correction DOW has been -8% with dividends since 2000, consensus on here.

Your points are agenda-driven and irrelevant to my critique of ALawPoker's position. I'm responding here because my last point should contribute slightly to one's economic understanding, for those who care.

Opportunists are not extremists by definition. Regardless, this has nothing to do with the point being made above.


This is also irrelevant since deciding what's a reasonable way to deal with conflicts is also one of the sources of conflicts.


This is backward - social and political acceptability does the balancing, regardless of the subjectivity involved.


They in fact can if they have enough power.



Again, your idea of what should be according to "free market principles" is entirely irrelevant when one's discussing how things work in the real world. The efficiency of "free market principles" is due to the fact that utility function is generally linear, market participants are generally rational, externalities related to consumption are negligible and most markets are not monopolistic. Under those circumstances, free market principles lead to a reasonably stable system that is efficient with respect to aggregate utility. But that it works has nothing to do with freedom, per se, other than that freedom to set prices allows for distributed computation of efficient prices. And it mostly, kind of works under most circumstances, and certainly far better than any other system without market components. But the real world is such that utility functions aren't always linear, market participants aren't completely rational, tons of consumption come with negative externalities (besides the obvious, all luxury goods have negative externalities), and there are plenty of monopolistic markets. That government doesn't fit the profile of something whose price is determined efficiently by a free market should be obvious to anyone who understands why markets work in the first place.

dont know what dictionary you own. dont know how this takes away from your point either that people who try make things better, opportunists, in general just make things far worse.

so? i agree the solution should account for this and it does.

what is your point?

sure they can, but they can't reason this from a bird's eye view as being best for all participants considered.

if we're in a group of 10 and we're trying to solve 1+1 and the biggest strongest person says the answer 50 and imposes the rest to come to this conclusion, this cant be seen objectively as the best way to have calculated.

lets assume this is true. why would i anyone want to centralize the irrationality of market participants if this is so? at least before they had an invisible hand guiding them.

well privatizing is the first step to internalizing many current externalities. Aside, i agree these can be issues but not a case against markets. How to deal with externalities is inherently a question of civilly restoring victims for violation of property. There should be a market of for laws that allows the society to resolutely deal with the conflicts should they arise. Those that want to solve this the most efficiently, however, will join a society that has the highest rate of property protection and therefore the least externalities.

there are only those who dominate due to their ability to provide so well. their success will always depend on this ability. if wal mart raised their prices and started swearing at their customers they would quickly create a void for which competitors can fulfill.

the real irony is the government having anti-trust laws on the books. the government represents all the bad parts of a monopoly, especially those the government reasoned for persecuting others of this so called crime. The government can charge whatever price they want and provide whatever service they want with little to no fear of competition. if monopolies are so bad, how can a government monopoly be good?

government provide services and the economic laws of how general services can be best provided is the same for other services as they are for these. Government can be a defined as broadly as centrally planning all the means of productions or as limitedly as minarchists do so they mostly just cover laws and regulations. Clearly the market can take over for many of the things the communists claimed they can't, however, could there be a market for laws and regulation? i see no reason why not. like i said before, people can join a kibbutz and treat their societal property however they wish. they can ban drugs within their compounds. another section of society may want markets but desires regulations so regulatory firms will sprout and compete to provide this service. and so on...

I'm not allowed to open a post like that with a statement of my beliefs?

Like I said several times, I'm willing to debate any aspects of it with anyone who is honestly curious (or perhaps it might be best in a new thread on a different forum).

If I opened my post by saying "I believe in democratic representation, yadee yada" would you have offered the same criticism?

Hmm?

Someone is not against freedom because he refuses to give his property away at 0 cost. One would have a weird definition of what it means to be free if he said something like this. Some words happen to be represented by the same letters, but have different meanings. I believe they go over this in 4th grade English.

I don't care what people say, I care what they do. No one thinks they're violent. But if a societal norm is violent, and one advocates the societal norm, then one is violent.

Would you say the people who rounded up slaves in 1800 were not violent people?

Society and its norms are always advancing; to suggest that a societal norm can not be violent merely because you say it isn't violence is to willingly blind yourself to the habit and the actual consequence of your ways.

OK, of course. The child molester and the serial killer don't think they're evil. But I'm allowed to, and so are you.

Since you claim the logic is so convoluted, care to explain why? Or does this work the way your political philosophy seems work -- where might makes right, and what you say goes merely because you say so, regardless of whether or not you have reason on your side?

I'll try to give a better idea of how I define these things if that helps:

The state: Government. George Bush. Police officers. The army. The post office. The public schools. Etc.

Violence: An act of aggression. Any behavior that involves another human being's person or property which he or she did not necessarily consent to.

"the people who support the state": Anyone who votes. Anyone who accepts money from the state. Anyone who works for the state. Anyone who works for someone who accepts money from the state. (Clear enough?)

Good and evil are, like you say, in the eye of the beholder. To me, all forms of aggression are evil.

So why does what I said not make sense? Does it really not make sense, or do you just disagree that the state is violence in the first place?

Please show me the logical error. Please demonstrate how I can see the state as violent but see the people who support the state as anything but evil/bad/whatever. (I'm not saying *you* have to see people who support the state as evil. Obviously you don't. You don't see the state as violence in the first place -- and that, I believe, is the only thing we disagree on here.)

Do you think human behavior is perfect and that the way humans live in the year 2008 is the standard by which all subsequent generations should judge themselves?

I think marxism is despicable; but at least it makes an attempt to explore first principles and apply them consistently, which can make for a worthwhile discussion. It's the might-makes-right status quo loving slugs who don't even attempt to apply intellectual rigor to their behavior that I think are the real detriments to human progress.

Problems will always exist. And people solve them. Markets solve problems. Forcing people to behave certain ways -- other than in rare instances such as self-defense -- does not help human society or progress in any way, imo.

Yes, when someone is murdered, I will blame the people doing the murder and advocate the non-aggression principle. When something is stolen I will blame the thieves and advocate the non-aggression principle. Who do you criticize and what solution do you advocate?

You're right; maybe if everyone listened to us and society stopped legitimizing murder and theft then the world might fall apart.

The closest thing to a libertarian society that human history has up to this point is probably the US from its conception up until the early 1900s. And to some extent we remained relatively libertarian through the world wars and up to Vietnam/removal of the gold standard. Why do you ask?

Leaving people alone and advocating an unequivocal right to keep the fruits of one's labor is Marxist rhetoric?

Things that "work" (i.e, things that satisfy humankind in a way where it can live more comfortably and more effectively) are not things you necessarily consider moral? It's weird to me that our culture is permeated with this idea that "morality" is something more than "that which is to our benefit."

What does this mean?

People won't accept efficiency and practical reward?

It's not doublespeak, it just means the set of morals I advocate are ones that are not accepted by society at large. Kooky, according to your idea of reality, sure. Perhaps. But being different than the way things are does not mean that the philosophy itself is inconsistent. (This is your "might makes right" tendency speaking to me again.)

Yes, it is inevitable that in a culture of violence people will seek violent solutions. Doesn't turn me on the way it does others. I prefer solutions that other people agree with. I don't feel good about forcing other people to do things that they don't want to do. I suppose this makes me crazy to you. But it makes me very happy. (And in a year or two it will make me very rich, at least compared to my neighbors. Bwahaha.)

Believe it or not, I wasn't raised an anarchist. I haven't been fed anarchist propaganda every day of my life. I was a good old state loving thug (with maybe a libertarian bend) just like you up until a few years ago. I became more interested in politics and philosophy since then, and have changed my world view drastically.

I used to even argue with the ACers on here, because (even though I was sympathetic with their arguments) I could not fathom the sense in advocating the illegitimacy of state action.

But to my credit, I was able to admit I was wrong and change. The funny thing about being open-minded towards ideas in an honest search for what's reasonable is that you end up being pretty comfortable with where you settle.

I advocate capitalism because of its practical benefits. I don't advocate it because I like the sound of the word. If I advocated not drinking poison I would consider drinking no poison to be the highest ideal. This would be because of the practical benefits associated with not drinking poison.

And yes, an empire fighting two wars and occupying 700 military bases in 100 or so countries is not viable for very long. Good luck.

And if pigs had wings they could fly, right?

But in reality capitalism provides the most efficient price structure, because central planners do not know how much wheat or ice cream is needed and how much it should cost. So, I choose to advocate capitalism. The pigs can walk.

PB btw, thanks for reading that mammoth post.

I probably won't be back til later tonight or tomorrow, if you have any more replies.

Yes.


You do realize that's what I said and was offering an example, right?


I don't care about the labels you put on people - I care about what they do.


According to this set of definitions, everyone is evil. Hence the term has no meaning. If mere non-rejection of an entity with some property confers you the property, everyone is everything. It's like saying people who drink coke are Nazi sympathizers.


My own normative judgments are irrelevant.


Everyone has an idea of what they would prefer to see in this world - so there are no such people as the might-makes-right status quo loving slugs. It's just that some people don't use the wholesale rejection of reality as a starting point of any discussion. I find it amazing that all these people who supposedly care about the welfare of people spend their time fantasizing about alternate realities instead of thinking in terms of practical steps that can improve the state of the world. Generally those people don't really care about the world, they just like fantasizing.

Besides, you were trying to provide a basis for why the US will fall apart. I know it's emotionally tempting, but a normative judgment has no inherent predictive value.


You believe the solution to murder and theft is getting rid of thieves and murderers? That's a lot of death penalty. Blaming does not provide any sort of cure for the problem.

And my solution would be to consider what sort of stable society would have low crime rates and how one can gradually transform the current society to that one.


So the most libertarian society in human history had slavery. I'm going to assume that my point that empirical evidence that capitalism works has nothing to do with personal liberty still stands.


You've got this backward. I'm saying that the fact that capitalism works is not proof of the superiority of your ideal version of capitalism that includes non-violence, personal liberty, non-aggression and other such pipedreams, because what is proven to work is the real-world version of capitalism with lots of exceptions and compromises, not your "morally superior" version. Your stance that your morality is based on empirical evidence is inconsistent with your earlier stance that certain things are inherently evil. You're in fact decidedly against what's proven to work, because supposedly it's violent or whatever.


Eugenics, for instance, may be efficient according to some definitions, but is not socially or politically acceptable. So is the market for human organs or possibly an unchecked capitalist system that results in an extremely large wealth gap. Aggregate efficiency does not imply the welfare of everyone or even a majority. From an economic standpoint, if a thief steals your money, but the money has greater utility, net of the cost, to the thief than to you, the theft itself is economically efficient.


How you came to your views is also irrelevant.


The fact that most people are able to continuously jump from one set of incorrect or irrelevant beliefs to another isn't to anyone's credit - that's just life.


It may or it may not be, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything you've said so far. All you've said boils down to, you don't like it, so it's not viable.

Andrew,

i read most of your encyclopedic post.

you are of course entitled to your philosophy. i'm very happy to know that the above post is the reasoning behind our gold/silver bet. i feel vastly more comfortable now even though on an overall EV basis i was virtually certain i had the best of it before.

in terms of this:

at virtually every step i have offered evidence upon evidence in terms of my factual analyses and relayed tons of research. you still have not dealt with the misunderstanding of value vs. "strong" companies etc. and i know you'll get around to it soon but it is very telling given the length you went into above w.r.t. your philosophy but didn't take a few minutes to really try to learn and understand something that is so basic and so central to basically any market calculation that it boggles the mind that you couldn't and didn't immediately take that from my initial post on the subject or couldn't immediately see the error in your logic.

in terms of the first bolded part, that is an unjustified and unfounded restatement of what i said to you. i relayed reasons why you may engender the reaction you do and stated outright that i do not agree with those reactions. further, i never said i sort of or otherwise understand those reactions even if they could be related to. isn't putting words in another's mouth a type of violence?

in terms of the second bolded part, i think you are being far to glib and i think upon re-reading your post, you'll find a good deal of it was probably the result of beign high. we've all been there and can relate. but i think you overstated your case a bit in more than a few spots. in the grand scheme of things that means little since your point still came accross. just thought i'd point that out...

anyways, this is well on the way to a politics discussion so if you would like to continue to debate the issue of the dollars collapse of the economic collapse of the US, please do. overall, you knwo my position. i think a very large re-adjustment is underway but i see no collapse in the cards.

Barron

Wow, did this thread turn useful or are there a lot more words than actual substance?

Cliff's notes pwease?

words > substance

Barron

Wow...........I actually agree with CrushinFelt.This thread has gotten so far off course its scary

You are officially off my ignore list CF... ...so dont disappoint me now

TTYL,
Stephen

The above post is by no means the "reasoning" behind why I made the bet. It is just the context. I believe the way I see government activity is more in line with reality than the way most normal people (such as yourself) see it in their day to day lives. If such is the case it's only natural that it would give me an advantage in how I fit economic information into the big picture, even if you understood the economics better in a vacuum. And most importantly, I believe this allows me great confidence in who I trust. I might not know what every financial indicator tells me, but when people who see the big picture the same way I do and who *are* economic experts tell me something, I naturally consider it better advice than the guy whose opinion also fits inside the framework where war and empire and out of control government is a viable way to live.

I feel slightly more comfortable knowing that your comfort range had room to vastly change because of something like this.

I know. Like I may have said before, I can be really lazy. When a post is long (and I'm not faulting you -- I obviously can make long posts too lol) it just makes me want to leave it for later. But also I've been mildly busy lately and have consciously limited my internet-dickaround-time. I promise you that my response to that post will be the next post I make on 2+2.

In terms of what I "didn't understand," you should stop assuming that because I think something requires more explanation or disagree that it means quite what you claim it means that therefore I don't understand how basic currency exchange and valuation works (if that's what you're referring to). I'll read your post in full and respond soon though.

OK. I didn't mean to cheapen your actual words. (I was on the tail end of that monster and just wanted to be done with it.)

But no, it isn't an act of aggression. It isn't very nice, but the libertarian perspective is that you don't own your reputation. Your reputation is just what other people think of you. So putting words in your mouth is sort of akin to calling an old lady fat. It isn't very nice, but it isn't a crime. It's the type of thing that would naturally distance me from polite company. And same with putting words in someone's mouth. I would just undermine my own credibility, because the truth of the matter would tend to win out.

I don't think I put words in your mouth though. I was just oversimplifying and wasn't trying to be literal, but sorry. You're right, it does misrepresent what you actually said so I shouldn't have used quotes.

Heh, I stand by all of it.

I wasn't high when I wrote it, just when I proofread it.

That's funny. The percentage of Americans who believe in at least one of UFOs, witches, evil spirits, astrology, numerology and various absurd paranoid conspiracy theories regarding the government is probably way over 80%, close to 100% if you exclude those with reasonable intelligence (superstition and paranoia appear to be valid coping strategies for those with limited intelligence in a world with complexity far beyond their comprehension, though those with advanced intelligence are by no means immune). Barron's level-headedness and empirical attitude are far from normal in the general population. From what I can tell, most people have some kooky beliefs that they consider to be unusual and insightful, but are usually afraid to share them because, in their mind, other people are still in the Matrix. Your particular brand of kookiness may be unusual, but kookery itself is common, even among the mentally healthy. Fortunately, most kooky beliefs are not particularly harmful.

Andrew,

we are now way off topic. i'll reserve judgement on your understanding of an economic floor of currency with respect to our prior discussion when you get around to responding to the concepts i outlined earlier (i.e. value vs. not wanting to buy weak american companies).

Also, let's try to keep the politics in the politics forum. i received a number of "mod mails" that complained about the level of politics here lately.

Barron

Word, np. I'm sick of the politics forum, but I'll keep my withdrawals to myself.

Andrew

Andrew

AHAHHAHAHAH
I love it when these posts show up

Hey where is that guy who was buying all metal stocks and short selling financials etc.
must have lost a fortune!
winners love to poke on losers thats just natural

Bump for waiting for your input on our discussion of economic floor of commotidy prices.

last week you did indicate that you'd go over it. in that time, you've written near encyclopedic posts and have yet to deal with what i called a fundamental error in your economic understanding. you did state my post was long, however, looking back it isn't nearly as long as many others written since then...

due to your recent posts, i have reserved passing judgement waiting for your explanation of the concepts i discussed. so when you get a chance i'd like to see that explanation... especially since economics is so "easy"

Barron

I just read the really long post that ALaw made (well, skimmed it). He gets an A+. Anyone who ses it any other way hasn't read enough history. The inevitable "oh ****" that's likely coming (from our POV that is, from the POV of others, namely China, it's more like a golden opportunity), all began in 1913. From that point on the United States was no longer the United States, at least not how we intended it when it first came to be.

To put it a shorter way than ALaw put it: The "I can" people built the country. In 1913the country was handed over the "I need" people. The "I need"s have run this country into the ground, propped up only by the "I can"s, but the need is too great because it never ends. It just keeps growing, like cancer, until it saturates its host enough to kill it (or it finds a weak spot and attacks it, however you want to look at it).

America is so backwards now that grants are being called refunds (the checks we will all be receiving this summer, including those who did not pay income taxes) and refunds are called grants (any "generosity" commercial entities receive from the government for research or the like), when in actuality all they are receiving is a tiny morsel of that which they've given.

It's not a conspiracy. It's not Chicken Little. It's just logic. It started in 1913, the New Deal gave it steroids, and this country's debt is measure of how strong it has become. Is there any way to solve it? No there are to many "I need"s and by the definition of a democracy, they have the power.

Very incisive and totally accurate.
Good post.

Another way to look at the "I Needs" versus the "I Can's"...
At the center of every human life lies a fundamental philosophy- one is either a producer, or a consumer.
An employer or an employee.
A tenant or a landlord.
A parasite or the host.

The problem for producer/employer/landlords/hosts is that they're outnumbered by the consumer/renter/employee/parasites by a margin of 20-1, thus, they can always be outvoted, subjected to revolt, etc. This is a large part of the reason why pure democracy is a huge failure. It empowers those who are least fit to have authority or any kind of a say in how things should be run.

This is a horrible and backwards way to look at things. Those first three relationships are all honest, voluntary exchanges and are in no way analagous to the parasite and host. You have bastardized the fundamental concept of capitalism completely.

People whose political thinking is at the level of sophistication shown above perhaps shouldn't go around talking about who are fit to have authority and how things should be run. I'd like to think that your views are not a result of great deliberation, but rather a glib reaction caused by unnecessarily negative emotions towards most of the mankind. Then again, there's a lot of stupidity in this world.

True...but if you massively reword it....it starts to make some sense.

I think if I was offered $100 to read the 18 pages of this thread and answer basic questions on it...I would have to decline...Thats saying something.

Ha, ya I the only post I read was ALaw's large one. And now I've read from mine on down; Watchmaker has misstepped a bit by making the comparison of Landlord and tenant to I can and I need. It's when the landlord is all of a sudden forced to keep his rent low or forced to give a 10% relief to certain tenants that it might become a relationship of I can vs. I need.

one thing watchmaker was missing is the fact that at least some of the "hosts" have ins with the central planners too.

Central planning is likely only there because of the I Needs as well, thus making the Landlord an I Need if he is as you described.