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Comment by notthemessiah | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't as get much attention, but Aaron was working a lot on a lot of pro-democracy anti-corruption money-out-of-politics activism in his latter years, founding "Change Congress" with Lessig, which later became "Rootstrikers", an organization focused on eradicating dark money in politics.

Aaron Swartz was also a Progressive (having co-founded "Demand Progress") and a Keynesian (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes) who believed in taxing the rich in the service of a functioning economy, I wonder what he would have thought about all the bullshit coming from Paul Graham these days in his vitriolic defense of the status quo. He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess.

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Just to clarify, Keynesianism isn’t particularly about who you tax but when tax and spending should occur.

The idea is to be countercyclical. Cut spending and increase taxes during a boom, cut taxes and increase spending during a bust. Keeps inflation during boom and deflation during a bust from being too high. The idea is to keep the boom from burning itself out (prevent leading to a crash) and to shorten the depth and duration of a bust (and eliminate them if possible).

Keynes did point out that poor people are more likely to spend money they receive than the rich, so if you’re trying to get out of a demand-caused bust, dollar per dollar, redistributing to the poor is more effective. During a bust, the rich especially have a liquidity preference so they’ll hoard cash instead of spending it.

Somehow Keynes is very popular during the bust and somehow falls out of favor in the subsequent boom.

Since then we've learned two things.

The first is that inflation isn't the demon it was historically made out to be. Hyperinflation is bad, but some stable and predictable <10% annual rate of inflation mainly hurts people hoarding cash, which is a dumb thing to do in general. But if you have a moderate rate of inflation and just stop accumulating new debt during a boom, the old debt gets devalued over time, and then it's always "better" to only pay the interest now and pay the principal tomorrow (i.e. never).

The second, specific to the US at this particular point in history, is that the dollar is such a strong reserve currency that the government can create trillions of dollars out of nothing and still not get hyperinflation. The risk of this is that you go too far and people stop using it as the reserve currency, but apparently that risk isn't worth the trillions of dollars in "free money" you get by discounting it.

> the government can create trillions of dollars out of nothing and still not get hyperinflation. The risk of this is that you go too far and people stop using it as the reserve currency

If the other big central banks around the world print money at similar rates, the US dollar will remain the reserve currency. The pandemic was global.

If the US were to enter a recession alone (which would be strange), and then chose to print lots of money, that's when its reserve currency status might be threatened.

Prosperity is generated by production not consumption. And who's most likely to invest in improving productivity?

I don't worry about stimulating demand when bubbles collapse. The viable parts of the economy get to pay lower prices for everything. That stimulates ORGANIC recovery and growth and avoids re-inflating the bubble in the fake parts of the economy that will only re-collapse again.

Delaying the collapse of unsustainable pricing and investment in non-viable sectors only makes their collapse bigger and more wasteful.

> Prosperity is generated by production not consumption.

Ya sure? So, if the economy produces oodles of luxury goods, but nobody gets to live in luxury by using them, because they're all put in storage -- "it's all about production, not consumption, dontchaknow?" ... How does this production lead to prosperity?

Production and consumption go hand in hand.

Aaron was working a lot on a lot of pro-democracy anti-corruption money-out-of-politics activism in his latter years

No wonder the government was going so hard after him...

Unsurprisingly Aaron wrote about capitalism often, sometimes negatively (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001638), sometimes ambivalently (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001680), and sometimes positively (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001679, which describes some of his experiences with Y Combinator when the "summer founders program" was just getting started). He described people who called him anti-capitalist as "especially funny" (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001107).

It's an insult to the man to assert that he would have taken a position without thinking about its consequences, which is what you are doing when you say, "He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess."

> all the bullshit coming from Paul Graham these days in his vitriolic defense of the status quo.

Do you have a link to some examples of that? I don't remember pg being remotely vitriolic about anything in his recent writing, but I haven't followed closely, am not on Twitter etc.

Could we get a reference for that attack on PG? Ideally with a direct quote as well, so that we know where exactly you’ve seen that behavior.

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