Grain store house11/11/2023 A very common prescription from America's current left wing is that in slow economic times, such as now, government should be borrowing money, maybe even just printing it, in order to build infrastructure. And when there's the bust we think that perhaps government should do something to stimulate the economy. We know that bust is going to arrive, we just don't know when or quite why. During the boom we think that perhaps the government should be saving up a bit. This does describe both a market economy, driven by those animal spirits, and also an entirely agricultural one, driven by the weather (and in Egypt, the flooding of the Nile). So, we've an economy with a propensity to go from boom to bust and back again. And we'll have exactly the same underlying economics in this story, really, absolutely the same, we'll just tell a different story to illustrate said economics. However, now let's write this story again. Yes, I know, the Giza pyramids are from several centuries before Joseph and all of that. At one point, the pharaoh has a dream vision that Egypt will fall into a great famine, and Joseph advises the pharaoh to store a lot of grain - a move that eventually helps Egyptians survive. In the Old Testament, Joseph rises to become a top aide to an Egyptian pharaoh after being sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. In front of this audience, Carson told a story that would reflect his faith - and that's where the pyramid story comes in. You would use the same amount of stone to build granaries of the more traditional pattern. The solid to space ratio is entirely unsuitable for the storing of anything at all in fact: if what you were trying to store was grain then you simply wouldn't build something in this manner. Pyramids were not and are not hollow, they were not used to store grain. My colleague Kristina Killgrove is entirely correct about the mechanics of this. Further, other ancient societies used much the same technique, even if they might have built canals or irrigation systems instead of pointy piles of stone. And for all the jeering that is going on further to our left about how wrong Carson is, those pyramids are actually an example of something said left holds very dear, fiscal stimulus in the time of an economic slump. The really interesting thing about this though is that he's actually right, it's just that he's got the mechanism entirely wrong. There is much amusement floating around about one of Ben Carson's more bizarre beliefs, that Ancient Egypt's pyramids were in fact grain stores, not tombs and monuments.
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