David Hale on the need to emulate Japan's industrial policy

The Commerce Department's going to have to be a lot tougher and a lot stronger -- an elite civil service that commands business confidence and respect.  I'm not talking so much about giving orders, but defining an agenda and ways that we can be more effective.  Whether it's tax policy, whether it's selective use of R&D subsidies, whether it's allowing consortia in areas where we need to have some antitrust change.

The Japanese have had industrial policy with certain clear characteristics.  It was market-conforming.  It was prescriptive, not proscriptive.  Business was encouraged through incentive and moral suasion.  It wasn't ordered to do things.

Japan has made all its policies interact together.  There was a very pro-saving tax policy that created a low cost of capital.  It wasn't just MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) saying, 'You should invest in the car industry.'  The cost of capital was very low and you could take a five- and 10-year time horizon.

~ David Hale, chief economist, Kemper Financial Services, "A Top Economist Frets About '80s Hangover," Investor's Daily, February 1, 1990

David Hale on the need for government to work with business

What you've got to have is a group of civil servants, politicians and businessmen working together who can get everything pulling together in the same direction.  Let's have the private sector play the really critical role of making the investments and seeking out the markets -- but feeling as if it has the full support of the system behind it so they can take a five-year view.

~ David Hale, chief economist, Kemper Financial Services, "A Top Economist Frets About '80s Hangover," Investor's Daily, February 1, 1990

David Hale on the long-term view of Japan vs. short-termism of Corporate America

We have a tendency to emphasize short-term reward and not long-term benefits, and to view the role of a corporate sector as strictly economic and not understand that it has human dimensions.  The Japanese recognize their corporate sector to be a kind of community, which in turn commands a high level of loyalty from people.  Americans view their corporations as a place they go from 9 to 5.

~ David Hale, chief economist, Kemper Financial Services, "A Top Economist Frets About '80s Hangover," Investor's Daily, February 1, 1990

Tom DiLorenzo on the p.c. brainwashing of students entering college

I've been teaching at the university level a long time.  (I got my Ph.D. in 1979 when I was 24.)  Probably the biggest difference I've seen in the students who come in to the university is today they're already thoroughly brainwashed in cultural Marxism and socialism and political correctness.  Whereas 15 or 20 years ago that was not true, at least in my experience.  There'd be some percentage of them that would be sort of corralled by the leftists on the campus who would pretty much waste their education years and turn them into muddleheaded babblers, basically.  But today I've noticed that they're all very well programmed right when they get there.  And that's the success of 25 or 30 years of K-12 and beyond propagandizing by what we'd call the cultural Marxists.

~ Tom DiLorenzo, "Political Correctness as Misesian Destructionism" (1:00 mark), September 29, 2018

John Maynard Keynes anticipates supply side economics

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.

~ John Maynard Keynes, 1933 Essay: The Means to Prosperity, section I: The nature of the problem, p. 338, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Macmillan Cambridge University Press, 1972

Warren Buffett on the importance of process

Games are won by players who focus on the playing field -- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.

~ Warren Buffett

Caitlin Johnstone on the left-right propaganda strings

Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master.

~ Caitlin Johnstone, "Society is made up of narrative. Realizing that is awakening from the Matrix.," August 21, 2018