Sophomoric Fear

In a typical debate format one will state their belief on the relevant material and briefly explain their reasoning before allowing for a rebuttal. Malamud only seemed to follow a fairly disorganized set of talking points in a candor that I will kindly refer to as “less than succinct”. He seems to try and fill time by repeating topical information in as many permutations as he can muster. I would not have an issue with this if he was to illustrating examples of the merits of his ideology, but he is not.

What Malamud is actually describing I will term as Historical Pandering. Malamud spends all of his time trying to inform the audience about the great depression while inserting snippets of his own beliefs against fear, deflation and unemployment. This direction does nothing to defend his point and only works to build a house of cards to be scathingly disassembled by Reed.

It seems the weakness at the core of Malamud’s talking points is a clear faith in his ideology. He generally seems to assume the audience will not find issue with what I believe to be his core idea that economics should be used to create wealth rather than efficiency. When Reed speaks he points out the reasoning behind his beliefs and offers several relevant examples to reinforce them. Malamud alludes.

What surprised me most in the end was that Reed did not attack Malamud for his use of fallacies. This is the crux of the issue for me. Creating inefficient or pointless jobs will not help a country grow or operate. Keynesians seem to have a habit of ignoring human action and motivation. People respond to incentives. The idea of a 100% employment rate is ridiculous. If someone does not have a risk of losing their job they will not be an effective worker. Think of a system of gears and motors. If one of many motors in a collection gives way the system will redistribute the energy to push along the broken gear. However the more this happens the less the system works. If a decent portion of the gears stop moving on their own and have to be hurried along the whole system will eventually stop. The “Fear” that Malamud talks about is one of the most important driving forces of humanity. Uncertainty has taught us how to deal with scarcity and all of its effects. A lack of fear is an example of stagnation, or more pointedly the later years of the Great Depression.