Irrespective of politics, it is really cool how jrodefeld is working through the thread and responding to everyone.
:rolleyes:
Three pages, and the only comeback you have is to play the race card?
Does “Heck of a job, Brownie” ring a bell? Hiring people for the Justice Department from Liberty University? Staffing Baghdad based on loyalty to the Republican party and views on abortion?
If they don’t actually want bad government, they sure govern as if they do. If you want to starve the beast, you try not to let the beast work effectively.
I’m concerned that these very smart Austrian school economists will use their evil knowledge to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and gain control of a significant portion of the world’s wealth. You know, like Warren Buffet grew his fortune from a few thousand dollars to tens of billions using his savvy evil registered democrat knowledge.
But the evil Austrians (my ancestry is a quarter Austrian!) are completely anonymous. Nobody knows who the self-made Austrian school billionaires are.
And we all know who else is/was Austrian? Hitler! And Schwarzenegger. And Kissinger. That’s quite a track record for bullshit. Oh, and the Austrian school’s manifesto is in the form of a comic book. Could Victor Von Doom be far behind?
Looks like we need a government that at the least pretends to embrace some socialist ideals and at the same time stops large companies from ripping off people. Australia, Canada etc have weathered the storm that plagued the USA pretty well. In Australia [& from what I understand Canada] we had surpluses in the good times and now we have a major deficit brought on by increased government spending in the tough times, this is common sense economics as it keeps the money moving and stops banks hoarding the money when times are tough. The issue is around how large this debt should be and are we going to be able to pay it down?
So jdroefield how do you feel about how Australia and Canada run their economies?
Also what is the measure of a great society?
I am genuily interested in your opinion, I may not agree but that’s OK.
[QUOTE=The Second Stone;12821511 You know, like Warren Buffet grew his fortune from a few thousand dollars to tens of billions using his savvy evil registered democrat knowledge. [/QUOTE]
But is Warren Buffet a symptom of a good society or an evil one?
Is pursuit and accumilation of money the only measures of a great society?
I don’t know the answer.
He manipulated the system to get his money, he would have made money in any environment. Now the ultimate size of his fortune may have been different.
I’ll hold him down while you beat him.
‘Agreeing with Keynes’ is a mighty broad brush to paint economists with. In fact, even Keynes didn’t agree with Keynes all the time. Keynes wrote a hell of a lot of stuff, and it’s not all consistent and it does not equate to what the government is doing today.
Keynes specifically opposed counter-cyclical government stimulus. He did so because he felt that government wasn’t capable of responding fast enough.
As for why Keynes has gained in popularity - that’s an interesting question, because Keynes was quite out of favor for a long time. And as far as I can tell, the only reason he made a ‘comeback’ was because economists felt like A) you have to do something, and B) monetarism had reaches its limits because of a liquidity trap. In other words, Keynes was the only game in town if you’re an interventionist sort, so miraculously he became ‘right’.
All economic theories that attempt to be mathematical have to make simplifying assumptions. In the case of Keynesian Economics, the assumption is that the productive capacity and labor capacity of a country can be reduced to aggregate values and manipulated as such. The Austrians think that this is a bad simplifying assumption, that labor and capital are not easily manipulable without destroying value and the information needed for the efficient functioning of markets.
Which one is right? The problem is that we don’t have a control economy to test against. Christina Romer promised that if the stimulus was enacted, unemployment would not rise above 8%. It did. It rose WAY above that number. Does that mean the stimulus failed? According to some, yes. According to others, it just means that the model had bad data input into it (i.e. “Things were worse than we thought.”). These claims are essentially unfalsifiable. The economy is so big and so complex, and contains so many confounding factors, that you can always find something to hang your ideological hat on.
As for the Austrians not being serious because they don’t have mathematical models - The problem for them was that they didn’t have the math required to study it in that way. They just believed that the problem of production was a problem of coordination of resources, and that the economic was too complex to model in a simple way that would allow you to predict economic outputs given certain economic inputs.
Today, an Austrian would say that the economy is a complex, adaptive system of chaotic output, but with organizing rules that have caused emergent order. The study of such systems is of much interest these days. Other systems like this would be the climate, ecosystems, ant colonies, and the human nervous system. By their nature, they are unpredictable in specifics, even if they are understandable in the aggregate. This makes them very hard to model.
For example, you can simulate an ant colony once you know the basic rules of ant behavior. You can build a virtual ant colony, let it run, and see the kind of behavior you would see in a real colony.
But what you won’t be able to do is predict what specifically will happen to the colony if you disturb it. Change its environment by adding food, or damage the colony by pouring water on it. You may know in general that the colony will respond with various characteristics, but you don’t know the form it will take, because the new order emerges from the random walk of ants as they seek out new food sources or move to repair the colony.
Sometimes, these systems are predictable within a linear range, but then exhibit discontinuities that are unpredictable. For example, no one really knows what the world market’s tolerance for U.S. debt is. No one could predict exactly when the financial crisis would hit, even though they knew that there was a lot going wrong in the finance sector. When we’re in a bubble, a lot of people can see that the bubble has formed. But no one knows when it will pop, or what will happen when it does.
Economic history is full of these discontinuities, or tipping points. A new product comes along and slowly enters the market, while the price drops. But suddenly it drops below the price of a major alternative, and the entire market shudders and everyone switches over leaving the old product behind. But these things are not predictable. The best analysts in the world can’t beat the stock market by more than a few percentage points, because we simply have no good models of the economy that can be used with any sort of specificity.
Now, maybe Keynes was right, and in the aggregate all those structural factors and chaotic responses will cancel each other out and you’ll get a smooth response from the economy to your mucking about with the money supply and throwing cash around to get everyone demanding more stuff. But so far, there is no proof of that. There’s not a single case we can point to where a big fiscal stimulus had the effect predicted for it before the fact. So the notion that economic output can be predictably controlled by controlling the inputs with fiscal stimulus is just a theory. It is far from proven.
In 1995, a majority of economists polled believed that Roosevelt’s New Deal had no effect on or lengthened the Great Depression. Now, a majority of economists think differently. But there has been no new breakthrough in economics that would add any new evidence to the argument.
What I think has happened is that some economists have simply been rattled by the last decade, and have lost confidence in the old consensus. That, and the fact that the policymakers have had a vested interest in supporting a theory which encourages people to give the policymakers their money and political authority over them.
It’s in the Constitution. it’s is what the Republic was founded on. Pay your damn taxes.
One of us. One of us. One of us.
Since the only way to dissolve the current system would be a violent revolution why are you writing 30 page screeds on the internet? You should instead be training with dudes in the woods. Or be like the rest of us – do your job, keep your head down, and crack bad jokes about the latest outrage of our betters. Oh, progressive is the new word for liberal? That’s cool, that’s cool. Oh hey, American generals are worried about “foreign influences” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Isn’t that ironical? And so on. Dick jokes are also acceptable.
Peter Schiff, nah he couldn’t be…
OK there’s got to be another Irwin Schiff, right,
Sins of the father and all, but I’m betting the apple didn’t even fall out of this tree. :rolleyes:
CMC fnord!
The only person who’s advice on high finance I trust … is Willie Sutton (and Woody of course).
This argument is equally applicable to Libertarian Free-Market economics. The whole concept is based on the idea that people will always act in their own best interests and make rational economic decisions. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that theory doesn’t survive contact with the real world, the advertising industry is the most obvious proof of that.
I don’t have any problem with poking holes in Keynesian economic theory, or any other in fact, but all you’re doing is discrediting a whole bunch of ideas while espousing another bunch of ideas that fail on exactly the same criteria. I also have yet to see any attempt on your part of the ‘intellectual descussion’ you claim to be interested in, all you have produced is vague hand-waving. By the evidence on display I would guess you have about as much economic knowledge as I do, maybe less, and I’ve never read an economics book in my life.
Several things immediately spring to mind here:
- You confuse cause and effect. Whilst there may have been purely monetary based collapses (though I can’t think of one), in almost all cases monetary collapse is actually a sympton of other problems. Placing the blame on ‘paper money’ is simply twisting the evidence to fit your claims.
- What in your mind would be the practical difference between a fiat currency collapse and everybody cashing in their paper money for gold? As far as know what a fiat currency collapse is.
As far as I can tell everybody who wants to revert to using gold as currecny simply doesn’t understand how modern monetary systems work and why they are necessary, but then I don’t claim to be an economic expert. Unlike the OP :rolleyes:
If there had been the slightest temptation to slog through the OP parts 1-3 (admittedly, it was miniscule), it was destroyed when jrodefeld listed his trusted media and cited rense.com.
rense.com is a zoo of hilarious misinformation and paranoid conspiracy ramblings. Among the current examples are articles detailing “The Jews Who Wrote The Protocols Of Zion” (treating the Protocols as an actual blueprint for Christian destruction rather than the crude anti-Semitic forgery they were in reality) and a piece revealing how Western women are in a “death spiral, morals gone”.
Citing rense.com as an authority on anything is an automatic fail deserving of incredulous laughter, much like citing whale.to as an authority on medicine.
It’s funny and sad to see a self-professed seeker after truth immersing himself only in the sources that will confirm his convictions, while firmly holding his fingers in his ears to avoid being tainted by voices that might instill doubts.
Regent, not Liberty.
Kissinger isn’t Austrian. But Wolfgang Puck is. Puck, Schwarzenegger, and Billt Wilder are the trinity.
Actually, sniffing paint thinner made the whole thing make much more sense!
Sometimes there’s only one place to go to find the truth you seek.
I gather that in the US it’s often Fox.
What is it about the libertarians that makes them so paranoid? Everyone is out to get me and if anyone would actually pay attention to what I say the world would be paradise!
(as long as I could afford to pay the fire department when I accidentally kick over my meth lab)
-Joe
Do you apply the same standard to, say, physics? Much of advanced physics is highly irrational, and most children would say they are ridiculous. But there is data to back up the theories, and thus they are generally considered true.
Theories that make no predictions and just throw up their hands in the face of problems are not particularly useful in making real-world decisions.
Not all of it. You can keep enough to live alone in your hut. But I tend to agree with Franklin that beyond that you have no “natural right” to keep the money that only exists because society has created the framework in which it exists.
In modern parlance, “just go Galt and GTFO”.
Really? You’ve only been a member for 6 months.
And if you had been on, you’d have realised that we don’t have much tolerance for turgid prose. There’s no way I’m wading through that lot.
So please, let’s have your main points, and just the main points,with brief reasoning.
We are the best judges of the strength of your argument. I saw no interesting facts and original and intriguing insights, only tired old right wing cliches and value assertions I do not share with you.
Indeed. The arrogance is amazing. I personally think many of Friedman’s economic theories, for example, are incorrect. I wouldn’t characterize him as stupid though, and would certainly acknowledge him as smarter then myself. The OP takes minds such as Galbraith and Keynes, and rather than simply disagreeing with them, has to try to paint them as simpering fools. And I just don’t buy the OP is smarter than them.
I also don’t buy the utter hogwash about 15% of the teabagger rally he was at being black. The lighting must have been really bad in the room, because otherwise I don’t see how that number squares with everyone else’s experiences.