In that Epic Comment Thread I referenced earlier (as of this writing, 556 comments) Markadelphia dropped this turd:
We survived higher levels of spending before…even made it through “The Scourge of FDR” and ended up in great shape.
Unix-Jedi glommed onto this almost immediately, but I ran across something a day or two ago that I cannot find now. Still, the point stayed with me, and it was this:
The Keyneseans insist that it was the “public spending” of the war economy that brought us out of the depression and spurred the incredible growth of the post-war economy.
Not so.
They seem to neglect the fact that, after the war, the United States was the only major industrialized nation that hadn’t been smashed. We had our own sources of raw materials, unmatched manufacturing capability, and the rest of the world needed rebuilding.
Who else was there to provide the things the world needed to rebuild? America’s economy didn’t magically rebound because our government had spent a lot of money it didn’t have – that was just what had provided the manufacturing base. Without a market to sell to we’d have crashed right back down. But that market was there, and it needed what we could make.
That market isn’t there now, and the rest of the world makes everything anybody might need. We buy most of it ourselves, if you haven’t noticed.
The world is not the same as it was after WWII, and only a fool or an idiot would fail to recognize that.
I’m also going to copy a comment from that thread in its entirety, in case Echo should ever go Tango-Uniform. By reader Moshe Ben-David:
I waded through all 544 comments. Took me a couple of hours. It was truly difficult but educational. I think I will copy and paste to a document to use as a textbook example.
I have tried to explain the bizarre way that the leftist mind such as Mark’s works, but it is one thing to tell someone what it is like, yet it doesn’t do as much justice as actually seeing a leftist speak for himself and prove what I am talking about; the sheer inability to grasp the most basic concepts and facts and then put them together in any meaningful way.
I must salute DJ, Unix, GOF, and Ken for their unbelieveable patience and willingness to engage in this exercise for the benefit of others who have come here to learn. I have engaged people with graduate degrees regarding the subject of Biblical apologetics in the same patient manner with facts and logic, not for my opponent’s benefit, but for our audience.
That is the good reason Kevin has not banned him. He serves as a kind of lab rat or zoological specimen, where, instead of learning about such idiots in the abstract, we get to read him first hand and be able to say, “So THAT’s what it looks like!”
It would be fun to coin a single word that describes Mark’s condition. Ignorance can be a temporary condition that can quickly be overcome with a little education. Stupidity can be organic or physical in nature. So, what shall we call it when you encounter a human who seems to have enough cognitive ability to function in society and even seemingly pass for having reasonable intelligence and yet beneath it all engages in the grossest forms of cognitive dissonance, and worse, willful ignorance? I don’t want to call it Markism because it would be too easily confused with Marxism, even though Marxism seems to be the logical reductio ad absurdum result of Markism.
Maybe we could call it Markean “Mark – ee – an”, but I’m afraid too many would mispronounce it “Mar-keen.” How about “Markasian?”
We’ve been saying this for three years.
And he Just. Doesn’t. STOP.