Hiking up Mt. Robson with four young children is stunningly beautiful and memorable experience. Realizing that your 12-year-old daughter has the flight of feet that you once had, and no longer have, is a bummer.
Secretly adding a few more rocks to her pack each time you take a rest, helps bring some bounce back in to your walk.
She complains, but moves on with even more determination. Such life in her step! But eventually she breaks down and cries. The joke is over, and dad's in trouble. Again.
Marxist-Leninist doctrine required the forced seizure of the "factors of production," namely labour, land, and capital, and in so doing, also squelched a fourth factor of production: the entrepreneurial spirit. Breaking that spirit eventually broke communism.
Decades after Lenin, Keynes thought he found a good middle ground. He suggested that governments could get involved by stimulating the economy during recessions, funding infrastructure projects and such to get people spending money again. There are at least two problems with the implementation of Keynes' ideas.
First, Keynes proposed that the money be paid back during economic booms, smoothing out the highs and lows, but it never worked out that way.
Instead, massive long-term debt - accumulated during good and bad times - has been amortized over many years until it is now akin to a backpack full of rocks. Its unwieldy total now burdens economies and dispirits the children and grandchildren it intended to benefit.
(Note: Though Keyne's ideas have been a source of hot debate for many years, there was little or no debate after the 2008 financial crisis. During the crisis, most policy-makers embraced Keynes like a long-lost friend.)
The second problem with Keynes brings us back to that old Marxist flaw of misreading the triggers that breath life in to a market - the intangibles. What Keynes referred to as "animal spirits" (and Marx seemed to miss altogether) cannot be primed and timed mechanically. Keynes was inspired by the miraculous economic recovery he witnessed in World War 2. In the wake of the Great Depression, he saw governments going in to massive debt (even worse than today) followed by an amazing recovery, and put two and two together - viola. Debt-spending is good!
But there was much more than government debt injecting life into the WW2 economy. Fear of an evil aggressor galvanized human spirits in a way that a government could never artfully achieve.
People didn't take their pots and pans to market to be melted into bombs because there was a government program rebating them for doing so. People were inspired by higher motives. Their hunger for freedom lifted the economy more than any government stimulus package ever could.
So here we are. Half way up the mountain to Berg Lake, and the government-supplied pack on our backs is built around a clunky iron frame, with a heavy canvas shell soaked with mountain rain, covering what feels like a bag of rocks. We are a little dispirited. What now?
We need to think like households and neighbourhoods again. Government money is not created in some far away magical place. When we want something, we don't just click our heals three times, close our eyes and wait for the good political fairy's magic wand to bring it to us. We pitch in and pay for it.
If the need is genuine and we must borrow, we temper our wants and term out the debt in manageable amounts. Otherwise, we dang well go without.
We can do this!
