below:
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
…thank our good luck, or the courts of the time, that Apple and IBM could not even conceive of patenting the PC and its crucial components back in the 1970s. Both the blossoming of the PC-hardware industry and the eventual demise of IBM and Apple as the dominant firms are due to the effective lack of patent protection on production processes and on most crucial components. Exactly the opposite of what … [ we have today. See ongoing Bilski v. Supreme Court 2009. ]
Bilski’s patent claim describes a way to hedge out weather risk using futures contracts. Geez, thank you “Einstein”!
My point is it may be time to fully unleash competition as a productive market force for new ideas instead of competition for trying to seek rents from old ideas through patent, copyright, or licensing covenant. What we have today is a result of scraping the bottom of the barrel and living off the past and few seem to realize it.
November 17th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Yup. Stimulus aka more welfare funded by counterfeit will tank Uncle Buck. Since we import 2/3rds of our oil a weak buck will kill us at the tank and at the grocery store.
The gig is over.
With these utter and absolute “should be wearing helmet” morons running things, the gig is absolutely over.
November 17th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I find it interesting that of all the people who accurately predicted the sub-prime crash, the one guy who is pumping “stimulus” is the one that receives far and away the most MSM coverage.
November 17th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
We’ve gotten away from a free market economy. Now it seems the majority of Americans are talking about who owes them what and how they’re not getting their fair share. I know painters making $60 per hour because they’re in a union that works in the city.This whole stimulus for public works with its clause where union workers must be used will get half the projects done because free market capitalism is somehow evil as is paying someone less to hold a paint brush.Our tax money will go really far with Obamanomics.
World owes us very little is my motto.
November 17th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
CY:
Amazing point. Either they are like CNBC here http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/11/internal-cnbc-guest-memo-leaked/ or people just want that one blue pill to take to fix it all. That is my hunch anyway.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Actually Mike, I believe your shovels and spoons story
are words from Milton Friedman on a visit to an Asian
canal site.