Don Beyer, my federal representative here in Northern Virginia, got a letter to the editor placed in this morning's paper edition of the Wall Street Journal. "Trust the Multiplier" (23 December 2020) the editor titled it, with the addended subtitle "a well-designed $2 trillion relief package could bring the economy back to its prepandemic level by next fall." Oh, dear. There you go again, as Ronald Reagan would say. Spend, spend, spend. In lieu of that silliness, I instead refer readers to Andy Kessler's earlier essay on the WSJ's editorial page "A Stimulus Dollar Is Only a Dollar" (6 December 2020), which explains how "Democrats devise magic ‘multipliers’ to justify spending, but the returns never show." Do Republicans not? Maybe just smaller handouts. Even better was James Grant's essay from this past summer about how Jerome "Powell Has Become the Fed’s Dr. Feelgood" (WSJ, 28 June 2020), for all this "overprescription of monetary medicine has the economy addled, addicted and searching for a fix."
(By the way, Powell is not a doctor, unless one considers a JD a doctorate, which remains a bad joke. Jill Biden, whatever my general opposition to her party, is a doctor, buddy. Because that gets to the question of what doctor means. Not "medical person," or médecin, as it is in French. The English word derives from the same root as doctrine, or that which is approved to be taught. A doctor is she who is qualified to make pronouncements about that which should be taught. Such is the point of a dissertation. Like the one she wrote.)
Anyway, having had enough with all this nonsense, I wrote to the congressman, acknowledging his letter, and commenting thus:
...I must disagree, however, with your assertion that "there should be little disagreement" that all the people articulated in your letter "need a response." Who would disagree? I disagree! Enough responses! Your [Democrat] party, and the Republican Party as well, have been spending these United States into massive debt with your endless responses. It was time to stop long ago.
I went on about how I find "multipliers" to be Keynesian claptrap, or to phrase that another way, fact-free social science. But stimulus is not just expensive. Contrary to Beyer's assertion, it's actually counterproductive in the long run. All this endless addling, stimulating, responding, and paying-off across the economy turns otherwise reliable people into wards of the state. It dulls the natural, entrepreneurial spirit of many, by encouraging people to hunker down, to try to just wait out the problem. It thus retards useful technological progress, in that it focuses on more of today, rather than what could and should be tomorrow. As I have heard one of my colleagues over in the economics department at George Mason University put it, the recession is the recovery, in that it forces termination of value-detracting activities, which are often a large part of what caused the problem in the first place.
What does this practically mean in defense-related industries? What specifically in aircraft manufacturing and air transport? What, for that matter, in commercial real estate. Oh, you all know. Observe that most of the world has gotten rather comfortable with working-from-home and videoconferencing. Not all work is best done that way, but lots of office-spacing and business air travel has likely been permanently replaced by these wholly cheaper options. Frankly, this should have happened long ago, but given a good crisis and massive global overreaction, it has happened now with most beneficial economic and environmental effect. We are mostly getting just as much done as before, but at much lower cost. That's economic progress, for progress generally requires that somebody, who was doing the old, now-unhelpful thing, loses a job, if not a fortune.
That means, congresspeople, that you should not be handing out checks, but rather, leaving the dislocated to figure out what to do that's new and different and now more important. That specifically means that the federal government should not be once again bailing out airlines, because their scheduled service will not be nearly as important as it once was. Instead, it ought to be scooping up those disused airliners as reserve air force transports. The federal government certainly shouldn't be bailing out overpopulated cities, or permitting them to tax people across state borders. Whatever the yammering about arts and "creative classes," their densities are no longer useful, if they ever were. Running up further debts just compromises the ability of the federal government to borrow serious sums in the future, should a real military mobilization, akin to that of 1917 or 1940, ever be needed again. Good look with that otherwise. Like Admiral Mullen observed, excessive debt is threat Number One to national security. It certainly isn't the Iranians. Yeesh.
So Don, I know that you're trying to help people. It's the season. I get it. By all means, stock the food banks, hand out the extra winter coats, and get those heating bills paid. Short-term bridge loans, fine. Do the emergency stuff, though as Grover Cleveland (another Democrat) once noted, you really should just leave that to insurance companies, banks, and charitable organizations. After that, you're just playing Santa Claus, buying the votes of constituents now, by kicking the costs onto others later. That is, as I wrote the congressman today,
your constituents' children will be faced with the need to tell all those bondholders that they're not getting paid back, which will mean that you all will have eventually turned this federation into Argentina.
For now, have a great Christmas.
As for the rest of you, let's all get to work. Just not back to work. It's time to move on. If you really believe that stuff about "building back better," you'll be building something else.
James Hasik is a senior research fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
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