The discussion of Class War Strategies on The NewsHour feature an economist and a salesman posing as an economist.

William Spriggs is an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute here in Washington. And Brian Wesbury is the chief economist at Griffin, Kubik, Stephens and Thompson, an investment bank in Chicago.

Long term readers know I refer to these professions as Type One and Type Two Economists, respectively. And they know I have no respect for Type Two economics pronouncements, and that I love folks that come to the same conclusions I have.

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think there are some things that we would like to see people have greater ownership of. We certainly want to see home ownership increase in this country. But there are a lot of things that the government does today, which are in place because the market is not a good allocator of resources or because what the government is really doing is serving as an insurer; and in that role the government does best when we include everyone, and that's best done as a government program. So the president talked about health insurance as an example. And we see from our current system of health insurance that that doesn't work when you make it an ownership society, because if I want to sell you health insurance, then I want to have the low risk population. I'd love to sell health insurance to a work force that's 20 something and very healthy. I don't want to sell insurance to people who are low income, more likely to be ill, and we see that there are gaps in who has health insurance because of that.

The thing you must remember is, the market is a system that determines the allocation of goods and services exclusively on the basis of wealth. People would like to think wealth is based on the value one produces, but being born in a position to inherit wealth, or to get wealth by maintaining the entropy puts the lie to that thought.

BRIAN WESBURY: Well, I think the ownership society is a very good thing. We have to remember that the more people have a skin in the game, have a stake in society, have assets built up over time, the less difficulty society will have withstanding bad times.

Bullshit, of course. Or, more precisely, salesmanship. Every person in the country already has a stake in society. We live here, we depend on society for survival the same way an antelope depends on the savannah. You also should keep in mind what it means to own something. It doesn't mean you can use something so much as that you can prevent others from using it.

And I believe what this does is it allows the government's spending to be put toward a use that will build assets and build ownership and build personal responsibility over time

Two things: the government doing what it is allowed to do rather than what it contracted to do is the problem, and "personal responsibility" means "your grief is your problem, regardless of its cause."

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think Social Security is a key example. And again the example of what happens in an insurance system like health insurance where we see that's just falling apart; it doesn't work. In the case of Social Security, we know that if you let individuals assess the risk of the economy and then start saving, when they think things are going to go bad, we get the behavior we don't want. We get reinforcing and exacerbating business cycles so people will think that the economy is more risky when it starts to turn down. They'll save more and we learned from the Great Depression, that's not a good thing.

Not all of us learned, apparently.

So we socialize these risks. And in the case of Social Security, what we're doing is we are insuring everybody from the three things which will happen to you as a worker. You may, God forbid, become disabled and can't continue to support your family. You may die young and your family again needs some support or God willing, you'll live a long life and you'll need to retire because you are not competitive in the labor market. And so by having it universal, you have a risk pool which ensures that the program will hold together to ensure against those risks. When people talk about the retirement program, that's not what Social Security is. It really is an insurance against these downturns.

Hey, didn't say something like that the other day?