pull down to refresh

By Frank Shostak
Monetarists and rational expectations economists believe that if monetary policy is transparent, then increases in the money supply will not have negative effects. The actual results say otherwise, as introducing new money into the economy leads to economic instability.
Both Friedman and Lucas—in order to establish that more money can grow an economy—might have followed the Keynesian framework that demand causes supply. According to this, increases in the money supply consequently causes increased demand for goods. This, in turn, is supposed to strengthen the real output. But an individual’s demand is constrained by his ability to produce goods. The more goods that an individual can produce, the more goods he can demand.
If greater demand could cause economic growth by itself, then world poverty would have been eliminated a long time ago. After all, what is lacking in many countries is not the ability to demand but the ability to produce.
This< I think, is the crux of Shostak’s article. Production comes before demand. There has to be production before a person can demand goods rather than demand creating production. Anybody can say, “I want that!” It does not mean that it will be produced unless that person has produced something to trade for it. Money only enters the picture as either a medium of exchange or a store of value, but, according to Rothbard, is only a deadweight and nothing else. Money, itself, creates nothing, produces nothing and demands nothing for the people holding it unless something is produced first.
reply
There's some equivocation going on in that argument. Economic demand is not just wanting stuff. Demand is more specifically the willingness and ability to pay for stuff.
You can't demand more than you can afford, but you can demand stuff that doesn't exist. It's just a description of how much you would buy, if it were available, at each price point.
reply
It seems to me that there are a lot of people around, nowadays, that demand without the ability to pay. In other words, they are not willing to produce, yet are willing to demand. You see this everywhere you go in the US. Isn’t this what many of the illegal aliens are trying to do? Something for nothing.
reply
Yes, but it's a different sense of the word.
In any technical field, you have to use the terms as they're defined or the theory won't hang together.
reply
I understand that there are different senses of the word that do not meet with the technical definition of the word. However, when people hear “demand”, even some of the technical economists, they do not apply the technical definition. This is the failure of language or, if you will, spell casting. It is how the wool gets pulled over our eyes. Some are using the daily usage meaning when saying demand vs others using the technical meaning of demand and the ones trying to obfuscate are crossing over and over again.
reply
That's how skilled practitioners create what Bob Murphy calls Krugman Kontradictions. They aren't literally contradictions, because he's a devious snake, but they are intentionally misleading statements that lead people to believe the opposite of the truth.
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Akg10s3 8h
Without a doubt, the impression is excessive... It's always negative...
reply