Blod som pengaliknelse

Lagom till Halloween så kan det passa med ekonomiska blodliknelser av varierande kvalitet:

- Johan Norberg - sex minuter in i klippet:

- Man kan jämföra [skuldkrisen] med 17 stycken patienter som kommer in till sjukhuset och har varit med om en bilolycka - och alla har blodförlust. Nu försöker de få blodtransfusioner av varandra hela tiden, och det kan ju tillfälligt då hjälpa en patient, men i det långa loppet blir alla svagare av detta. Så det som behövs är att på något vis minska åtaganden, minska utgifter och samtidigt försöka dra till sig kapital från andra ställen

- Paul Krugman:

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.
[...]
What should be happening? The answer is that we need a major push to get the economy moving, not at some future date, but right now. For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad.

- Don Boudreaux (där det i vanlig ordning är svårt att klippa i inlägget, så det rekommenderas definitivt att läsa hela):

[Keynesian economics is] as if a person who is bleeding to death because of a gunshot wound in his stomach is brought to a physician.  The physician correctly realizes that the patient is losing massive amounts of blood and, also, correctly understands that such blood loss is dangerous to the patient’s health.

So the physician prescribes massive infusions of blood, period.  If the patient doesn’t recover, the physician orders that the volume of blood-infusions be increased.  If the patient dies, the physician will forever blame himself for not increasing the volume of blood-infusions even further.

If the patient does recover, the blood-infusions will be praised for saving the patient.