Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
“Any given government program will become the opposite of its name,”Elon Musk said recently.
Think of the Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Control Act, the CARES Act, the War on Poverty, and countless others. They all resulted in the very inverse of how they are named.
That’s some wisdom right there.
Musk holds many libertarian views along these lines and has been a vocal champion of capitalism as an economic system. He famously set out to lead a team to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. It did not work but not for want of trying.
However, Musk is not always consistent. And he is not always correct.
He also recently wrote the following:“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.”
Let’s consider these assertions from the inside out.
Musk claims that AI is going to produce vast goods and services such that it will generate 4, 5, and 6 percent growth.Indeed, if economic growth is going to outpace money supply growth, even in normal times, it will need to be above 6 percent at least. That’s just based on average rates of money growth over the decade. If we want healthy growth beyond that, we’ll need output growth on the level of 9 and 10 percent.
The United States has not experienced growth like that since the 1880s. Data gathering was not quite sophisticated in those days—national income accounting had not yet been invented—so we cannot say for sure. This is just an estimate.
Source: ZeroHedge News
