Taking their schtick out on the road: Americans undercutting America abroad

The looming economic crisis comes from the unsustainable US external debt. For more than a quarter-century, we Americans have been buying more from the rest of the world than we have been selling it, and borrowing from abroad to make up the difference. The resulting trade deficit has been a major engine of global growth...

-- The Nation, February 13, 2006 issue

The Communist rag L’Humanité interviews American moonbat economist Joseph Stiglitz. He’s been making the rounds, and tailoring the message to the listener, having recently tossed out the unsupported whopper that cleaning up after Saddam would ultimately cost the United States $1 trillion $2 trillion dollars in equipment and manpower, and for present and future soldier benefits. Needless to say, as a Nobel winning statistician dabbling in Social-“Justice”-Economics, he knows how to have fun with numbers such that he can arrive and a clean, round figure that conveniently sounds alarming.
His recent BBC World Service interview dwelled on the futurelessness of globalization, but only if America is an importer. It seems odd that it’s a subject the BBC understands rather badly for an operation that is globalized, and is most eagerly listened to in South Asia which seems to be in the process of being raised out of deprivation by it.

So his foray into the kooky world of L’Humanité (quite naturally prompted,) dwells rather too simplistically for a Nobel Laureate on the failure of capitalism. He comes just short of declaring that it’s already pushing daisies. “The free market doesn’t work? For WHOM, exactly, Joe?:

L’Humanité: You often refer to the euphoria of the financial markets. In 2001, the financial laws put in place after the dotcom bubble had burst, like the law Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States, did not change things greatly...

Stiglitz: First of all, one needs better and clearer data, which makes it possible to detect the problem in a more precise way. Secondly, a more important tax, like China has on the short-term capital gains is a way of discourage capital from being exported quickly. It’s also necessary to use economic stimulus benefiting socially productive goals such as innovations, research on diseases like malaria or AIDS, rather than on the growth of the hair (but which pays more!). The free market doesn’t work, but one can use its’ strength by altering it.

Ignore the stagnancy and rampant escalation of poverty under the feverish Keynsianisn of the left, especially Carter, the British Left of the 1970s, and pre-realism Mitterand, big Joe's employment killing Capital Gains Tax is here to rescue the world from tooth decay!

So by some miracle it’s strong, but failed, and useful only if “the social betters” who have little familiarity with it remander it for their specific social goals... Nice trick, if you can make it work more than once. After all, find me ONE economy that’s been heavily nationalized that hasn’t either gone into the tank, or has been saved by the type of “masses” that commie crackpots like L’Humanité refuses to represent.