Seriously? You guys are nothing if not entertaining as all hell. Goodnight to you.
Straight Dope: Fighting Ignorance (except that of human nature) Since 1973
Indeed, and unless you can explain properly why the drought and other factors were not important on why a lot of the food like the pigs were destroyed, (and even some of that meat was used for relief) I have to say that ignorance **was **fought.
Then what about silver?
The government didn’t just destroy hogs.
It was New Deal policy to destroy various kinds of crops to help increase agricultural prices. I know more about monetary policy, but I’m pretty sure that in some years the Federal government bought up more than a quarter of wheat production specifically in order to take it off the market. This helped people selling wheat, but no one else. In some cases, food was distributed. Not all.
There were good parts and bad parts to the New Deal. Most of the food destruction was clearly bad. In a deflationary Depression, it’s a good idea to support prices with increased demand from more money. It’s not such a good idea to support prices by destroying food when people are hungry. They made some mistakes.
This is a subtlety that some people never seem to grasp. Some of it was good, and some bad. Most years, the good outweighed the bad. This is why FDR was re-elected, and then re-elected. But WillFarnaby is at least right on this one point that destroying food was part of the bad.
Yes, but this also misses most of the background that **WillFarnaby **is missing, a lot had to do with the drought and it was not an effort geared to help the hungry, but to help the farmers. IIUC if most farmers would had called it quits I think that then there would had been even more severe hunger in America then.
Fighting Ignorance doesn’t mean making factually incorrect statements, refusing to back them up or prove them in any way, then acting huffy that people don’t swallow it whole.
Preface: Der Trihs, I have no objection to your larger point that government charity has the greater potential to do good, precisely because it is coercive. It seems incontrovertible, frankly: under a purely voluntary system, the amount of charitable activity is limited to the total volunteered; the government can exceed this limit through coercion. One could argue that pure volunteerism is morally better, but not that it’s more effective in purely practical terms.
That all said, in this specific case, what you wrote above is incorrect. WillFarnaby is (presumably) referring to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Even by today standards, the AAA was incredibly meddlesome in the economy: it set limits on crop production, paid farmers not to plant, and yes, destroyed crops and livestock. This was done in order to help the economy and the poor: the goal was to raise crop prices to where they’d been before the Depression, by limiting the supply, in order to benefit farmers (at the time, a group of Americans who were poorer than the median American, unlike today). The side effect was obvious: in order to benefit one group of the poor, other poor Americans were harmed, as food became more expensive or even unavailable.
The New Deal is illustrative of the potential hazards of government programs to aid the poor, or to interfere in the economy in general. While the relative influence of each is disputed, it is clear that political factors, not economic ones, played a major role in New Deal aid. Western states received a disproportionate amount of federal money, particularly in relation to the South, the area with the worst poverty. Why was this? Because the South was solidly Democratic already, and the West was not. When politicians make the decision of who will benefit from government programs, politics will influence the decisions.
It should be kept in mind that government is just a tool, and nothing more. It is capable of tremendous good or terrible evil, great efficiency or awful waste, depending on the particular application at hand.
ETA: That’s what I get for skimming. This was covered in previous posts, sorry for the redundancy.
So libertarians want to help the less fortunate. But they’re too ineffective to accomplish anything.
These links ignore that civil rights were won acting through democratic governments, not by rejecting government.
If it’s not rude to ask, how old are you, Mr. Farnaby? With their one-size-fits-all approach to all problems, hyper-libertarians seem to me like kids who’ve learned of a new hammer watching a Friedman YouTube and now think everything needs to be pounded. Or perhaps, a kid who’s discovered sugar is sweet and now wants his Mom to serve him only chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
This is also ironic because, as I’ve pointed out before, the government-free and corruption-free society envisioned by hyper-libertarians is incompatible with human nature.
It’s a common problem when libertarians start comparing a political system that only exists in their imagination to a political system that exists in the real world. It’s no surprise when the imaginary system works better. But you can’t have a fair race between a horse and a unicorn.
Just compare the idealized conservatism of Tom Clancy or the idealized liberalism of Aaron Sorkin with their real world counterparts.
It’s hard to debate hyper-libertarians because they’re stuck in a single smug reference frame. They refuse to answer simple questions.
Perhaps WillFarnaby or jayarod7 will prove me wrong on this latter point and answer a few simple questions. Let’s start with:
[ul][li] Inflation seems to be the big disadvantage of “fiat money” in your views. Inflation in the U.S. has averaged slightly less than 3% per annum over the past 30 years, per the CPI. Do you think U.S. prosperity or happiness would be significantly better had the inflation rate been 0%? Had there been 3% average deflation?[/li][li] Do you believe the allegation of “$20 trillion of secret loans by F.R.B.”?[/li][li] What’s your stand on mandatory childhood vaccines for diseases like rubella and pertussis?[/li][/ul]
If you refuse to answer these simple questions but instead wait a few weeks and then post another long screed,
[ul][li] What effect do you think that will have on your credibility?[/li][/ul]
[quote=“septimus, post:232, topic:660693”]
[ul][li] Inflation seems to be the big disadvantage of “fiat money” in your views. Inflation in the U.S. has averaged slightly less than 3% per annum over the past 30 years, per the CPI. Do you think U.S. prosperity or happiness would be significantly better had the inflation rate been 0%? Had there been 3% average deflation?[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Let me add an addendum to this:
If you believe the CPI has been faked by the government and is reported lower than true figures, what do you make of independent measures of inflation, such as MIT’s Billion Price Index, which correlates very well with the government’s figures?
Here’s another question for the libertarians. What happens if your society includes a collectivist who doesn’t believe in private property? His political belief is that all property should be owned collectively and no individual has an exclusive claim to any property. So he sees nothing wrong with taking your car to drive to the store when you’re not using it and taking what food he needs to eat without paying for it when he gets there.
How would a libertarian society handle this guy? Would you allow him to live by his beliefs? Or would you use force to stop him and impose your belief in private property upon him?
No the big disadvantage is the bust following monetary expansion and malinvestment.
Yes. A controlled deflation, as we had in the late 19th century, was accompanied by large increases in real wages. Compare that to the last 30 years where real wages have stagnated.
[QUOTE]
[li] Do you believe the allegation of “$20 trillion of secret loans by F.R.B.”?[/li][/QUOTE]
No. I do believe that the Fed operates without accountability and little oversight. This results in them placing the well being of established financial firms they are affiliated with above the general public.
[QUOTE]
[li] What’s your stand on mandatory childhood vaccines for diseases like rubella and pertussis?[/li][/QUOTE]
I believe it is wrong to force someone to vaccinate his or her child. I also believe it is wrong for parents to not vaccinate their child. My son has all of his vaccinations.
I’ve never posted a long screed.
I don’t believe the government has “faked” anything. Rather they have changed the methodology for calculating CPI several times over the last 30 to 40 years. I’m not familiar with the MIT BPI. CPI is largely irrelevant. For example, in a recession or depression prices should be falling. This is part of the recovery process. If Bernanke or Greenspan goes haywire and starts pumping money into the economy in order to offset these price decreases, the fact that consumer prices stay the same is just as harmful as if they rose when we weren’t in a depression.
We would use force to prevent him from taking our property. This mans beliefs are no different from a person who thinks he is entitled to rape anyone he wants.
So a libertarian government would enact a law based on their beliefs and then enforce that law with the use of force if necessary. And people who don’t agree with the law still have to obey it.
What exactly is the difference between a libertarian government and a non-libertarian government? Because what you’re describing sounds like the government we already have.
Well, non-libertarian governments actually work. So there’s one difference!
I’ll review WillFarnaby’s answers to my three questions. But first let me comment briefly on first-order economics.
Average real wages largely track productivity. Period. Productivity and real wages are high today due to technical advances. Many important advances (e.g. antibiotics, electronics) were made after FDR abandoned the gold standard. 
To believe that real wages would be significantly higher today, if we used gold for money, is to believe that technical advances (medicine, electronics, etc.) would have occurred even faster on a gold standard. Is that your claim, Will?
The share of GDP which goes to owners of land and capital instead of labor has increased in recent decades. Healthy profits tend to lead to prosperity and productivity growth (although there is a point of diminishing return). Surely a libertarian does not blame any slowness in wage growth on capitalists’ profits.
Here’s a pdf from the Bank of England which may have useful graphs. It shows average prices and wages over a 300-year period. Looking at its Chart 3 I see
[ul][li] The longest, and highest, stretch of real wage growth was from the end of W.W. I to the present, a period of slight inflation.[/li][li] There is also a period of strong growth from the defeat of Napolean until W.W. I, a period of very slight deflation. This 19th century growth rate is somewhat lower than the 20th century growth rate.[/li][li] The main difference visible on the graph is how erratic the real wage was on the gold standard. The “busts” you worry about were very much a pre-modern problem.[/li][li] The 18th century (1700-1800) is marked by very erratic wages, which decline somewhat over that period. Consult Chart 1 to see that this was a period without inflation.[/li][/ul]
Do you have data to demonstrate the opposite, Will? If you must link to mises.org, please be very selective: Most of its pages are childish beyond words.
We were already quite aware of your views on F.R.B. malice. The question was about the malicious bullshit in Forbes’ headline and whether you’d acknowledge it. You did (“No”), but I think a firmer acknowledgement is in order. All of us – rationalists as well as right-wingers and hyper-libertarians – need to denounce lies, even when they serve our partisan interest.
Vaccinations may seem secondary to economics, but they test whether you understand “Tragedies of the Commons” and related issues. You flunked the test.
No one cares whether you, WillFarnaby, vaccinate your children. The fact is that many don’t (many non-vaccinaters cite “libertarianism” as the reason :dubious: ). I’ve insisted that Hyper-Libertopia is incompatible with human nature; for our policy discussion we must assume that people do behave the way people do behave, not that the world is inhabited only with WillFarnaby clones.
Two quick follow-on questions to test your vaccination understanding before we get back to antique economics and F.R.B. malice:
[ul][li] True or False: Smallpox would never have been eradicated without mandatory vaccinations.[/li][li] True or False: Some children have defective immune systems and rely on “herd immunity” to avoid rubella, pertussis, etc.[/li][/ul]
To suggest that somehow “society” will help those less fortunate is ignorant and dangerous.
The question I have is this, you assume that libertines want to help the less fortunate, OK if I accept that it still doesn’t talk to me about how the rest of the population will act. To tell you the truth I would look after my own first and the rest can go heave. Particularly if I have lots of guns. I get guns don’t I?
Especially when you are also forbidding help from the one aspect of society that has actually shown the ability to do so at all well: the government. Government after all is part of society, not some alien monstrosity like the libertarians seem to want to believe. You might as well tell someone that they are free to go wherever they please after locking them in a cell.