Openbare werken zijn extra belasting, geen oplossing (Tuur Demeester)

In de Standaard van vandaag staat te lezen: "De Vlaamse regering gaat 800 miljoen euro lenen om een reeks projecten te financieren die de economie opnieuw moeten aanzwengelen. Voor het werkgelegenheidsplan wordt 22,5 miljoen euro extra uitgetrokken."

Dit beleid lijkt wel heel erg op dat van de Hoover-jaren aan de vooravond van de Grote Depressie. Schrijft Murray Rothbard in zijn "America's Great Depression":

"Whenever government intervenes in the market, it aggravates rather than settles the problems it has set out to solve. This is a general economic law of government intervention. It is certainly true for the overall Hoover depression policy. Nowhere has this law been so clearly illustrated as in the American farm program since 1929. The FFB managed to hold up wheat prices for a time. Seeing this apparent success, wheat farmers naturally increased their acreage, thus aggravating the surplus problem by the spring of 1930. Furthermore, as America held wheat off the market, it lost its former share of the world's wheat trade. Yet, prices continued to fall as the months wore on, and the heavy 1930 acreage aggravated the decline. The accumulating wheat surpluses in the hands of the FFB frightened the market, and caused prices to tumble still further."

Henry Hazlitt spelt ons nog eens de belangrijke les die hierachter steekt, in zijn "Economics in One Lesson":

"Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so-called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that is can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off because “we owe it to ourselves.”... . [S]uch pleasant dreams in the past have always been shattered by national insolvency or a runaway inflation... . [A]ll government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; ... inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation."

Hazlitt's hele boekje gaat over die ene les: bij het kijken naar de economie is datgene wat niet gezien wordt even belangrijk als datgene wat wel gezien wordt. En bij dit grootscheepse subsidieprogramma waar De Standaard melding van maakt is dat wat gezien wordt de honderden werkers die aan de slag zijn onder het programma, zolang het duurt. Wat niet gezien wordt, zijn de nog grotere aantallen ontslagen die vallen in andere sectoren, en de algemene verarming van de samenleving in zijn geheel. In 1932 schreef journalist en romancier Garet Garrett de volgende paragrafen neer in zijn briljante boekje "A Bubble that Broke the World", over de bouw van de pyramiden in het oude Egypte:

"Command of labor and materials built the pyramids. The economic world was then very simple. Some private usury, of course, but no banking system, no science of credit, no engraved securities issued on the pyramids for investors to worry about. Merely, the whim of Pharaoh, his idea of a pyramid, his power to move labor, and the fact of a surplus of food enough to sustain those who were diverted from agriculture to monumental masonry.

It is believed that on Cheops alone 100,000 men were employed for twenty years. And when it was finished all that Egypt had to show for 600,000,000 days of human labor was a frozen asset. Otherwise and usefully employed, as, for example, upon habitations and hearthstones, works of common utility, means of national defense, that amount of labor might have raised the standard of common living in Egypt to a much higher plane, besides ensuring Egyptian civilization a longer competitive life. But once it had been spent on a pyramid to immortalize the name of Pharaoh it was spent forever. People could not consume what their own labor had produced. That is to say, they could not eat a pyramid, or wear it, or live in it, or make any use of it whatever. Not even Pharaoh could sell it, rent it, or liquidate it.

History does not say what happened to the 100,000 when Cheops was finished. Were they unemployed? Were they returned to agriculture whence they came? If so, that would be like now sending suddenly four or five million people from industry back to the farms in this country.

You may take it, at any rate, that when Cheops was finished, there occurred in Egypt what we should call an economic crisis, with no frightful statistics, no collapsing index numbers in the daily papers, no stock-exchange panic, no bank failures, but with unemployment, blind social turmoil, Egyptian bread lines perhaps. And this crisis, like every crisis since, down to the very last, was absorbed by people who could not consume what they had produced, whose labor had been devoured by a pile of stones, and who understood it dimly if at all. The forgotten people."

Had Garet Garrett vandaag geleefd, hij had ons gezegd dat de voorgestelde oplossing precies het probleem is, en hij was het dan ook, zij het om compleet omgekeerde redenen, met onze minister eens geweest dat het ergste nog moet komen.


Blog van Tuur Demeester
Murray Rothbard Instituut