Why "Threshold Economic Principles" Aren't Selling.

Spot pokes fun at Craig Westover — again.

Reading Westover lately reminds me of my early days as a freelancer, when the game was to see how many times you could rewrite the same article and resell it.

Westover wrings yet one more post out of the notion that progressives fight dirty because they fail to acknowledge "threshold economic principles." This forces conservatives to argue about the details of tax and spending plans, where they lose because... well, free market economic principles have not had a great record when it comes to fixing potholes and helping poor little kids get breakfast.

My favorite Westover reworking of an old line is this:

The dollar spent by the government is an unearned dollar not spent by the person who earned it. The dollar used by the state to “create a job” is a dollar not available to the person who earned it to create a job, support an existing job or invest so as to allow someone else to create a job.

With the help of a good editor, he might have said something like this:

A dollar spent by the government might create a job that wasn't there before. But the job isn't a "new" job, in my view, because no matter who spent it, the dollar would have contributed to employment somewhere.

Even a liberal could agree with that. But the man just can't stop himself — and goes on about how nonessential government spending is nonessential spending, and it's nonessential because:

When government subsidizes something because the market will not support it, government is diverting capital from its most efficient use to a lesser use and the community as a whole loses, which is hardly a line to pull us out of a recession.

You know, like how foolish it is to spend money on public education because those highly efficient securitized mortgages are a so much better deal for the investor — not to mention for the community as a whole.

We've just been through a couple decades in which the objective of the smart money was not to create jobs, but to exploit the fault lines, chinks and timing of complex financial markets. And that is what makes the Captain's free market principles so hard to swallow right now.