And to suggest that southerners are somehow congenitally less fiscally conservative than westerners is a strange, utterly unsupported assertion.

BTW, Boyz, how did Illinois, who gave use this twit in the first place, turn out on election night?

A lot of ways of saying the same thing. Yes, in keynesian terms, if you haven’t printed up the same supply of dollars as the cumulative deflation of assets, you can’t have inflation. In monetarist terms, M x V = GDP. V has shrunk from, for example Goldman Sachs 30 times to a typical commercial bank’s 12. That means the velocity of money via Goldman has come down by two thirds. You have to print 3 x M to get back to the same total GDP.

Trying to keep it simple but it would be easier to explain with a blackboard.

Now let’s deal with exogenous issues. If you print a lot of money, but the europeans don’t the dollar will lose purchase power parity for key commodities which is a kind of inflation. We saw this phenomenon in 2007. Now that the rest of the world industrialized economies are printing as much as we are to solve the same problems, we won’t have to experience this.

Timing is key though. You must stop printing when the other g-7 countries stop. And you must stop printing when you have restored the multiplied supply of money.

Bundler, thanks for the info. I’ll have to confess that I still don’t understand how printing money can fail to cause inflation. Or are you saying that, at least in the short term, it’s being overcome deflation of assets? Because if that’s the cause, then judging from what I see of the stock market lately, I certainly can’t argue.

Trust me. You are in a major deflationary period already. The keynesian inflationary whiplash only happens if the rest of the G-7 prints significantly less paper currency than we do. Fortunately for us, we are in a WORLDWIDE deflation where Europe and Asia are actually in even worse straits than we are. Their central banks are repossessing assets like the RTC had to do in 1992 while our Fed is only repossessing paper assets which causes substantially less dislocation. Right now 40,000 investment bankers in New York who used to get paid $300k per year are looking for jobs as waiters to make $60k. A billion chinese factory laborers are wondering why america has stopped buying lead painted toys and are cutting back wages from 3 bowls of rice a day to 2. All commodity prices have become de-speculated in the great unwind of leverage and are already down 30%. This is what I would call HYPER-deflation. Deflation and stagnation are normal partners.

The turnabout to inflation won’t be seen for 5 years, just as it took money printing from 1974 to 1979 to achieve worst case scenario stagflation from deflation. Obama is truly Carter II.

She was less cynical, less ossified in a particular political milieu with associated debts owed, she was younger and probably as bright as the others if not a “serious thinker” (although I don’t know what serious thinking the other three have done…none that I know of). I commented before that I’d rather vote for her and her imponderables than vote for the others with what I *knew* about the other three. I think we knew her well enough.

IMO intelligence is not the most important attribute that is needed in a leader. Character, proof of character, and, again IMO, integrity of character are more critical. Serious thinkers can think (or maybe, some, pretend to believe, I suppose) that socialism, communism, and top-down societies offer viable humane alternatives to semi-free-market capitalism. Go figure.

Go and look at the electoral map again. The South and West are conversatism’s base, its intellectual, moral, and financial underpinnings. If we split those two regions, conservatism in America is toast. And it’s not like it’s going to rebuild itself anywhere else in the world if it can’t do so in America.

And to Bundler: I only disagree with one part of your analysis, and really only half of that part… we won’t see deflation, but stagnation. Increasing taxes, the cost of compliance, and other government interference in the markets is going to kill productivity. And then there’s all those greenbacks that the Treasury is printing up to clean up Freddy’s Fanny. I expect that we’ll be seeing price inflation of 3-5% per quarter, while wages (for people who remain employed) remain stagnant or decline somewhat. Ready for a return of the Misery Index?

This is a good point, Bill.

However, why do social conservatives sometimes embrace statist policies on economic issues?

To say that history is direction is to say that things generally improve over time and that peoples and cultures learn from their mistakes. I borrowed the term from Frances Fukuyama’s book “The End of History”.

What do you mean by “directional”?

This is because history is “directional” for everyone except the French, for whom history is non-directional.

You are probably correct. I experienced the deflation of Japan during the 1990’s and the U.S. is likely to experience a repeat version of it. However, this reality will not deter the liberal-left dems and the keynesian economists like Paul Krugman from doing their best to inflate our way out of this.

He could never explain any policy, and Sen. McCain even was worse during the campaign – unable to defend even the most obvious…

That’s because McCain himself does not believe in any free market policy. It is well known in Arizona that he is more of a democrat than republican. Every election, McCain panders to the right back home in order to be re-elected. Once re-elected, he continues to do whatever he wants. McCain started out as a carpet-begger. He picked Arizona and the republican party because he ran on the basis of being a combat veteran, Arizona is the home of many retired military personnel, and most of them vote republican. Hence, McCain’s joining the republican party. So, of course McCain was unable to articulate economic freedom in his campaign.

This group, while having an inordinate amount of infulence in the party (big money), don’t bring a lot of electorial votes. SO, we need to make peace with them… never again a Democrat-lite candidate.

The idea that we could win anything without the social conservatives is not even worth discussing. Millions of voters sitting home in Georgia, Alabama, etc. is not appealing.

The west is where the growth is so we need them. Most left the blue states to seek freedom out west, only to discover that the liberal/big government types beat us to the power levers… the outward migration from CA, because they didn’t like the result of big government, high taxes and increasing infringement of personal liberties. So, they brought the strange belief that they could bring the same CA policies to the other states, without the high taxes and increasing government infringement of liberty. They were wrong.

Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, used to vote for personal freedom and property rights. No longer. They have been transformed by the California migration. We need to find a way to convince them that the reason they left California was for freedom of choice, not to transform their new state into a California-lite.

We need to be a big tent… we will not win based on a geographic isolation as proposed in the theme of the comment. But our candidate needs to be someone who has political principles… and is able to communicate them. The Republican Party is invested in the free marketplace… McCain doesn’t understand what that means, and is therefore unable to communicate the principle. Remmeber, John believes in the religion of Global Warming and would have initiated a command and control regime that would have bankrupted the US just the same as Obama will.

The command and control regime is one that will resonate with the electorate within a couple of years of a Democrat Administration. Once they unleash the EPA to interfere in every aspect of human life, and to regulate everything, it won’t take long for the folks to decide they’d rather not.

It was impossible for the McCain camp to campaign on economic freedom… they obviously didn’t have their heart in it.

That is behind the inability of Mac do come up with a cogent campaign… it’s in John’s nature to jump to anything that strikes his fancy. From infringement of the First Amendment, to infrimgement of the Second Amendment, John sees a problem and, being a man who knows nothing other than government, like the carpenter with only a hammer, proposes a big government solution.