George Rebane
Ahh, another glorious Friday, and an opportunity to continue the never-ending debate about President Obama’s series of stimulus packages that have done so much good in this recession, the good that would have gone by the board had not Congress bent to the man’s progressive instincts and Keynesian prescriptions.
Here again we see the weekly update of the contribution to Nevada County afforded by the now (in)famous American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009 – better known as ARRA. The monies from this national commons has drizzled down into the nooks and crannies of our country, directed to places, people, and projects where it will do the most good for the ruling class. But the discernible effects of ARRA have been varied and very debatable.
That ARRA has been a just-in-time blessing for America is touted by no less than the President himself. Starting in the marbled halls beside the Potomac, the orchestrated cry has rippled down through state capitals and city halls large and small, all the way to remote mountain counties harboring gratefully funded NGOs and the occasional stretch of road or bridge in disrepair.
ARRA’s skeptics have spent the last year or so looking for the benefits of this federal largesse. They’ve looked at job statistics, trade balances, unemployment numbers, etc without much success in finding the blessings from this new mortgage on the country’s economy. And as a result, you’d think ARRA’s promoters and true believers would be in shame and disarray. Don’t let the thought enter your head.
The benefits of ARRA are right there in front of your eyes, you just have to know where to believe. The skeptics are tagged daily in the media as reactionary knuckledraggers to whom it must explained over and over again that if we had not stimulated with ARRA, then this, that, or the other horrible thing would have happened. And having now spent the borrowed Asian yen and yuan, voila!, the bad stuff didn’t happen. What more proof could a reasonable person want?
In systems science such arguments are known as counterfactual conditionals, or simply counterfactuals. Their use in reasoning, especially about causality, is an important part of leading edge developments in both philosophy and machine intelligence. To understand them, consider first another kind of conditional – the indicative conditional. The indicative could be something as bland and tautological as ‘If it did not rain this morning, we would have had some other kind of weather.’ – an obviously true statement.
An example of a counterfactual is ‘If it had not rained this morning, then it would have snowed instead.’ Well, the fact is that it did rain this morning, and it is not certain at all that the alternative to rain would have been snow. It could have been sleet, hail, clear skies, or … . A counterfactual is not a reliably true statement, it is a chancy statement at best – at best there may be a measurable probability that the statement would have been true, and that’s all.
So now we understand the blather that comes from Washington and from local jurisdictions and NGOs about the effects of ARRA – ‘If we had not passed ARRA, then two (or three or four or …) million more jobs would have been lost.’ Bull pucky is about all we can sprinkle on such arguments. No one has made a case for such claims, especially now that we’re seeing the economy continue to struggle and sag. With at least equal validity one could claim, ‘If we had not passed ARRA, then the recession would now be over.’ (I’ll call that the von Mises argument.)
And claims of how much ARRA money actually has landed in the bounds of Nevada County, and what the greater tragedy would have been had Nevada County not received such stipulated funds, are somewhat beyond comedy. And the mirth is multiplied by the serious demeanor with which Obama’s local progressives portray the “truth” of their claims, and ascribe all other representations, no matter how qualified and official their source, as “lies”. The twilight of reason.
[update] A correspondent and RR reader from the Washington area sent this August 2010 DOE Inspector General’s report on the progress from its distribution of ARRA funds. Recommended reading for a dose of high government comedy. But when you stop laughing, you might want to have your hanky ready for the tears you will then shed for our country and your wallet.
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