Video: It’s ACORN All Over Again

Gary North - March 01, 2019

James O’Keefe got his initial 15 minutes of fame with a video of him pretending to be a pimp with a supposed underage girl. He went to a branch of ACORN, which Obama had worked with in his community organizing days. It is a government-funded local community action organization. He asked for advice on how to get government funding for his small business venture. He got this advice.

Then he went to Breitbart, who posted it. The resulting publicity was so negative that Congress pulled the funding. ACORN is no more. It went out of business.

He is still at it. In this video, he pretends to be a representative of an organization looking for government funding. What does it do? It digs holes in the ground and then fills in the holes. He went to labor union leaders and told them he was trying to get money from the government to make jobs. The labor union representatives bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

What few people know is that John Maynard Keynes, in his path-breaking book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), proposed a variation of this same jobs plan. He said that the government could bury bottles filled with paper money, and then let businesses hire workers to dig up the jars.

You may think I’m kidding. I’m not. He wrote this:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment and with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. (p. 129)

“To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. (p. 220)

Here is the video.

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Published on July 19, 2012. The original is here.