Can we really spend our way out of this mess?
By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 - 86 Comments
The remarkable re-embrace of deficit spending is every bit as mindless as the financial panic that preceded it
The phrase “paradigm shift” was coined by the historian Thomas Kuhn to describe the process by which an old belief system, long entrenched and widely shared, is suddenly overthrown by a new one. But how to describe the sudden revival of an old belief system to replace the new?
How, in particular, to explain the remarkable re-embrace of deficit spending (“fiscal stimulus,” in the phrase of the moment) across much of the developed world—not only by the political class, for whom its appeal is obvious, but by much of the economics profession? How, when so little fresh evidence has been offered of its effectiveness, and so much of the original critique that first discredited it remains intact? And how, in Canada of all places, which suffered more than most from a previous generation’s experimentation with deficit finance, and where the case for Doing Something would seem less pressing than elsewhere?
