A Challenge to Modern Liberals Regarding their Fealty to the Principles they Espouse

Great Debates
161

And what do you suppose we do when the Federal Government becomes corrupted and institutes horrible policies on the whole of the nation?

Could you elaborate on exactly what the Federal Government does so much better than either private individuals and organizations or local communities and smaller scale governments?
I know that I have more influence on my local city council than I do on the United States Congress. If my city has a law I disapprove of, I can either organize with my neighbors to change the law (much easier than changing a Federal law) or I can move to a different city filled with like minded individuals who desire to live in a certain type of community with laws and rules tailored to its inhabitants.

162

You speak of “moving to a different city” as if it were as easy as that.

When was the last time you had to completely pick up stakes and move to a different city on a moment’s notice, with no job lined up, no place to live, and no family or friends living there to provide you help and support?

163

It sure is a hell of a lot easier than having to move to a different country to escape a tyrannical State. If a bad law or government policy is local, you have a greater chance at influencing your legislature and overturning the law, or moving to a different city. Even if YOU don’t move others will and the free movement of peoples will influence the various city councils to change their laws and policies. They don’t want a mass exodus which would decimate the local economy.

There would be a greater chance of freedom and just laws with smaller, competing political units than one monolithic Federal Government that rules over us all.

We need a human scale in political and social life. Why would we want fewer than 1000 federal politicians to set the rules for over three hundred million people?

164

Then we try to change it. Something that’s easier than changing the laws of thousands of local governments.

Pretty much everything? It’s less corrupt, and more competent in general. It’s fairer because it draws on both rich and poor regions of the country; local governments are grossly different in what they can do simply because of their limited resources. It’s easier to keep under control since it is in the national eye the way smaller governments are not. It’s harder for corporations to dominate.

I rather doubt that, unless you are personally wealthy.

165

No, you have less of a chance of influencing the local govenrment.

They won’t be doing what the people want, they’ll be doing what the local corporations and wealthy individuals who control them want. A race to the bottom is characteristic behavior of local governments.

The exact opposite is true. Local laws and governments tend to be more intrusive, more tyrannical, and more corrupt. The Federal government is constantly stepping in to restrain local petty tyrannies.

Because that is a “human scale”, while hundreds of thousands of petty officials is not.

166

Only after someone pointed out to you, the point stands anyhow, at the worst times the country had to dump the gold standard, and after several other problems, it was clear that staying on that standard was not the wisest thing to do.

167

From previous discussions on the Gold Standard:

Shackling your population to a limited resource which is growing at a rate slower than your population is suicidal and really fucking stupid. You inhibit your society and economy so that the only way it can grow is by finding more of the metal, rather than allowing productivity, creativity and other Human characteristics to shape your destiny. When no more wealth can be created except by finding more gold, the environment and even the people suffer as nothing is more important on the larger scale than getting more gold.

See also my discussion of the Idea of Money above.

168

The meme that Government Is Incompetent relies on people to mindlessly repeat the idea over and over while putting a blindfold over one eye and staring at the floor. The government is not incompetent and private interests do NOT do a better job at everything. Of course, they’d like you to think that they do so that you surrender your non-profit government functions over to their profit motive. (Just as they’d be oh so grateful if you’d just let them self-regulate.)

169

Meh millions of people do that today, I have done it a few times in my life.

I understand that the way inflation, GDP, S&P 500 etc are presented makes them meaningless terms and I would suspect 99.9% of all economists do as well. They are headline rates.

On the issue of non government money I see your point, it could help stop the corruption that occurs when the government lend money at a lower rate than they purchase it at, as we have seen recently but this was designed to drive money back into the system. But I don’t see how the world would be better off if we moved back to a barter system, besides slowing the accumulation of money by individuals?

So explain to me “what is your proposed form of currency and why is it better than what we have today?” Please explain in simple points and not essay form.

170

Seeing my name typed three times, I respond to the ritual summons.

Let me sum up the discussion. jayarod7, when you write the word Libertarianism we see the word Creationism.

171

You are assuming the idea that when government ever expands its power, it must be because things weren’t working before for the average person and thus our wise “public servants” stepped in to improve policy for the good of the nation.

This is almost never the case. In particular with the creation of the Federal Reserve, what happens is that banking interests collude and want to protect their own interests (protection from bankruptcy) and this coincides with politicians who want to amass more power for themselves and the gold standard and the constitution restrict there ability to spend money and amass more power for the benefit of themselves and their wealthy friends.

I suggest you read “The Creature from Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin if you want to know the real history of the creation of the Federal Reserve System. I don’t doubt that there were well meaning politicians who came to power after the central bank was established who wanted to do good things through government spending, but the fact remains that the abandonment of sound money for a centralized cartel of banking interests who could print their own money was motivated purely by selfish desire.

172

Tap dancing, remember, slavery was an evil that had to be taken on by disposing of the gold standard, other problems still showed how short sighted was to remain in that standard.

And based on your suggestion, no, you are not reading real history, only conspiracy books from a film producer with political aspirations.

173

You have absolutely no idea how sound money operates. Read any book by Rothbard, Hans Senholz, or Henry Hazlitt if you want to know something about how sound money works in reality.

It is a modern Keynesian idea that an economy can only grow with the expansion of units of currency. This is why we are taught to be terrified of deflation, as if falling prices are somehow tremendously harmful to the economy. Perhaps they are if you are living in an economy which has been subject to a series of unstable economic bubbles precipitated by Federal Reserve credit expansion (i.e. inflation).

In such a case, raising interest rates and cutting the amount of money in circulation (i.e. deflation) would cause a sharp recession and some short term pain. There is no doubt about this. But after a year or so the bad debt would be liquidated and we would return the economy to a sound footing and we could have stable economic growth again.

Once we have a sound currency without a “fake” economy based on Fed liquidity and endless money creation, the economy grows based on savings and production. Falling prices are encouraged and the economy grows without the need to continually introduce new money into circulation. Investment in capital equipment is based on real savings and not debt.

So you must disabuse yourself of the fallacious notions that deflation is catestrophic for the economy and that a gold standard prevents any economic growth.

That last claim should be debunked just by examining history. Surely the United States economy was FAR larger in 1920 than it was in 1850? Yet during that time the purchasing power of the dollar actually rose, we had deflation in prices throughout the economy. We did not have a perpetually expanding money supply.

How did this happen? This should not have been possible if your theory is correct.

How about you entertain the notion that the gold standard was abandoned because politicians wanted to spend money to get themselves reelected and benefit their crony colleagues? And fight wars we should never have been involved in. It is not an accident that shortly after the creation of the Federal Reserve we got involved in World War One which was perhaps the most unnecessary war in our history. The Gold Standard was not done away with because we couldn’t have economic growth. We were experiencing decades of economic growth prior to FDR confiscating the gold in 1933.

For more reading on the subject I recommend this short essay by David Rasho,

The Possibility and Feasibility of a 100% Reserve Gold Standard:

The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar by Murray Rothbard:

Read these and then tell me why sound money would be “suicidal and really fucking stupid”.

Now I will grant that the transition to an honest money system would be complicated and somewhat problematic. There are many proposals to consider in a reasonable transition away from paper money that would alleviate these concerns.

What we should be focusing on is whether, once we establish an economy based on a stable currency, such a system could alleviate many of the problems (such as the recurring business cycle, the plague of the corporate state, etc) could be lessened under such a system.

All the evidence points to a sound money system being far superior to a fiat money system that distorts the free market, encourages Corporate Statism, promotes war and destroys the middle class.

174

Griffin is a nutjob. In a variety of fields though, so I suppose he’s got that going for him. Is there any reason I should listen to the economic policies of a radio station manager with a degree in communications who thinks cancer is a “metabolic deficiency” caused by a lack of amygdalin in your diet?

175

There are two glaring inaccuracies in your statements here. The first is that all activity in the private sector is motivated by the desire for profits. The second is that the government is entirely non profit. Neither is remotely true.

First of all, all the libertarian is saying is that to achieve desired social ends we should organize peacefully and in a voluntary manner. Sometimes businessmen want to make a living a start a business. They will be at least partly motivated by seeking profits. But what about all other forms of social organization? What about all the private non profit organizations that are formed by caring people who don’t care about making money, but merely want to solve a pressing social concern? Charity hospitals are a great example. Lawyers who do pro bono work is another.

Concerned members of society can replace government functions non-coercively and voluntarily.

And you must start to think about profits differently. Profits are not something the businessman extracts from individuals through illegitimate means (otherwise it is theft and would be against the law in a libertarian society). In fact profits and losses are means by which the consumer in a democratic fashion is able to make his preferences known to the “market”. By giving his money voluntarily to one business or another, he is rewarding the business that offers a good product or service and punishing the one that treats him badly or offers a shoddy product.

Unless force is introduced into the equation, profits and losses benefit the consumer more than the businessman. It is an absurd canard that certain types of leftists buy into which states that any area of social life where profits are present is probably exploitative and involving sinister motives. If only we move to a “non profit” system, everyone will be more ethical and the problems will be solved!

Of course the reality is that without the price system which is dictated by profits and losses, there can be no efficient allocation of scarce resources. Things are less efficient when government runs things, resources are wasted, the money spent does not correspond to things people need or want and outcomes tend to be worse.
As for the government being “non profit” this is farcical at best. Government is run for profit. They extract money from private citizens at the point of a gun and spend it on political programs. Special interests go to Washington to profit themselves with no bid contracts, subsidies and benefits. Politicians get kickbacks from their big donors. A vast majority of the people working in government and the corporations that work with government have ulterior motives involving their use of the State to profit themselves.

You know what is really non profit? A charity hospital. The Red Cross. Habitat for Humanity. Any organization that relies to donations or gifts to run its operations. The people who get involved in those organizations are NOT seeking to profit monetarily. They are seeking to help others. That is great and is encouraged.

Government doesn’t do this. Now, if government became non-coercive and it had to rely on private donations to fund it, then things might be different.

Now, as far as government competence is concerned, libertarians don’t think that government always fails in accomplishing what it sets out to do. The fact that frequently the State is inefficient and there are detrimental unintended consequences to its actions is actually a secondary point.

The primary objection to the State is that it, at least in all current existing forms, exists as a predatory and exploitative organization. It violates the non aggression principle. It has the legal right and obligation to initiate force in a given geographical area. Its funded comes from expropriating the public though force or the threat of force.

So even if it did a lot of things that lead to good outcomes (which is highly disputable) it would still be illegitimate because the State’s entire existence is based on the immoral initiation of force against peaceful citizens.

Lastly, I don’t expect any business or anyone else to “self regulate”. There will be laws in a libertarian society protecting persons, property and the environment. There will be laws enforcing contracts and punishing fraud. I expect regulations to come from private citizens, watch dog groups, consumer reports, online ratings of businesses, lawsuits of concerned citizens and many other sources.

The government has done a lousy job “regulating” corporate abuse. In fact all it has done is protected businessmen from liability and created politically protected monopolies for big Agricultural firms, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, banks like Goldman Saches, and large energy companies.

This is the problem we are dealing with. And one in which the libertarian society would deal with in short order.

176

No, they can’t. Government has been forced to take up innumerable tasks because private citizens and organizations either can’t or simply will not do the job themselves.

Or because he was successfully lied to or coerced. There’s nothing particularly noble about business. And the unregulated market you want would be rabidly predatory and anything but voluntary.

No. Sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse depending on the task. Governments are better at some things, private industry at others.

:rolleyes: No, it isn’t. Which is why it doesn’t make one.

Yeah, as in most of the population being dead in the resulting chaos and bloodshed. That’s different all right.

Except that’s your definition of “moral”, not most of humanity. Most people prefer a functional government that keeps order and them alive over your “better” government that would result in them being dead or enslaved.

Yeah, sure. :rolleyes: We tried that, it was called the Gilded Age. You’d have people dying right and left from poisoned food and medicine and all the rest of the predatory practices of the past, while paid-for shills announce how great everything is.

177

As the proposed way to get there infers revolution, I do not think this will be done shortly, more likely never.

“But when you want money
For people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait” - The Beatles, Revolution.

Because yeah, Murray Rothbard was a piece of scientific racism trash.

178

Willingness to learn is key, regardless of one’s stance.

Did jayarod7 just never understand the debunking, or what?

179

No, I’m not suggesting that Shadow Stats! is making up its numbers.

I am flat out asserting that he’s making up the numbers based on the released information, or more precisely, that he’s manipulating CPI data in a totally arbitrary and indefensible way. His numbers are not only manufactured, but they give every appearance of being manufactured in the absolute laziest way possible, in essentially the same way that Unskewed Polls! manufactured its numbers. The real data coming in from the legitimate hard-working pollsters was inconveniently too fact-based, so they took those numbers and systematically added several points to Romney’s score in order to make themselves feel better in the most delusional way possible.

The people who have looked at the graphs from Shadow Stats! can see it’s a similar operation. He takes the official figures and puts his fat greasy thumb on the scale. He basically just adds a constant, for god’s sake, and for some of his alternate measures, the constant increases as time goes by. This is the kind of mindless “analysis” for which he charges $175 a year.

That last graph I cited shows a particularly contemptible example.

In that particular unskewed index, he has that alternate inflation rate at 5% in late 2008, the same year the price of oil went from $145 a barrel in July to $30 a barrel in December. Yeah. Right. He has the general price level going up by 5% at the same time that oil dropped by 80%. Food prices were also dropping like a rock: corn went from $8 a bushel to less than $4, wheat from over $11 to around $6. This is not to mention that we were in the middle of the collapse of the housing bubble.

But he has an alternate index where prices were actually inflating at 5% a year. Unreal. Simply unreal.

And now you have done us all the favor of putting yourself permanently on the record of having given an earnest defense of the integrity of these numbers. Thank you for that.

The creator of the website, John Williams, is a charlatan who’s not qualified to tell us whether his own shoes are tied.

Look at the 5% inflation rate he reports in 2008. Look at it. That’s all the “evidence” from him that we need. That is sheer insanity. And to defend him, what do you do? Bold quote an unnecessarily large excerpt of his bio, as if that is evidence. His “qualifications”, such as they are, aren’t relevant, no matter how impressive they might seem to the ignorant and economically unsophisticated. Lots of stupid, irrational people have fancy degrees. I have three separate pieces of paper myself that say I’m an educated guy, but I don’t rely on the sheepskins to make my case for me. Biography is nothing. I rely on evidence, and John Williams has none. In fact, he’s been saying hyperinflation is “likely” since before the Lehman Shock, and even once claimed that it will happen “by 2014”. Just half a year left on that one.

In my post, I cited the MIT Billion Prices Project, which is not a government source. It was put together by professors at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Do I trust the Billion Prices Project because of the prestige of their uni? No, or at least, not for that reason alone. I trust it because it shows deflation in late 2008 and early 2009. This is what we should expect, or at least those of us who are capable of interpreting basic market prices. You don’t need to trust the government to see the price of energy and food dropping like a rock, because those particular bits of data are available to everyone. It’s dead easy to interpret.

All it requires is not being stupid.

That’s not a high hurdle to jump. Except for stupid people.

You didn’t read my post carefully.

Well, okay, to be fair you don’t seem to read anything carefully, so I’ll take a moment to quote myself here.

Look at the difference between our posts.

From the beginning, I specifically admitted the possibility that the government numbers might be off. Then I expressed delight in the modern age of technology, where there are other non-governmental prices indices we can use to test how honest the government is being. This is to say that from the very beginning, I accepted the possibility that the government’s numbers might be wrong, and then I went looking for a reliable non-governmental version.

And you? Exactly the opposite. You decided in advance that the government was wrong. “What leads to you think that the government would NOT want to misrepresent its economic statistics? Unless you work for the government you would be happy to see its misrepresentations exposed.” You have already made up your mind that they are lying, and you want those “misrepresentations” exposed. This is why you delight in any bit of nonsense that comes your way that reinforces your pre-existing belief. This is why you accepted stupid numbers so blindly, despite their obvious unreliability. They told you what you wanted to hear, and you thoughtlessly ate that shit up.

I recommend that you feel embarrassed about this.

I was open to the possibility that the numbers were wrong. So off I went to the Billion Prices Project. I linked to their graph where they compare their own measure of inflation with the government’s measure, and I mentally noted a few important things. First, I saw that they had their price index dropping in late 2008, which is the sort of outcome that actually makes sense in a world where the prices of food and oil are collapsing. Then I noticed that their price index matched up in a fairly pleasing way with the government’s index.

This is independent corroboration of the in-the-right-ballpark-ness of the government’s numbers. This gives a lot of strength to the people in the BLS who claim that they’re genuinely trying to do an accurate job measuring inflation. I admitted the possibility that the government might be lying, but when I found a reputable resource that provided figures very close to the government’s, I was led naturally to the conclusion that the government workers are pretty much okay.

Is there an incentive for the government to lie about certain things? Yes. Of course. But there is also an incentive for people in the government to want to be extremely well informed about the actual state of the economy. There is also in the incentive for stat-hounds in the government to do their job honestly and well. There is also an incentive for data-loving people outside the government to demand good data. And there is also, most relevant for this thread, an incentive for people who don’t like government to make up their own fantasy data when the official figures don’t tell them the story they want to hear. Shadow Stats! has been claiming that hyperinflation is “likely” for years and years. There’s an incentive to make a stronger case for inflation now for someone who believes there will be hyperinflation by 2014.

There’s also an incentive for ill-informed ideologues on the internet to creduously swallow his numbers without any attempt to compare them to the historical record.

When I wrote that it was “hilarious” that his own product has shown no increase in price, what I meant was that it was hilarious.

It’s certainly suggestive that in the same time period where he claims that the purchasing power of a dollar has practically dropped in half, he’s still charging the same amount. That would mean he’s effectively charging half price for his services, compared to seven years ago. You are, however, correct to note that there are theoretically other reasons for this to happen. It’s not proof of anything by itself. It’s just icing on the cake.

That post that I quoted says “modern world” and “modern global economy” and “the last hundred years or so”. It has literally never happened in the modern financial era that any country has returned to gold after abandoning it. No exceptions.

Is it your contention that the Civil War happened in the modern global economy? I guess you could point out that the countries of Europe actually did attempt to return to gold in the 1920s, only to abandon the attempt in the 1930s. That was the last genuine effort. This is within 100 years, but he didn’t say “exactly 100 years, no exceptions!”. He said 100 years or so. Would it make you happier if he had written 90 years or so? If you’re genuinely having trouble understanding his point because he wrote 100 years or so, instead of 90 years or so, I’d be happy to rewrite the post for you. I can personally replace those numbers, and make sure the proper qualification appears in every single relevant sentence, if it would make it easier for you to follow.

My one-year old niece naturally makes a mess eating. If I ever visit, I’m perfectly happy to help guide the food into her mouth, making airplane noises, if it helps get the vegetables down. It’s not a problem at all.

In every case of hyperinflation in the modern financial world, the only choice for such a society has been to return to a sounder basis for their money… meaning that they use a fiat money system. When their fiat system failed, they replaced it with a new fiat system. Weimar Germany was the last hyperinflation that returned to gold in the 1920s (about 90 years ago), and their return to gold didn’t last ten years. Their gold standard failed again.

No country has returned to gold in the modern financial world. Not once. When a fiat system fails, it’s replaced with a new fiat system. Currency pegs are still used, but nobody decides to peg to gold. Instead, countries choose to peg their currencies to other fiat moneys. The US dollar is a popular choice for a currency peg, as is a basket of currencies. It’s [del]turtles[/del] fiat money all the way down. Even Bretton Woods, the dinosaur that lasted into the 70s, wasn’t a proper gold standard. The US maintained its devalued peg from FDR, but private ownership of gold was outlawed and all the other countries in the system pegged their currencies to the dollar.

Every gold standard in history failed. No country in the modern financial era has ever tried to return to one. The dinosaur finally went extinct in the 1970s, but the asteroid hit long before that.

180

Governments are by nature non-profit. The existence of our debt proves you incorrect. People making a salary does not equal “profit”. You are aware that people get paid to work at non-profit agencies, right?

Yes, I am aware of how much of an unrealistic fantasy Libertarianism is. Just like most other ideologies, it completely ignores Human Nature and what happens when people don’t play nice with their system.

Fantasy. You are completely ignorant of economies of scale.

Straw man. No one is arguing this.

Keep covering one eye and staring at the ground while repeating the mantra, because this is patently false in a large number of cases.

Ignorance and silliness.

More silliness.

Here is where the epic level silliness of Libertarianism shines through. You cannot have a functioning society where every person has to volunteer to belong. You’re also assuming that we don’t already have the equivalent, where you are certainly free to leave this country if you don’t wish to participate in it’s laws and mores. But if you stay, then the government not only has the right to force your participation in it’s laws, it has a moral duty to do so. You don’t get to play the Sovereign Citizen game and opt out of obeying the laws and social constructs of society while still benefiting from it’s structures and infrastructure.

I completely disagree, as above. I believe that the State has a moral imperative to force your compliance with it’s laws. If you don’t like those laws, then you work to change them. Or if we cannot change them for whatever reason, we work out ways in which they get largely ignored (see: Speed Limits, possession of minor amounts of Marijuana, etc).

Just sucks to be the people killed, injured or harmed by those products while the corporation spends years defending their right to add melamine to your milk. The benefit of Government regulation is in it’s Immediacy.

I completely disagree with you on this premise.