Epilogue
These are short essays.They focus quite narrowly on questions of fiscal policy and
public finance.Originally meant for widely separated audiences,they often repeat
tropes and themes.Readers accordingly will encounter economists assuming can
openers and the budget effects of selling the Pentagon more than twice.William
Vickrey's range of imagery was not especially large,and his pedagogy did not shrink
from repetition-as all who can remember him rising from the back of the room to
declaim on the 1.8 percent unemployment rate of 1926 can attest.
Nevertheless,even taken together,these essays form a remarkable body of economic
thought.Vickrey was a master draftsman of compact,lucid prose.He dealt with material
that was inherently difficult,and that has become more so for economists brought up
in the late phases of our present pre-Keynesian revival.Yet I defy the reader to find
here an unclear concept or a wasted phrase.If you have not understood something
there is only one remedy,and that is to read it again.
Two themes predominate in these pages.One concerns the relationship between
fiscal deficits,public debts,and'chock-full employment.'Vickrey's personal courage
-make that,indifference to the predominant view-and his relentless logic are best
illustrated in these passages,particularly in his insistence on the necessity of large
public deficits and growing public debt.He was a rare specimen,a totally honest
policy economist,who preferred to be completely without audience rather than to
compromise his position.How many of us can say the same?
With honesty came a clarity of thought,even prescience.In his 1993 paper Fifteen
Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism'Vickrey writes:"There is a serious danger
that the bidding up of asset prices could create a bubble of unsustainable values that is
likely to collapse disastrously,as occurred in 1929 after the budget surpluses of the
preceding years.'Such a pity he did not live to see the end of the 1990s.No one would
have been less surprised by the bust of 2000 and the Great Stagnation that has followed.
In this area,incidentally,it is possible that Vickrey underestimated the capacity of
the authorities to delegate,through guarantees and insurance schemes,the creation of
the necessary deficits to private parties,permitting the public sector proper to appear
to run a budget surplus at full employment,and slowing the decline in consumer
spending thereafter by permitting a continuing cash-out of home equity.This is a
phenomenon I have elsewhere called the Keynesian Devolution.But,one can be sure
Vickrey would have fitted this into his scheme.
The second large theme here concerns inflation,a topic of greater urgency in the
1980s and early 1990s than today.Vickrey was a firm opponent of sacrificing
employment and output to price stabilization.Here he stood on nearly neoclassical
ground:fully-anticipated inflation can for the most part be compensated,while it is
unanticipated changes in the inflation rate that cause difficulties.But'unanticipated
reductions in inflation are as unfair to debtors as unanticipated increases are unfair to
creditors.'In any event,Vickrey wrote,unanticipated inflation is merely equivalent to
"legitimized embezzlement;'the unemployment required to get rid of it is akin to
139
140 Full Employment and Price Stability
arson.'It is a sizzling comment on the monetary policy obsessions of the 1980s.In
several places he treats the theoretical underpinnings of monetary scorched-earth policy
the Non-Accelerating-Inflation-Rate-of-Unemployment,as one of the most vicious
euphemisms ever coined.'
To deal with inflation-embezzlement without committing unemployment-arson
Vickrey thought economists should get busy on the design of new policy instruments
Vickrey's practical streak prevented him from aligning with schemes for tradeable
rights to raise prices,but he had an alternative:tradeable rights to gross mark-up.or
value added.If value-added can be taxed,as it is universally in Europe,why can't it
also be controlled?The effect would be to put a three-way choice in front of firms
enjoying an unusual run of monopoly advantage:either lower your prices,or pay an
indemnity to other firms(by purchasing their excess warrants for gross mark-up)or
else pay a penalty tax.The disappearance of inflation as a policy issue in the 1990s
somewhat takes the edge off of this idea,but one cannot help wondering whether,if it
had been in effect,it might not have spared us the present predations of producers of
software,pharmaceuticals and other monopolized products.
Finally,one reads with pleasure Vickrey's crisp excursions into the structure of
taxation.Vickrey opposed special treatment of capital gains,and indeed advanced a
scheme for cumulative assessment that would raise the effective rate on long-term
capital gains and bring about something close to neutrality between the taxation of
capital and ordinary income.Yet Vickrey favored abolition of the corporate income
tax,which has a'double effect on the economy,not only removing purchasing power
from the income stream,but in addition discouraging new investment that would add
to this income stream.'Vickrey saw that,when combined with an offsetting increase
in upper tax brackets on the individual income tax,this step would have a progressive
and a stimulative effect on economic activity.He also saw,in related essays,the brutal
inefficiency that results from excessive taxation of real property at the local level.He
would have been a vocal advocate of revenue sharing in the current state and local
fiscal crisis.
And so we have Vickrey in a nutshell:deficits and debt large enough to assure
chock-full employment,monetary policy at ease and in the background,extra
instruments to control inflation and monopoly power,and taxes altogether progressive,
neutral and fair.
Is it a lost cause?Certainly two or three years ago,in that short moment of intense
and ill-founded satisfaction with the Third Way of tight budgets and low interest
rates,Vickrey's prescriptions would have had trouble getting heard.But now,in the
spreading wreckage all around us,things may be different.Public deficits are again
large,breaking the spell of budget balance-except that they are not quite large enough
to move the economy back toward full employment.Most now recognize that monetary
policy has been,for some years,pushing on a string.And the foundations of our
policies to control monopoly power,to tax,and to distribute the burdens of government
across federal levels are all ripe for overhaul,once the electorate decides,as it surely
will some day,to make a change in political leaders.
At that moment,this small book will reveal its full value.
James K.Galbraith
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿