Monday, September 06, 2010

in short, paul krugman says the US needs another world war II to recover: catch-22 redux?

sep 5th, 2010

the logic seems to be that more deficit spending is the tonic for the US economy, and that WW2 spending was precisely that. 

well, if that means the US needs to go into a major war, i have a candidate for the US to attack -- china. oh, that would be very nice indeed! after all, the US has started pushing back on china after the obama love-fest got him nothing but insults from the hans. a little pushback in the south china sea is going a long way towards making the hans behave. assuming number 1 and number 2 start fighting with each other, number 3 will basically be the winner!

although there is a small flaw with krugman's (increasingly wild) ideas -- the US *has* been in 2 wars for some time, in case he didn't notice. that does not seem to have had the requisite effect. 

but then, the US war in afghanistan is the most kafkaesque war i have ever seen: they pay the pakistanis to kill americans, in effect. following up on yossarian in 'catch-22', i ask: ?why have the intermediary? why not just have the americans shoot their own soldiers, without the expense and hassle of transporting them to pakistan and having them suffer before they die?". and anyway the whole af-pak mess is helping china more than anybody else. 

[reference: in catch-22, there is a soldier in an irreversible coma, who has one bottle dripping fluids into him, and another bottle collecting the excreta. yossarian wonders, "why have the intermediary? why not just connect the input bottle to the output bottle, and be done with it?"]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pls see foll article on "end" of Iraq war http://cms.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=8960

sansk said...

this shows ultimately how morons rule in the incestuous professions of economics.

Any sane person who is able to get past broken window fallacy will recognise that war does not engender economic growth but it impoverishes.

(Caveat : Wars which are started for the express and explicit intention of exploiting natural and human resources of other nations DO help economic growth in the victorious nation AND it happens at the cost of enslavement and /or impoverishment of defeated nation.)
No wonder, Nobel prizing winning economists are considered morons in rest of the world.