Ao cuidado do Sr. José Sócrates, mas também do Sr. Passos Coelho

"No economic recovery will ever occur until governments bury, once and for all, the Keynesian concept of aggregate-demand management and instead take measures to revive incentives to rebuild risk-capital financing by mobilizing the country’s entrepreneurial talent.

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Greece is the industrial world’s first casualty, with Portugal, Italy, Spain, and perhaps even France not far behind. Some American political jurisdictions, notably California, are suffering similar crises. These casualty countries are all democracies. But political parties are slow to correct the accumulated mistakes of decades. Capital markets are forced to correct mistakes much faster; the markets are signalling that unless governments move swiftly, they risk default. Rather than learn their lessons and abandon Keynes, European governments have responded by throwing him into reverse, through fiscal austerity that suppresses growth and increases the real burden of public debt. What their countries need is to let people leverage their entrepreneurial talents and build up assets.
Unless this is done, the world economy will remain locked into a stagnation punctuated by periodic crises. Lasting prosperity stems from innovation and entrepreneurship. It is easy to talk about this, but hard to bring it to life.
To match talent and capital, and sort out winning ideas from the failures, societies must build their risk capital and sustain the entire maze of institutions that maintain accountability among investors, entrepreneurs, and intermediaries. Accountability requires the continuous reevaluation of entrepreneurial experiments and the ability to intervene to shut them down through bankruptcy to prevent costly errors form compounding.

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The choice is not between stimulus through government spending and austerity but between stagnation and innovation. Government policy must foster independent sources of risk capital. In the 1970s, or the 1930s, or the 1980s, increasing government debt helped to do this, but it is very hard to argue that this is the case in 2010. The policy lever that can best influence risk-taking today is fiscal. Governments should reduce taxes on capital income and eliminate taxes on capital gains entirely.

Spending cuts must be second in the sequence, after tax reduction have generated more risk capital and employment. Cutting spending first will cause a sharp drop in employment, with no collateral benefits through additional deployment of risk capital.

The worst course of action would be for the federal government to arrogate to itself the role of the private institutions slowly established by the efforts of tens of thousands of talented individuals. Restoring conditions for long-lasting prosperity requires risk investments that create assets, which in turn help create seed capital for new entrepreneurs, in a virtuous cycle. Government job creation produces at best temporary incomes, diverting capital from creating assets.”

The Keynes Conundrum, por Reuven Brenner e David P. Goldman. Na First Things de Outubro.