Tag: Economic Solutions

“Banality Of Evil”

That is a term that was first used by Arendt back in the early 60s at the trial of Eichmann…..

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

That typed….ever heard of the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC)?

No?

As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Instead of orchestrating airstrikes or insurgencies, these bureaucrats impose mass suffering via economic warfare, collectively serving as the tip of the spear that is America’s ever-expanding economic sanctions regime.

https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/ofacs-banality-of-evil-small-us-agency

This group can be as lethal to innocent civilians as an airstrike….

Just thought you might like to know.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo  me agitare”

What To Do? Economically That Is!

There are about as many opinions as a/holes in Washington on how to solve the economic crisis in the US.  There are the Keynesians, the Austrians, are the most talked about in these days of turmoil.

Keynes argued that the solution to depression was to stimulate the economy (“inducement to invest”) through some combination of two approaches: a reduction in interest rates, and government investment in infrastructure. Investment by government injects income, which results in more spending in the general economy, which in turn stimulates more production and investment involving still more income and spending and so forth. The initial stimulation starts a cascade of events, whose total increase in economic activity is a multiple of the original investment.

And then there is the Austrian school of economics.

Austrian Economics is a school of economics that emphasizes the spontaneous organizing power of the price mechanism, holds that the complexity of subjective human choices makes mathematical modelling of the evolving market extremely difficult (or impossible) and therefore advocates a laissez faire approach to the economy. Austrian School economists advocate the enforcement of voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, but otherwise the smallest imposition of coercive force (especially government-imposed) on commercial transactions.

There are the two approaches that are being considered in the nation’s capital.  There are many adherents to these schools, but which will be the savior of the nation’s economy?

To me the Austrian school sounds like more deregulation and that is one of the main causes that let the economy get so out of control.  I will agree that the government cannot spend its way into a sound economy, but having no control over the beast of greed will not do it either.