Tag Archives: mega-depression

The Stagnation Thesis

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There’s a rather strange debate in progress about Tyler Cowen’s new book, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. I say “strange” because the debate seems to be about whether Americans (for the most part) are more prosperous, in real terms, now than in the early 1970s. The fact is that Americans (for the most part) are better off now, but not nearly as prosperous as they could be. The reason is that governmental interventions — spending and regulation — have stifled innovative activity by depriving it of funds, restricting its scope, and reducing its potential profitability. And it is innovative activity that drives economic growth.

Of the economist-bloggers I read, only Don Boudreaux seems to have cottoned to this fundamental fact. The others — including Cowen — seem to be arguing about trivialities and irrelevancies (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The entire discussion, beginning with Cowen’s thesis, diverts the reader’s attention from government’s economic destructiveness to the (futile) search for a price index that properly accounts for temporal changes in the kinds and quality of products and services.

My assessments of government’s destructiveness are given in these posts:

Economic Growth since WWII
The Price of Government
The Commandeered Economy
The Price of Government Redux
The Mega-Depression
The Real Burden of Government
Toward a Risk-Free Economy
The Rahn Curve at Work
The Illusion of Prosperity and Stability
Estimating the Rahn Curve: Or, How Government Inhibits Economic Growth

The last four decades, of which Cowen writes, are simply a continuation of a government-caused Mega-Depression, which began in the early 1900s. Here’s the bottom line:

The Mega-Depression

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In the preceding post, I offered my definition of recession and asked whether the current one has ended. (The answer: not yet, but I may know soon — or sooner than the official score-keepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research.) It since occurred that to focus on the current recession — or any recession — is to ignore America’s mega-depression, which is now more than a century old.

As I explain here, the mega-depression began in the early 1900s, when the economy began to sag under the weight of “progressivism” (e.g., trust-busting, regulation, the income tax, the Fed). Then came the New Deal, whose interventions provoked and prolonged the Great Depression (see, for example, this, and this). From the New Deal and the Great Society arose the massive anti-market/initiative-draining/dependency-promoting schemes known as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The extension and expansion of those and other intrusive government programs has continued unto the present day (e.g., Obamacare), with the result that our lives and livelihoods are hemmed in by mountains of regulatory restrictions.

The mega-depression is an example of  “that which is not seen,” a coinage of Frédéric Bastiat. In “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen,” Bastiat writes:

Have you ever chanced to hear it said “There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts on industry; it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself.” . . .

The advantages which officials advocate are those which are seen. The benefit which accrues to the providers is still that which is seen. This blinds all eyes.

But the disadvantages which the tax-payers have to get rid of are those which are not seen. And the injury which results from it to the providers, is still that which is not seen, although this ought to be self-evident.

When an official spends for his own profit an extra hundred sous, it implies that a tax-payer spends for his profit a hundred sous less. But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it.

In the case of aggregate economic activity, what we see is what has been left to us by government. What we do not see is the extent to which the money taken from us by government and the restrictions placed upon us by government have deprived the economy of entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and productive capacity. The cumulative effect of those deprivations — that which we do not see — dwarfs the Great Depression in depth and extent. The cumulative effect is our mega-depression: