We Cannot Build an Economy on Lies

President Ronald Reagan summed up the conventional wisdom that reigned from the mid-1970s onward in the United States: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Economists, policymakers, and everyday Americans alike generally accepted that markets, unfettered and free, are the best way to create economic growth.

Progressives, including journalists, politicians, academics, and corporate interests, for the past four decades have claimed that markets have caused a particular problem-a problem that usually is related to a past government market intervention-and demand governmental action to fix that same problem.

One is hard-pressed to understand how the onset of covid-19 discredited free markets, given that private enterprise was the entity that kept necessities delivered to American homes even while governments at all levels did everything they could to shut down the economy.

Not surprisingly, Time gives its readers a rather crabbed history of what has happened in the last forty years regarding government and the economy.

Free market orthodoxy made an intellectual case that government should stop pursuing policies that might disproportionately help Black Americans, like investments in public housing or affordable health care.

Limiting government's role in public investment and regulation only entrenched and deepened the racial inequities in the American economy.

The current set of lies tell us that the way to "Grow" the economy over the long term is for government to borrow trillions of dollars, spend it on programs while simultaneously blocking capital development in areas that are profitable, especially in the energy industries in which the Biden administration plans to seek capital "Divestment" from profitable oil and gas ventures and divert capital into the inefficient and costly "Alternative energy" sectors.

https://mises.org/wire/we-cannot-build-economy-lies