But then, I'm not surprised; you seem to judge almost everything even a government does by whether or not it improves the profitability of private business.

Quite wrong, I judge government whether it tends to make people better off or worse off and how it does this. Making people who make good decisions worse off to make people who made stupid decisions better off is simply perverse. Both from an incentive stand-point and from an ethical/equity stand-point.

Oh and the OECD puts the unemployment rate in Denmark at 3.7% and 3.3% for 2007 and 2008 respectively. Even if we apply the maximal adjustment noted in footnote 2 (just to give you the benefit of the doubt), that becomes 2.7% and 2.3%, so it depends on how you measure it in some regards. Also, the economy appears (as does the U.S. economy) to be slowing with projected growth for 2009 being 0.6%. Also, it is believed that the Danish employment rate is well below NAIRU meaning problems with inflation down the road. If we were really into that planning thing you seem to espouse we need to put some of those employed people out of work.

The government has to subsidize even profitable industries?

Yeah, too bad individual economic viability isn't the only thing that the government makes its decisions by. By your logic, we should let even vital defense industries go under even if they are slightly less than the most profitable, even though the cost of not having those components could cause considerable pain (economic and otherwise) in the near and far future.

Yes it worked so well with the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Block countries. Why look at them now, they are all blowing the doors off of the U.S. and have higher....oh never mind. Then lets look at China...oh...yeah not so good either. Guess you got me here. Or not.

I guess somebody should tell Denmark. Silly welfare-happy Danes, thinking they have 2.8% unemployment and 1.8% real GDP growth (slightly less than the United States' 2.2%, but then Denmark doesn't have 4.6% unemployment with it and vastly greater inequality.)

es it is nice to be compassionate and help out others, but just because I made smart decisions doesn’t mean I am in a position to help others. But here comes Barack Obama telling me I have to help these people whether I can afford to or not.

This is why I'm not a libertarian. Does it honestly not occur to you that there can be worse economic consequences from not helping the idiots once in a while rather than sitting pretty on your smug little pedestal? But then, I'm not surprised; you seem to judge almost everything even a government does by whether or not it improves the profitability of private business.

You can't be arguing today that markets don't fail. The consumer credit market is the perfect example. Left totally unregulated, it embarked on a runaway mission to ruin itself. Or look at agriculture. During the 90s the growers of hops all went out of business because the price didn't support the business. Now the price of hops is through the roof, the brewers are all screwed, and people are scrambling to get back into the hops growing business. Pure, distilled market failure.

Markets are stupid and frequently misbehave. The only signal it produces is the clearing price, and that signal isn't everything we need to know. We have to look forward, to use our brains to ask the questions the market doesn't answer. If we act on this market signal, will we be able to feed ourselves in five years? If we act on this market signal, will we have any energy production ten years from now? These questions are important and they must be asked, and answered, to keep society from collapsing. Blind slavery to the price signal doesn't work.

The market, as we have seen a half-dozen times this year alone, is completely incapable of predicting anything.

Uhhmmm, no, the market doesn't predict anything, people look at the information the market provides via prices and make predictions.

If you want any kind of forward-looking policy, you have to use the power of government to distort -- yes, distort used in the positive sense! -- the market in order to achieve the desirable outcome.

The literature on time inconsistency argues against you. But hey, what to Nobel Prize winning economists know anyways.

If left to pure doctrinaire market forces, nothing would ever get done in the world, and the economy would be unable to escape a local maximum condition.

This is a joke right? Nothing would ever get done. Hyperbole much?

With planning, regulation, and market distortion the economy can escape a local maximum to reach a higher operating point.

Yes it worked so well with the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Block countries. Why look at them now, they are all blowing the doors off of the U.S. and have higher....oh never mind. Then lets look at China...oh...yeah not so good either. Guess you got me here. Or not.