On Stimulating the Masses
“Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.”
Ah, yes, nary a week should go by without hearing from our good friend Frederic Bastiat. The French economist, who died too early and too soon after his emergence as a economist. Bastiat died at the age of 49, only six years after truly finding economics, as a theoretical study, at the age of 44 (thanks Wikipedia!). In that time Bastiat published some real economic gems. This from his Selected Essays on Political Economy:
“But what relief can the landless find in the proclamation of the right to employment? In what respect will this new right increase the amount of food or the number of jobs available to the masses? Is not all capital employed in giving them work? Will it increase by passing through the public treasury? By taking it away through taxation, does not the state close at least as many sources of employment on one side as it opens on another?”
Fast forward to today and we face a similar, but different problem for the masses. In all of their zeal to get reelected save the economy, the government spending trillions of dollars. Some of these ‘stimulus projects’ will help select portions of the masses, but in the end, the only real stimulus will be in the green ink industry. What will the masses be left with? At the very best significant inflation, at the very worst hyperinflation. Inflation always falls upon the masses the hardest. And thus, the masses are being plundered without even knowing about it.
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