Government does create things. It creates tremendous amounts of information which can be repurposed by business planners and entrepreneurs. More importantly it creates a stable structure in which businesses can operate with better margins than if they had to do all risk-mitigation themselves. And it creates almost all civil liberties that we understand in modern context.

Can you imagine the Fortune 500 having to collectively manage an army or national intelligence service to defend its interests? That verges on some very scary ultra-libertarian doctrine which so neatly dovetails with paleo-fascist corporatism… A world none of us want to live in.

There is hardly anything you can now call a “basic human right” that at one time didn’t exist, and in most cases the direct opposite was enshrined in law or custom. And in virtually every case modernization of those principles took place because someone by pen, sword or both, changed the rules under which their system of government operated.

Let’s leave aside the rather extreme position you’ve taken about government not producing anything and just talk about the stimulus.

Or the government can borrow money from banks, which means there is less money for private enterprise to borrow to invest in their enterprise.

There’s only less money for private enterprise IF banks are lending at full capacity. I assume that I don’t need to go over any Fed data with you to assure you that they aren’t right now.

OR, the government can print money, which causes higher inflation, which most certainly costs people jobs as it discourages investment and saving and can cause shortages if it gets really high.

If we’re experiencing deflation (and we are) as an economy and the government engineers some inflation, then we’re just getting back to normal. Deflation is just as bad for investment, and discourages spending.

And you’re third “or” is just a rehash of the crowding out phenomenon in the first example.

And let’s say that I give you these scenarios are likely to occur (and I stress that I do not). The increase in employment from a slack labor market is still likely to drown out the minor effects on employment of inflation (inflation erodes real wages, it does not cause unemployment) or some future tax hike or reduction in government spending (because those things have little effect on employment when the economy is operating at full capacity).

The point is not that me and my friends are right about this and that you’re wrong. There’s a LOT of ways that the stimulus package may not work or may not be worthwhile. But there’s no reason it CAN NOT work. And there’s no reasonable scenario where we lose net jobs from it.

(Fairness: he meant to quote John Adams, who said, “Facts are stubborn things,” but misspoke. It’s a fun quote anyway.)

“Facts are meaningless…you can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.”

I don’t know of anyone who thought FDR caused the Great Depression, and I’ve never spoken to a conservative who argued so either—if anything, it was always the ‘prolong’ argument. Isn’t this a bit a of a straw man?