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Comment by meerita | Hacker News Reader

Keynesian economy never worked. Redistributing money will just make it worthless.

In an economy with 80% consumer spending, your assertion should be supported because it is fundamentally at odds with the economic context and make up of economic activity.

Supporting consumers obviously worked this year, the fact that a 30% drop in economic activity has been as mild systematically as it has is direct counter evidence to your statement.

This is too reductive and unclear what you are saying.

If we do no redistribution and simply allow people to starve in the streets then revolution is coming.

On the other hand, if we prioritize helping people, and stop propping up failing businesses then we can maintain social stability long enough for the economy to restructure according to natural economic forces.

You don't need to print money. The measures of injecting money for consumption never work. There are too many precedents, the best, I think, is Argentina, which uses the Keynesian method of injecting money to generate consumption, creating brutal annual inflation and putting the country into recession every 2 years. If you really want to improve people's quality of life, you have to encourage investment, saving and deregulating things so that prices fall, and investment strategies change and focus where it would really give money.

I love your certainty. I'm not sure it's warranted though.

Well, just look the evidence: Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, etc.

I'll give you Venezuela and Argentina, but can you clarify how Spain matches your argument?

Between the socialists years, 2006-2010 they've spent so much in consume programs that we will be paying for that many years. We're lucky that we have euro, but the proof is unemployment is hight as crazy every year and there are no signs of investement. People also changed mindset from savings to spendings, and now they are demanding more money from the goverment for anything. Please check also Chile, they had couple of programs made by Bachelet, they all failed.

That's a weird argument, given that they appear to have run a primary surplus in those years: https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/government-budget

I agree that there was a massive mal-investment in much of the Eurozone post 2002 (I'm irish and remember this well), but I don't really see how this maps to socialism/socialists. Can you clarify?

It is not. During Zapatero's we had the worst crisis ever, now we have covid's and Sanchez ruling agenda: money spent on gender, progresive things and not in real infraestructure. There's a sort of basic income done, and it is not even working.

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