goings to production increases in capacity going to consumers to finance consumption purposes. I have no idea what proper division is according to Buechner I am pretty sure that as a rule more of it goes for production. (Recording) The alternative however is that all it-the whole $100 billion goes to the government, and all of it is spend on consumer goods and services. This is a giant net sucking of wealth out of financial markets funds, which could and would be used to finance additions to productive capacity in the economy, but instead it goes to finance government purchases of consumer items. Now the statistics are very confused on this general subject of what’s been happening but the in general there seems to be a consensus that the real wage rate in the United States hasn’t risen since about 1974 the real wage rate. That doesn’t mean that households standard of living hasn’t risen because since that time we have had a massive movement into the labor force by the female population. The prosperity of the 1980’s which is attributed to Reagan statistically does not seem to be meaningful, and I think that has to be understood at least in part because according to Buechner Reagan multiplied the federal deficit by a factor of three or four, and we went from a $1 trillion dollar national debt- the national debt is a summation of all the deficits in the past added onto each other to where we are now approaching $6 trillion dollars. (Recording) This is pretty horrifying, but nonetheless the other side of this is anything you can do to discourage borrowing for production. The government’s regulations and controls in the economy are “extremely discouraging for people to borrow for productive purposes” or for people to produce anything. (Hazlitt 687) The whole environmental movement has not just increased regulations it has erected absolute prohibitions all over the place in the economy. Among...
