Yes, this is it. He is simply ignorant, is my contention & doesn’t understand the harm it causes. It’s more of a rhetorical tool to get the “lefties” or others on side.
It’s far easier to use that term I guess, than explain constantly - it is a government imposed monopoly, which is said to be independant from government, but which the governors are chosen by the president and is fundamentally a political institution, which is owned or set up by private bankers in 1913 after they met at Jekyll Island. Lol, or maybe it would be. Send him an email maybe? /general
I have similar suspicions. Recently, he’s also had a guy named Bob Chapman on quite often who advocates tariffs and trade barriers to save America’s economy.
His other friend, Jason Bermas, warned his audience a few weeks ago about plans to abolish the SEC because this would lead to uncontrolled finance oligarch madness.
I don’t know, LS. I’m not listening to him that often anymore, but almost every time I do, I’m facepalming within the first 5 minutes. Has he left his track or have I slowly slipped away from his stance?
Uh sorry I am new to this foruming thing so I don’t know how to quote, but I’ll just paste the quote: “Now obviously the State isn’t going to hire economists that tell its “boss” aka the State that it (the boss) is doing a terrible job.”
And I am for a small State at the moment. I have heard no explanation for how public goods like roads or defense would be provided by a purely free market anarchy (forgot the correct term).
It seems to me that if everything becomes privatized, there will be a lot of free loaders who use the roads although they did not pay for them. At least today your use of roads is justified by paying taxes.
Now before you start yelling, keep in mind I am not saying it is impossible to live without a State, I am just saying no ones told me [:(]
The “movement” will evolve past Jones. I have some blog posts on this to finish. I actually called and talked to Bermas on his show a month or so ago. He gave me a lot of room to talk, but I don’t know that anyone was actually listening. I did my best to refute socialism and plug Mises in under 2 minutes.
It’s great that Bermas granted you time to plug free market ideas. On another positive note, they tend to have Lew Rockwell or some other libertarian on quite regularly, so I hope all is not lost.
Private contractors make most of the roads now where I live. So it’s already happening not sure why you said this.
Oh I’m sure the road owner would benefit tremendously by hiring somebody to catch the thieves that didn’t pay their toll. I could foresee larger business community paying into a common road that brings in large amounts of customers. It could be advertised: “Shop here, free road, no tolls.” As long as the business community finds it profitable and attractive many events could happen that are not even foreseeable yet.
It is true that the libertarians problem is always resorting to abolish the state.. People are content with the fact that the rise of the civilization has gone hand-in-hand with the strength of its state (notice i did not say size). Where the libertarian goes wrong is not in his understanding, that is quite right. His mistake is in his explanation. There is no such thing as a government. There is a people and their system of regulating themselves. Government doesn’t kill people, people do.
The dissonance between the liberal and the progressive is a bitterly fought trivial matter. We both recognize the problem; the tendency of producers, consumers, and capitalists (small c) to prefer cheap credit. We say that you fail to realize that industries will create their own monopolies regardless of the presence of a government. And the people wIll largely go-along and revel in their newfound “wealth.”
Just reading over the latest Rothbard post should show you we are on the same side. He says, “in 1993, the maverick and venerable Democratic Chairman of the House Banking Committee, Texan Henry B. Gonzalez, optimistically introduced some of his favorite projects for opening up the Fed to public scrutiny. His proposals seemed mild… the presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks would be chosen by the president of the United States rather than, as they are now, by the commercial banks of their respective regions.” “Not only are the public and politicians responsive to it eternally subject to the temptation to inflate; but it is important for the Fed to have a cozy partnership with private bankers. Private bankers, as “the world’s fiercest inflation hawks,” can only bolster the Fed’s eternal devotion to battling against inflation,
whichi he later goes on toshow as a fallacy.”
It is the tendency of markets to consolidate. The only way around it is to create regulatory systems, public or private, that ensure that no one entity can control more than 20 to 40% of any given market. Otherwise you get fraud and price-fixing which is another form of tax all on its own.
No, it is the tendency of markets to compete. It is private bankers with a coercively backed monopoly via these “government people” you speak of that you need to turn your head around and look at.
I am no “ist” my friends, nor an “ian.” I am me. I believe what i see to be right bring criticizm where i think it shuld be present.
See Rothbard on the panic of the early 19th. Or any other period in human history. This isn’t really a debatable point. Government IS a factor in the market. And wether that consolidation has been at its hands or not, it has been the tendency of markets to consolidate. Once again, this has played out time and again in history, and isn’t really a debatable point. How and why do you think states were created in the first place, because wealthy elites wanted to consolidate their control of the marketplace.
Third, are you really saying that monopolies don’t create fraud and price-fixing?
In a recent post the members of this forum debated who the ruling class in this country was and many outrageously claimed that POLITICIANS are the ruling class. That is highly laughable. I thought it was absolutely apparent that politicians were just a shade of the actual rulers of this country; bankers, businessman, and the irrational mob.
Ah I see, so now you define the state as part of the market and try to thus win the argument. Try this on dumber individuals, it might work.
What is “price-fixing”? How does one achieve this? How does one gain a monopoly? What has “fraud” got to do solely with monopolies? Are you really saying “price-fixing” is a viable strategy on a free market?
Oh yes, outrageous!!! They’re enablers, whether you like it or not.
Hi Travis! I’m an anarcho-capitalist that converted about 9 months ago from the Green party. Quite a change in such a short time. The book that most transformed me was “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard. He begins by arguing against obvious violations of personal rights – that is, conscription and other forms of involuntary servitude enforced by the state – and slowly moves into more radical ideas, like privatization of roads, prisons, police, defense industry and, yes, even the judicial system. At the beginning of each chapter, you’ll find yourself saying “OK, I’m with him on privatization of X, but SURELY we cannot privatize Y.” By the time you reach the end of the chapter, if not immediately convinced, you’ll find yourself drifting to his point of view.
It took me a few months to accept some of the more radical ideas, but now I’m pretty much in agreement on all points.
