economic fallacies of the Left and Right
List of econ fallacies by members of both political extremes (from a very good blog site that I’m going to frequent from now on).
Outline here (but click the link to read the paras corresponding to each bullet point).
Fallacies on the Left are:
- Forgetting that things were even worse in the past
- Assuming that Dickensian conditions implies a country must be capitalist
- Assuming that economic reforms failed because real GDP growth didn’t increase after 1980
- Assuming the Soviet Union went into a depression after economic reforms began
- Assuming neoliberal reforms are associated with authoritarian governments
- Capitalism is based on greed
- Assuming increased income inequality negates the gains from freer markets
- European countries have more progressive tax systems than the US
Fallacies on the Right are:
- Countries with big government tend to be poorer
- Denmark and Sweden are socialist countries
- Singapore and Hong Kong are not really capitalist
- Europe/Canada/Australia, etc, are much more socialist than the US
- Capitalism is based on individualism