For this week’s Outside the Box we have a two-parter of short essays. They are unrelated but equally important. First, in ‘Time to Drain the Fed Swamp,’ Brian Wesbury and colleagues at First Trust make the case that it was the private sector, not the federal government or the Fed, that saved the economy after the Panic of 2008. The Fed has outgrown its britches, they argue, and it’s time to fill the Board of Governors chair and vice-chair positions with people who will hold the Fed to account for its mistakes. They conclude with this trenchant line:
We need a government that is willing to support the private sector and stop acting as if the ‘swamp’ itself creates wealth.
Then, in ‘Don’t Buy Into ‘The Broken Window Fallacy,” good friend Doug Kass shares Frederic Bastiat’s parable of a broken window to demonstrate why destruction la Harvey and Irma – is not a net positive for the economy in the longer term. I keep reading nonsense economics by people who say this is going to boost the economy; and in the seriously weird way that we measure GDP, maybe it will, however slightly; but it is a definite drain on the wealth of the country.
This post was published at Mauldin Economics on SEPTEMBER 13, 2017.
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