Russell Lamberti Profile picture
Aug 24, 2019 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
So Germany can "boost" it's economy by the govt borrowing more scarce real savings & using them to fund MOAR govt programmes with unknown P&L/return, racking up MOAR debt & future taxes for taxpayers. 1) If you actually believe this, then you are lost in a very dense fog. 2)...
...the word "economy" actually means something: Achieving aims with as little waste/few inputs as possible. "Boosting" the "economy", if such a poor phrase must be used, should mean "getting better at economising" - that is, consuming less, allocating capital to pressing needs.
"Economic stimulus" used to mean "stimulate economising" - allow rates to adjust to mkt level, don't fix prices & wages, cut taxes, balance budgets. This worked extremely well at "stimulating economising" which led to wealth accumulation & progress. But in the interwar period...
..."economy" lost its meaning to instead refer to a consumption machine where evidence of wealth creation was more aggregate output, & using lots of resources came to mean economic progress (thank Keynes, Soviets, GDP accounting identities et al for this regress).
Once this change had taken hold, "economic stimulus" came to mean "stimulate resource use" - that is, use as many resources as possible to achieve desired ends. Economic stimulus now means "economise less" - hence do what it takes to get resources to be used up, ie consume more.
This is an intellectual error, true, but it's also a form of decay of moral character. The ability and willingness to economise is a test of the ability and willingness to accept the constraints of reality, that humans are bounded, that nature imposes limits, tradeoffs exist.
You see this decay in the opposition to economising by the claims that it's unreasonably & harmfully puritanical & austere. Liberal resource use is progressive, open, inclusive, egalitarian. Economising is stultifying, exclusive, stubborn, elitist. At record debts & record low...
...interest rates, the Progressives are well & truly in charge. That a few states that run a primary balanced budget on top of this orgy of resource waste can be called "austere" is a funny (but sick) joke. But such is the relentless moral crusade of the de-economisers.
Until the true meaning of "economy" is rediscovered, "economic stimulus" is really a programme of resource waste. If govts "stimulate" so much as to negate the natural economising behaviour of entrepreneurs & households, then a world of hardship lies ahead. Stimulus is poverty.

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More from @RussLamberti

Nov 7, 2023
Perhaps this can save a life🧵

Cape Town is a splendid place to tour - when done right.

Concerningly, misinformed tourists are placed in grave danger when guided by Google Maps and perhaps other apps through highly dangerous areas. The quoted story is far too common.
Here is the Cape Peninsula. The main tourist zone is marked in red. The airport is at the blue X.

Upon arrival, the tourist must get from the blue X to the red zone safely. This is not difficult, but main highways must be used and certain danger zones are to be strictly avoided. Image
This danger zone stretches across the large outlined area south of the airport. Not everywhere in this zone is strictly "no-go", but much of it certainly is, especially for uninitiated tourists and especially the zone directly south of the airport. Image
Read 12 tweets
Jul 6, 2021
SA yet another example of how wrong liberal universalists were that you could superimpose a Western-style liberal democratic framework on any country and out the other side would come rainbows and unicorns. Failure must now be blamed on anything but Pretorian mass democracy.
The bet was that SA's immense social complexity could be mediated by a centralised democratic order with theoretical 'democratic institutions' and 'checks and balances' without those things properly existing in real life. Something like a Cargo Cult order - form without function.
Liberals of all stripes won't admit it, but South Africa has failed in virtually exactly the way and for the very reasons that conservatives predicted it would - corruption, incompetence, and using the state as a means of imposing cultural dominance through crude majoritarianism.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 1, 2021
In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, They Rejected Lockdowns
By @jeffreyatucker

aier.org/article/in-the…
The '57-58 flu is estimated to have killed in one year around 100k Americans, or about 200k in today's population terms. The age profile of death was notably younger than Covid, and pregnant women appear to have been one of the high risk categories.
According to this 2009 paper, "The highest attack rates were in school-age children through young adults up to 35 or 40 years of age...It was attributed to the complete absence of protective antibody among children and young and middle-aged adults."
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5a81/5104a7c03… [pg 7]
Read 20 tweets
Jan 15, 2021
Best news of 2020 was Covid isn't dangerous to children, after panic that the young could be vulnerable. None of the miserable Covid fearmongers actually celebrated this fact. They just pivoted to new fear campaigns and pretended that children were still risk vectors. Nuts.
Children are the bright light of Covid. Closing schools or masking children all day at school and pumping them full of Covid fear is a macabre type of abuse by a generation of cowardly adults.

And we've known children are ultra low risk from very early on.


Bureaucracies can't solve complex problems.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 30, 2020
Last night, a peaceful couple was executed in cold blood on their farm near Newcastle KZN, with no apparent motive other than some form of sick terrorism. Criminologically, this can't be likened to (also horrendous) township violence. Different problem.

southafricatoday.net/south-africa-n…
My work on this problem so far leads me to the tentative conclusion that on avg male farmers are murdered at a similar rate to the avg SAfrican male. This is often taken to mean that farm murders are not a uniquely bad problem, but I think it supports the opposite conclusion.
Firstly, male commercial farmers are not the average SAfrican male. They are middle-to-high income earners, living in extremely low-density, formal & secure houses. They are also considerably older than the avg male, roughly twice the age. Any criminologist would tell you that...
Read 17 tweets
Jul 29, 2020
Putting highly sensitive, unproven assumptions into models with hundreds/thousands of lines of opaque code spitting out numbers that get handed to bureaucrats to tell tens of millions of people how to live is not how any of this is supposed to work
The epistemological and political philosophy failure that this entire chain of policy formation entails represents what's wrong in most other areas of public policy. This technocratic authoritarianism remains THE barrier to progress in C21st, thrusting us toward impoverishment.
The fact that 'the models' were hopelessly wrong irks me far less than the fact they were used to devise a course of action that violated human agency in the most egregious and unconscionable fashion. That's where the real shame lies, not with play-play spreadsheets.
Read 7 tweets

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