Bob LaMettry’s October 29 letter should serve as a good reminder to all of us to occasionally check our home libraries for outof date reference books. With the Internet, it is all too easy to simply rely on a Google search to get up-to-date answers. Bob’s own library is a case in point. He failed to find a definition of “Luddite” in his editions.
Mine, however, a dated (1970) Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd edition contains a concise and perfunctory definition, which is eerily similar to the online Merriam-Webster definition found online:
“Luddite: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly: one who is opposed to especially technological change”
Perhaps his text predates that early 19th century reference and explains its absence. So too must his economic definitions be limited: Laizze-faire has proven disastrous in each of its incarnations from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, philosophies that were defined more by the economic recessions and depressions that followed their respective applications.
One would think by now people would understand that the government, which is us by the way, has a significant role in a sustainable economy.
The neoclassical model suggests government keep its hands off of the economy, to let the wealth rise to the top where it will be invested in jobs and economic growth. Our current experience however is consistent with the past and we well know that the wealth just accumulates at the top.
LaMettry seems to think that debt is the big impediment, when debt can infuse the economy with new energy, put more money in the hands of those who will spend it, and begin economic recovery.
Current debt is below current GDP, historically that debt has exceeded GDP and did so just before our biggest recovery, and debt is eased by the reborn economy, and eventually reduced. Our recovery depends heavily on that economic stimulus.
If anything, Obama has been too timid in his economic proposals. The stimulus should have been larger and faster, instead we are on a very slow recovery much like the lost decade in Japan in the 1990s.
LaMettry is closer to the Stone Age in his defense of Stone Age economics. BTW, fire was “discovered” and the wheel actually evolved from a government-like community interaction.
Jerry Hiniker
Grand Marais
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