Its funny how some people are really hardcore libertarian when it comes to letting people be racist and letting rich folks take advantage of poor folks but when it comes to stuff like gay marriage or pot… not so much.
How about just pot?
This makes perfect sense… if you actually think that every American household pays for everything (home, cars, furniture, college, etc.) with cash instead of credit. And if you think that, well, you are a moron.
You’re not allowed to insult other users in this forum even if you phrase it as a conditional. Please don’t do this again.
Well between books on tape and the ipod, I look forward to the day when I can hear the bible verses being recited in random order.
They were a minority who were looked down upon, who didn’t start corporations, and couldn’t take loans. One single component of the free market, taking place among a few ignored souls and repressed, is not the same thing as the free market. A piece of the puzzle and the full puzzle are disparate things.
This kind of gets back to my question in the other Rand Paul thread of why Libertarians and hardcore racists are so often inseparable fellow travelers. You’d think there would be some separation between the hardcore conservatism of most racists, and the (hypothetical) Libertarian position of allowing people a relatively free hand to determine their own moral postures, but scratch many claiming to be Tea Party Libertarians and there’s often a die hard racist underneath.
Why does this paring occur so often?
Hardcore racists tend to be idiots. The free-marketeers find them easy to demagogue by convincing them that government is only interested in benefiting poor minorities (or Jew bankers) at the expense of economic opportunity for regular Americans. The government enacts social legislation that they disagree with, so obviously the government can’t get anything right.
I’d rather have you convince me.
Half the people I know have a degree somewhere along the line from one of these schools and none of them have been elected President, heck I know a guy that went to ALL these schools and he teaches for a living.
Did you know that if you go to Japan, almost every business executive or political heavyweight graduated from a single school. Same in Korea, China, and a host of other countries.
Just like Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it was constitutional but unlike Bush’s invasion of Iraq the bailouts were necessary.
I think we have had this conversation about fannie and freddie and their role in this entire debacle and I think you lose before you start. Fannie and Freddie were problems but they were not the cause of the problem.
I am sitting in the eye of the hurricane and I can tell you a few things:
Fraud played a HUGE part in all of this.
The banks that securitized this stuff KNEw that fraud was rampant.
The funds that bought this stuff had SOME idea that fraud was rampant.
The rating agencies SHOULD have known that fraud was rampant.
Noone cared because they were making too busy making money.
There are three specific items that I would like to address here:
No doc (or stated income) loans: were originally meant for small businessmen who chose their own income by deciding how much they wanted to take out of their business and the town banker knew their business well enough to know that they could afford a frikking house. They were also used by folks who were cheating on their taxes but the banker knew had assets and could make payments. There was enough history with these mortgages to give bankers a feeling for how these mortgages performed. The some bankers said “hey iwe could sell a lot more of these if we don’t limit these loans to people who we know actually have the money, lets make them available to anyone who claims to have enough money” and then they were shocked SHOCKED when these mortgages didn’t behave the same way that the original no doc loans behaved.
Subprime mortgages: People have been lending to people who didn’t meet fannie and freddie standards for a long time,they just charged them more because fannie and freddie wouldn’t buy them. Then the CRA came along and Fannie and Freddie suddenly started buying subprime mortgage but this didn’t mean all bets were off. They were buying mortgages for borrowers who had subprime credit but otherwise met the income requirements and the debt equity ratios. After 25 years of experience, wall street was able to compile enough statistics on subprime borrowers to give them an understanding of how subprime mortgages reacted through good times (e.g. the mid to late 90’s) and bad (the late 80’s early 90’s). Then they somehow reached the conclusion that the same results could be achieved even if you didn’t apply the same formula, so they started selling NO DOC subprime mortgages and were shocked, SHOCKED when they didn’t react the same way that subprime mortgages with income and down payment requirements.
Reverse amortization mortgages: These mortgages hearken back to the days when inflation was high and rising and people wanted ARMs because the interst rates were in the double digits, but they also wanted protection from having their payments rise too quickly so lenders would cap the rate at which the mortgage payment could rise but not the rate at which the underlying interest rate could rise. So when the underlying interest rate rose faster than the payment cap would allow you have reverse amortization going on. There was enough data on these mortgages for bankers to get some idea of how these mortgages performed. Then some bankers said “hey lets start them off in reverse amortization status and forget about the down payment or income verification” and then they were shocked SHOCKED when they didn’t act the same way as the mortgages they had based all their models on.
Now there was certainly pressure from the libruls to make mortgages available to poor people. Libruls had been beating that drum for decades through 40 years of Democrats controlling both houses of congress. Well, they waited until there was a Republican house, senate and President before they finally gave in and started giving out subprime loans en masse. It weird how that happened.
And why do you think Levy’s opinion wold convince anyone? What does his opinion prove?
I think the commerce clause argument is based on how big the frikking problem had become.
And yet the treasury department has been regulations with legislative authority since at least 1913 when the IRS was created and congress passed laws that specifically instructed the Secretary of treasury to write regulations that would have the force of law. I think the same probably holds true for other departments where congress has specifically instructed the secretary of some department or another to issue regulations that will fill in the details.
How is that desire unconstitutional?
Wut?
Unfortunately the opinions of the justices of the supreme court differ from yours. As does the most famous of the libertarian judges, Judge Posner in chicago:
“A constitution that did not invalidate so offensive, oppressive, probably undemocratic, and sectarian law [as the Connecticut law banning contraceptives] would stand revealed as containing major gaps. Maybe that is the nature of our, or perhaps any, written Constitution; but yet, perhaps the courts are authorized to plug at least the most glaring gaps. Does anyone really believe, in his heart of hearts, that the Constitution should be interpreted so literally as to authorize every conceivable law that would not violate a specific constitutional clause? This would mean that a state could require everyone to marry, or to have intercourse at least once a month, or it could take away every couple’s second child and place it in a foster home… We find it reassuring to think that the courts stand between us and legislative tyranny even if a particular form of tyranny was not foreseen and expressly forbidden by framers of the Constitution.”
- The Czars
The appointment of the many “czars” by the Obama administration are unconstitutional.
[/quote]
How? They derive their power from the executive and do not have any legislative or article 3 judicial authority.
Exactly and they cannot exercise power that they do not derive from the President.
neither is the white house chief of staff. What’s your point?
Youngstown steel combined with we paid at least market price = whats the constitutional problem again?
You mean the shareholders who were going to get ZERO nada zilch if GM went bankrupt? Thats sounds like ignorance or false outrage.
Says who?
We have a constitutional amendment that specifically allows taxation (which has been progressive since the first day we had an income tax).
The Constitution doesn’t say anything about national highways, a standing army, or an air traffic control system either, why aren’t they unconstitutional?
Nah, he’s just nucking futz. Obama is probably not what I wold call a constitutional scholar but as someone that taught con law at chicago, he is a much closer to that definition that someone who parses through the constitution to find an interpretation that supports their beliefs.
Weren’t you in favor of rand paul in part because of his intellectual honesty?
Yeah, unless you get someone to stick a sharp object into them so that they die.
I’m pretty sure the “invisible hand” has always been there. The law of supply and demand has been around before someone wrote about it just like the law of gravity existed before Newton.
Tell that to the merchants and traders.
“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
– George Orwell
I guess now we can add the Libertarian to that list.
thank you.
Supply and demand was irrelevant in most of history. People didn’t produce things for self-interest or profit. Without social mobility that’s impossible. Without private property that’s impossible. Saying, “If you let people do as they want, it will turn out well.” May make it seem like it all could have happened at any time, but people weren’t allowed to do as they were inclined to for nearly all of human history. Proscriptions on wealth and loans, class systems, feudal rivalry, etc. all stopped a free market just as dead as Communism. If anything, Communist Russia was closer to the state of the world from the time of Ancient Egypt to the Renaissance than it was to a modern economy. People produced for the state in return for military protection, if they didn’t produce, they were forced, and everything they did produce was taken and shipped around based on gaining position and favors rather than based on need.
Fortunately for my PhD research program into the political economy of ancient states, this is quite thoroughly wrong.
Appeal to Authority plus internet-claims to specialized real world experience. Neat.
You might want to try to argue your point with evidence and reason rather than claiming credentials on an anonymous message board. Hell, I think Sage Rat is wrong, but “Trust me. I’m an internet expert.” just doesn’t have the oomph that an actual cogent argument does.
The qualities of ancients are generally drummed up as more significant than they are. You can look at the complex mechanisms of Ancient Greece and say that they were technically advanced, but the fact is that no one took those devices, took out a loan and capital, formed a production line, and started selling things on the open market. They were curiosities and nothing more. The potential for being a technically advanced state and actually being one are entirely different things.
And anyways, how exactly do you intend for me to sum up the myriad differences in the local markets of thousands of nations over a period of 30,000 years and be particularly accurate? Outside of giving a quick and general coverage of subsistence farming, mercantilism, and serfdom, what more do you expect me to say to demonstrate some of the key differences between ancient economies and modern? If you want to write something, go ahead. But if your conclusion is that modern banking, meritocracy, modern ideas of ownership, and the idea of the mutual benefit of trade were all common, widespread among the general population, and appearing all together in the same place through history, I’d want to see some pretty damn good cites. But so far as I’m aware, and to which the Wikipedia agrees, Capitalism didn’t start to form until starting around the 16th century, and certainly didn’t reach something like a completed form until the 18th century.
He made a sweeping assertion. I denied it in a sweeping way. Some claims can be met with argument, while others deserve little more than abject dismissal. This claim happens to be in the latter category.
How do you know?
By “Ancient Greece” I am going to assume that you mean classical Athens. This is not my specialty, but I can certainly give you some immediate counterexamples off the top of my head.
The rhetor Demosthenes owned a shield factory in Athens that employed over 100 people. He produced shields not for his own consumption but for the market.
There are large numbers of loan and credit documents from Athens alone. Paul Millett, whose work I don’t ordinarily love, wrote a book about Athenian lending and credit instruments about fifteen years ago. There is substantial extant Athenian law on business parternships, liability, and debt. A recent Law & Economics article argues the following:
Easy. Don’t. If you are going to be completely wrong, then perhaps your summing up has little value.
You are backpedaling. Your original claim was that “supply and demand was irrelevant”, “people didn’t produce things for self-interest or profit”, etc. Do you not feel this way any longer?
It is self-evidently true that ancient economies were different and that they were not “modern”. But we have a great deal of evidence for trade networks throughout many ancient states. The first case that comes to mind is for the Roman terra sigillata. This stuff was mass-produced pottery that turns up all over the empire and beyond, all fashioned in exactly the same way. But chemical analysis of the pots themselves reveal that these pots were not only traded widely but also produced locally for some provincial markets. The patterns of trade and manufacture for these objects was quite complicated.
Closer to my own research is agriculture in Roman Egypt. Wine was produced in Egypt, Gaul, and elsewhere largely as a cash crop. Even grain producers in Egypt, to great popular discontent, preferred to let their grain rot in storage than sell at an undesirable price.
Ideas of ownership were complicated and are often difficult to extract from the surviving documents. I’m writing an article on property rights now in Roman Egypt, incidentally. The short answer is that our best guess is that at least half of the land in Egypt by the second century AD was private, and that its cultivators owned not only the income stream that the land could produce but the land itself. The rest was a form of public land, whose owners competed on a more or less open labor market to find tenant farmers. Inducements to work land could include the payment of rent in advance, a preferred interest rate on seed loans than one could ordinarily get in the open market, the landlord’s guaranteed investment in immovable factors of production, etc.
If you happen to be interested in reading actual lease & moneylending documents, well, they are out there and are available in digital repositories on the internet. I can certainly make some suggestions.