By WARREN E. BUFFETT
August 18, 2009
Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort:
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens....The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
I want to emphasize that there is nothing evil or destructive in an increase in debt that is proportional to an increase in income or assets. As the resources of individuals, corporations and countries grow, each can handle more debt. The United States remains by far the most prosperous country on earth, and its debt-carrying capacity will grow in the future just as it has in the past.
2 comments:
Keynes was brilliant (obviously) and his explanations are understandable by lay people. RR understood these ideas and applied them.
The best the liberals can do is ridicule "Reaganomics" and the "trickle-down" theory. And look where we are now.
It'd be laughable if it wasn't so painful.
Winger, Not a day goes by that I don't wish that Ronald W. Reagan wasn't still with us! VN8
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