Not at all. You are trusting a tiny fringe group of idiots. Why do you believe less than 1% of doctors? What about them is more trustworthy than the other 99%?
Do yourself a favor and look up the phrase “Herd Immunity.”
What? This makes no sense at all. I am not, nor have I ever been opposed to public schools. I think control should rest locally and the federal government should stay out of it completely but that is a separate issue. It is simply reality to state that people are dependent on government assistance because government policies have made it impossible to succeed without it. By the way, if I was in charge, help and welfare for the poor would be the LAST place I would cut.
How is it inconsistent to say that considering people are dependent on public schooling and certain forms of welfare NOW, they shouldn’t be forced to be given Ritalin or psychotropic drugs? There is absolutely no inconsistency there.
Find one place I or any libertarian claimed that there should be no public schools. If you can’t then you are simply reaching for any excuse to try to discredit my motives as it becomes clear you can’t deal with my arguments.
You may be fine having your normal child forced to take psychotropic drugs, but I am not.
I’ll take this one on. The Austrians didn’t avoid math because of a distaste for math or for science; they avoided it because they felt that the assumptions and simplifications made to reduce economic information down to aggregate values that can be statistically examined and modeled were not acceptable. And they have a point. Why do you think it’s valid to reduce the incredible complexity of the structure of production down to a single variable? The relationships between relative prices are complex, and contain vast amounts of information. Demand and labor cannot be reasonable reduced to individual numbers without losing details key to understanding them.
An economy is an example of a complex adaptive system with emergent properties. Its response to inputs changes unpredictably. It exhibits chaotic responses within an overall framework of spontaneous, optimized emergent order. We are still in our infancy when it omes to understanding and predicting such systems. The Austrians understood this, and so they resisted the simplistic general equilibrium models which abstracted away the very things they felt were most important.
Their argument was that arbitrarily reducing and simplifying the economy so that it was more amenable to mathematical manipulation was actually a perversion of science, and somewhat akin to looking for your keys under a streetlamp 500 ft from anywhere you walked, simply because there was more light there. While true, it ignores the critical factors.
I noticed you ignored the links that you couldn’t reject out of hand. I don’t want this thread to be obsessed on the issue of vaccinations. I support SOME vaccinations.
As for Homeopathy, it DOES work if you get a good Homeopath. You are astoundingly ignorant. There are many alternative therapies in Eastern Medicine such as acupuncture and Ayurveda that allow people to attain a level of health not seen in Western culture. Your ignorance is based on you believing everything the United States medical establishment tells you without any critical thinking.
There are more and more peer reviewed papers and research backing up homeopathic treatments each year. Here is a sample of what some are saying:
http://www.holisticonline.com/homeopathy/homeo_clinical.htm
http://nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/articles-research
http://www.emmessar.com/chemical/homeopathy/homeo6.htm#1
http://www.emmessar.com/chemical/homeopathy/homeo6.htm#2
http://www.emmessar.com/chemical/homeopathy/homeo6.htm#4
http://www.emmessar.com/chemical/homeopathy/homeo6.htm#3
How can you claim that there is no evidence for the success of Homeopathy? I personally got fantastic results for a variety of health concerns a few years back.
You need to back away from assuming that everything the government and the medical industrial complex tells you about health care should be taken as gospel.
That is hardly the truth.
Nope, the Austrians and classical economists dispute your cites. It is not inherently wrong to say that inflation is rising prices because that is when people KNOW there is inflation and feel its effects. But the precipitating event that causes the rise in prices is the creation of money.
You have to read Mises and the Austrians to understand the harm caused by inflation.
I wouldn’t recommend you read anybody else in regards to learning about inflation other than the Austrian economists.
ALL of them? Are you kidding me? On this thread and in others I have quoted dozens of the Founding Fathers to prove my point. If one or two were mis attributed, then I am more than happy to admit the error.
But if you don’t think that the majority of founders believed in small government and considered the growth of government and the creation of a central bank to be the utmost threat to liberty, then you really don’t know your history very well.
I have linked to so many pages backing this up, but apparently you haven’t read them yet. I have and know that the founders were libertarians.
I do not care what the “Founding Fathers” wanted. The United States back then was a small country with about two and a half million people. What is more, the “Founding Fathers” were rich white men who had different economic interests from most Americans.
Well, you’ve quoted two in this thread and they both turned out to be bogus.
And you’ve been bombarding us with links in this thread. It seems a bit evasive to fall back on “oh, I already posted dozens of quotes to back me up, trust me.”
There is no such thing. Homeopathy is bogus. There is no physical mechanism for how it can work.
Wheras you seem to think that being aggressive with your ignorance makes you correct.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Wheras your ignorance is based on a few quotes and ad statements some newage health scammers told you.
I’m just going to work with this one, because it is classic given how much jrod accuses others of not critically thinking. In this ‘article’ (which lists only the year and the Journal of the article they are trying to spin - no real citations) you find this quote
[/QUOTE]
That’s right bucko. Ignore the fact that Linde (who ran this ‘study’) admitted that is was very flawed, and it certainly was
Even without this, the article is amazingly sparse - I didn’t check into all the sources but it lists only 4 with positive outcome, the most recent of which was in 1999 (for an article written in 2009. It does not inspire confidence from those who know what positive results require.
I note that all of jrod’s links come from naturopath groups with vested interests in promoting and selling quackery. Not exactly a stirling source.
jrodefeld has become my favorite libertarian on the boards. By far. No one else comes close.
If I took it upon myself to, er… let me say, advocate for his positions in the method they best deserve, I am confident that I could never do a better job than he is doing. He is, as far as I am concerned, the utterly perfect spokesman for libertarianism. If I could give a copy of this thread to every economically undecided person in the country, I would do so in a heartbeat. I’m not lying about that. He is truly that perfect.
Seriously. I could never top this, no matter how hard I tried.
This is why I’ve stayed out of this. jrodefeld is the best spokesman that I could possibly ask for. His every post is like Christmas morning. But he’s finally repeated a mistake that I dealt with back in March. When I squash an error, I want it to stay squashed. Just how I am. Let’s take a quick look-see.
He claims in post 24 of that thread that it is ILLEGAL for people to use different currencies. Ah, hell, let’s just let him speak, right? After all, he’s an expert. We know this, because he told us so.
Emphasis added. Strong words. Strong enough to yell.
Ah, but I actually responded to him back in the day. Let’s see what I said:
Emphasis added. Ah. So our expert was wrong. He’s been corrected on the Liberty Dollar case before.
That was in March. He claims to be a reader. He readers things. Things like “books”. Maybe he readers YouTube. I dunno. Apparently, though, his eyes glaze over when they hit things like “facts”, because my response to him didn’t sink in. In the current thread, he brings up the very same example he used before. Same one. The whole being-entirely-in-error thing somehow slipped past our expert. The expert still hasn’t got this currency law thing quite figured out, does he?
Emphasis added. He still can’t comprehend the words that are printed in his own damn cites. And then he tops it off by saying that begbert has no idea what he’s talking about.
This is just… beautiful.
I told him half a year ago that he can go to a site like e-gold and do his transactions with electronic currency backed by genuine gold metal, and he still hasn’t figured that out. He still doesn’t know about it. That e-gold website’s customers are doing their transaction with their private gold-backed currency every single day–still operating completely within the law–and he’s not even aware of it. He wasn’t even aware that his own cite explains that the crime was making a coin that looks like a dollar, and not making a new non-dollar currency.
So yeah. He’s pretty awesome, is what I’m saying. My favorite libertarian here, no contest.
Wouldn’t Paypal be considered a form of private currency? How about casino chips?
Find one place I claimed they said that.
You have run out of reason, and are reduced to fabricating straw men as a desperate defense. That is what happens when you allow yourself to be deluded by the mythology concocted by charlatans like your libertarian heroes. It withers when exposed to scrutiny, and you are left naked and exposed to the laughter and derision of your audience, with nothing but falsehoods woven from whole cloth to conceal your shortcomings. Pitiful.
Paypal and casino chips are denominated in the relevant national currencies. You could consider them private currencies–people can and do exchange credits on PayPal computers and casino chips for private transactions–but they don’t go quite as far as it’s possible to go. Those credits are always transferable, one-for-one, with the national currency. It would constitute fraud if that transfer could not be made.
A business like e-gold, in contrast, denominates its private currency in real weights of the metal, independent of any national currency. You’re not actually trading the metal–that stays in the vault–you’re trading electronic representations of that gold. That’s a fully-fledged currency, a private gold standard. What’s more astounding is that even in private markets, the commodity backing isn’t necessary. You can have a money that’s backed by an arbitrarily defined service, and not even need a commodity like gold. The gold pieces from World of Warcraft, if the stories I’ve heard about the game are true, are just such a currency. The service is entirely electronic, subject completely to the whims of the creators. Which means that Blizzard has managed to create a private fiat currency. And it works. It apparently has a relatively stable exchange rate with government currencies. It’s a genuine store of value, means of exchange, and unit of measure. It’s genuine money.
Money can be simply amazing.
Accusations of igorance are a bit of a gray area in this forum, because they can be simply descriptive of another poster’s perspective, however, when they are simply hurled as an insult, they are treated as insults. Your first quoted statement is borderline and your second quote is over that line.
Back off.
[ /Moderating ]
Libertarianism appeals to high school seniors and college freshmen. It has an appeal in its simple logic , but it is really sophistical. It fails to relate to the real world and is often absurd . When a poster says he is a Libertarian or leans that way, I wonder how young he is.
JRODEFLD adds in nasty remarks like “listen up” or “got it” that puts off his readers. He could learn some manners.
I love how he bailed on Greenspan who was a proud Libertarian his whole life. When his policies helped destroy the economy, Libertarians had to dig out so they pretend he and the other Bush economic "experts’ who were proud Libertarians, weren’t. I would have preferred if they learned what was wrong with their policies and adjusted from there.
Greenspan was a Randian and actually was coached by her. He was a member of her entourage.
This is rich. Not only does Jrodefeld not understand basic economics, civics and vaccinations. He believes in homeopathy.
Jro, bubbie. Do us a favor. Look at the masthead of this site. Right under the words, “The Straight Dope”, we are here to fight ignorance. You are promulgating it.
I have already acknowledged that I’m not in exact agreement with what the Founding Fathers said in the 1700’s. There’s no point in you demanding that I acknowledge that again. What I said was that if they had seen what occurred in the 19th century, they surely would have seen the need for a larger, more involved government.
Eugenie Blanchard was. So was Walter Breuning.
No, this is not so. As it happens I’ve read a considerable amount from people who were alive in the industrial revolution. For example, William Cobbett was a prolific author who traveled widely in both England and the United States and carefully documented the conditions of people in both countries during the early 19th century. His most famous book is Rural Rides, which you can read online here. By reading the words of Cobbett and other first-hand witnesses to the industrial revolution, I’ve gotten a very good picture of what happened during that time period. Much better than the articles written by your economists, which were written many generations after the fact. Is this not so?
If you stop reading biased accounts written with the intention of misleading you about the past and start reading documents actually written at that time period, you’ll learn that what actually happened in the industrial revolution is quite different from what your Austrian School economists say happened.
There has been a middle class since the the days of ancient Greece and Rome. Claiming that it appeared for the first time in the 19th century is absurd even for you.
So if your version of events is actually correct, answer me this question: how much social unrest was there among the poor in the first fifty years of the industrial revolution in England? How does that compare to the fifty years before the industrial revolution? How about if we ask the same question in France, the United States, Germany, or any other country that industrialized in the 19th century? Obviously, since your an expert on economic history, you know that in both Europe and America in that time period the government and the upper class were constantly using violence to suppress the workers. If life for the workers was so great, why was this violence necessary?
And as I’ve already told you multiple times, the rate of economic growth in the last 30 years has been quite bit higher than in any other 30-year period in American history. It seems that since this established fact contradicts your beliefs, you’ve chosen to simply ignore it. However, since I like rubbing things in your face, I’m going to place it in gigantic letters.
the rate of economic growth in the last 30 years has been quite bit higher than in any other 30-year period in American history.
Now, given that fact, why do you keep saying that the rate of economic growth was higher in the 19th century than in recent times? It’s another one of my trademark very simple questions, and I think it deserves an answer.
We did amend the Constitution so as to ignore the will of the founders. The founders wanted slavery. We amended the Constitution to outlaw slavery. The founders didn’t let women vote. We amended the Constitution so that women could vote. The founders didn’t allow a federal income tax. We amended the Constitution to allow a federal income tax. etc…
By the way, I’m still waiting for you to justify your statement that gold prices remain consistent over time, when in reality the price of gold has dipped 80% against oil over the past decade. Please answer that question.
All right, take a few deep breaths.
First of all, you claim that there’s a projected shortfall of “$100 trillion dollars” [sic]. Like must of what you say, this is completely untrue. The projected shortfall in Social Security is 5.3 trillion dollars. For Medicare I can’t find a cite that reflects the changes from the recent Health Care overhaul, but even the highest estimates before that law were nowhere near 100 trillion dollars. So your figure of 100 trillion dollars is utterly bogus.
Now as for the fact that we can solve these shortfalls with any one of several minor changes, here’s a quote from the same article.
So the fiscal problems of Social Security are easily solvable. Medicare could be dealt with likewise. Now that I’ve provide an airtight cite that proves myself to be right and you to be wrong, I guess you’ll have to go back to calling me “retarted” and “insane”.
Well, okay, those are fair questions. My answer are that I do not see how falling prices help the poor, and that I want a healthy inflation level of about 4-5%, which is about what we’ve had during our wonderful fun of good economic times since 1982.
Inflation is good for the poor, good for the middle class, and only mildly bad for the ultra-rich. Deflation is terrible for the poor, terrible for the middle class, and excellent for the ultra-rich. That’s why your Austrian School economists love deflation and hate inflation. They want to grab all the wealth that’s currently held by the poor and middle-class and hand it over to the rich.
Consider me. I’m middle-class and not far from the poverty line, earning about $26,000 per year. I have a mortgage on my house of about $130,000, for which I pay $956 each month. At the moment I can pay that mortgage, buy food and other necessities, and save a little each month. If we entered a deflationary spiral, my salary would fall but I’d still owe the bank $956 per month, so I’d lose my house. By contrast, if our leaders were smart enough to give us some inflation, then my salary would shoot up, bud I’d still owe only $956 per month. So now that you’re on the record as saying that you want to see deflation, please answer me this question:
Why do you want to take away the houses currently owned by me and millions of others like me and give them to the rich?
Ten dollars says that you refuse to answer this question.
First of all, I’m note sure why you keep talking to me about Keynes. I’ve never read anything by Keynes nor quoted him, nor has anyone else in this thread that I can recall. Keynes is totally irrelevant to this thread, any by bringing him up 50 times in each post you’re only demonstrating your own inability to stay on topic and address the questions we’re asking you.
Second, why should I believe what you say about the “current crisis”? Obviously you’ve already admitted that you’re unable to provide cites, but you should at least provide some form of argument. However, you’re in real trouble when you talk about address the “current crisis” because there isn’t any current crisis. The economy is not in a crisis right now. There’s a risk of crisis, namely a deflationary spiral, but that can be addressed with more government spending.
Okay, so now you’ve finally admitted that you’re not able to give me the cites that I requested. Oddly enough, that’s exactly what I predicted you would do.
I’m not going to go to a bunch of links with no explanation. I am certainly not going to a lewrockwell.com link from work - they think I am crazy enough already.
Why don’t you, the undegreed economics expert, inform me, in your own words, why you make the leap from MV=PT to changes in M being automatically mirrored in P?
It should be easy for you.