Yeah, Bastiat is very cool. Elegant, simple, clear.
I'm going to make the [very large] assumption that Cutten is serious about wanting an objective analysis that will make him money.
So...
The way the world works is pretty simple.
Some poor place finds a way to make some rich place pay for its work. Back in the day, when I still had hair, Venice made cute little mosaic crap out of bits of broken glass, and sold it to the rich folks in Constantinople. This wee bit of initiative got northern Italy going, which got first France and then Antwerp/Rotterdam/Amsterdam/Bruges into the game via salt fish and textiles, which bled over into London and the rest of England, through the same route: salt fish and textiles, and before you could say boo you had a whole network of small to large (for their times) cities trading with each other for all kinds of stuff.
Inevitably, this led to stagnation, as they fell prey to their version of "special interests/unions", the guilds and their apprentice system.
Then the Portuguese rounded the Cape, the Spanish, jealous, sent Columbus the other way to try to quite literally get around them, and everything got shook up, again. With the New World, the peasants who missed the post-Black Death opportunity found a second chance in the Americas.
The northeast US and Canada were rocky, relatively infertile compared to the Caribbean isles and the southern US, and had, in the areas first settled, relatively little in the way of precious metals, and so had to rely on their own sweat to keep from starving. Longer-term, they overtook their rich southern neighbors, and have wound up far richer in the present day as a result.
But those riches came from risktaking, and inevitably risktaking folks tend to overreach from time to time. This is one of those times. You can either let everything fall apart and put it back together after, or you can pump billions and billions in to keep things afloat until the cycle turns.
Both sides have a point in their arguments, but not for the reasons they think. If you pump billions and billions into an economically stagnant place, you won't get much. Do the same with a place that has people with the experience to put that money to work, and the results will be spectacular.
The Marshall Plan lifted up the industrial areas of Europe: northern Italy, northern France, Belgium, western and northern Germany, and the southern UK. It didn't make southern Italy, the south of France, or Scotland more competitive internationally, though, because it couldn't. A place is either competitive or it's not.
But because of national borders and politics, you can't target the money to where it will do the most good. You have to spray everyone with currency, knowing that a lot of it will miss the folks who will make the best use of it.
This has nothing to do with Austrian or Keynesian economics, except that the latter at least acknowledges that you have to spend money. They still have no idea about where spending it will do the most good because their analysis omits the crucial point that you have to spend it where it will work. Literally where it will work.
So, you have to waste a lot of money to satisfy politics. This is what causes the post-stimulus inflation.
So yes, after this season of scarcity and poverty you will have wealth and, unfortunately, inflation. Because there is politics to consider. You have to keep the folks in the stagnant places from rebelling while you throw the money at the people in the competitive and risktaking places. No getting around it.
)))