KEYNESIANISM, REFORM JUDAISM, AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS (Copyright 2013 David Altschul) Keynesianism: The theories of Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946), including the ideas that: wages should be allowed to increase beyond a nation’s money supply; government stimulus is the answer to all fiscal problems; everything that’s produced gets bought (he died before the Edsel and New Coke); the money supply should adjust to wage fluctuation rather than vice versa; and that short-term, crisis-driven reforms need not consider long-term harm. Keynes is the mind behind not only pundits like Paul Krugman of the NY TIMES, but policy-makers like President Barack Obama and the team of Clintonists he brought in to “reform” the very mess they made. Specifically, it was Summers and Geithner during the Clinton era whose “reforms” of the banking industry created the drunken-gambling nightmare of “derivative” investments, and cause the banking, housing, and construction industries to wipe out. Under Obama, they made new laws forcing banks to throw mortgage money at borrowers incapable of paying their debts. This is a typical symptom of Keynesianism, as pointed out by F. A. von Hayek in A TIGER BY THE TAIL and elsewhere: Because a manipulation by central planners creates a flow of investment with no sound business reason, either the manipulation continues (and prices skyrocket as the value of the dollar falls), or all of those investments collapse as soon as the life-support is shut off. Either way, taxpayers, workers, employers and consumers lose. Hayek noted that for an economy to survive, the fluctuation of wages and prices had to be dictated by the money supply. Our current Federal Reserve’s program of printing new money every month has merely decreased the strength of every dollar already in the market, and has been crippling retirees. The disabled, and every else who relies on fixed income. It’s a guaranteed recipe for collapse. Students of history might recall that the hyper-inflation of Germany’s Weimar Republic created sufficient mass unrest for Germany to elect a National-Socialist, Jew-hating dictator. Reform Judaism: A movement that started in 19th-Century Germany which, as it gathered momentum, “dropped rather than reformed Jewish law”, as Rabbi Joseph Telushkin notes in his indispensable JEWISH LITERACY. The movement’s website begins its self-explanation with the statement: “Judaism must change and adapt to the needs of the day.” Reform philosphers offer no Judaic basis for that “must’, and no indication that change and adaptation have ever contributed to the sustainability of a moral code. The Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) was being read 785 years before the birth of Jesus, and its teachings (indeed “Torah” means “teaching” and not “law”) have united generations of Jews across thousands of miles. Anyone who organizes a community under the banner that “Judaism must change” seems dedicated to the idea that my grandchildren have to be oblivious to the Judaism that was central to the lives of my grandparents. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Tremendously oversimplified, this principle of physics dictates that any isolated system tends towards increasing randomness and disorder. When a system labels itself as “Judaism” but deliberately isolates itself from the primary documents that have kept Judaism and Jews alive for millennia, the only possible results are randomness, chaos, dissolution and assimilation. (Reform pundits, like the Borg would not doubt proclaim resistance is futile.) When government power-holders create rules isolated from the laws of cause and effect and from the actual behavior of real people in the marketplace, those laws and behaviors will not self-correct to obey the power-holders, and the arrogance of the power-holders will ultimately starve, crush, and disempower their populations.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 01:02:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015