Oh, woe is the poor, exploited proletarian worker-slave, by those evil greedy capitalist dogs! See how they are driven by greed, leading the poor worker-drone to starvation with their price-gouging? If only his noble overlords would come once more to his rescue, and crush the evil exploiters!
[8-)] I’ll weep a tear for these idiots when they realize their governments are the ones they should be revolting against.
Ah, I saw this a while ago. Funny thing - aren’t taxes the highest form of price-gouging? I mean, the government is the monopoly supplier of the various “goods” in question and can charge as much as it wishes. No competitors exist to undercut it, it is driven by no motive such as that of profit - it simply extorts as much as it can.
-Jon
They have no idea it’s the central banks and endemic inflation that is robbing them of their wealth. Why should they? Even most trained economists these days are unaware that inflation transfers wealth from the poor/working classes to the government/banks/military-industrial-complex (since they look at things aggregately and ignore methodological individualism), and think the Fed is necessary to “manage the money supply”. Socialism fails in large part because it expects people to be other than they are… must anarchists make the same mistake?
No, this is not a failure of the followers. It’s a failure of leadership. Failure to reveal, failure to teach, failure to inspire, and most importantly, failure to enter the political battle. We can’t blame people for not knowing what they’ve never been taught, or not embracing leaders that don’t run.
True. I’m just frustrated by individuals buying into these lies repeatedly and unquestioningly - invariably blaming the wrong institutions. But you’re right, the blame is not (solely) theirs.
Who do you think a teacher and postal worker are going to blame? Who signs their paycheck?
My feelings exactly. You can’t expect the middle class to do anything but what they’re told and gripe about it. The middle class never produced leaders.
You must be their leader. You must tell them what to do. If you don’t, nothing will change.
I don’t agree with any of that. People are quite capable of choosing which option is better for them. It would just be nice if they had libertarians to choose from as well as statists. Leaders don’t tell people what to do, they offer an inspiring vision and a plan to get there, which people choose to follow and implement of their own free will. Persuasion, not coercion, you see.
I can’t imagine how you would not consider that to be telling people what to do. The majority of the people will not understand how the plan works, they will have to make the choice to follow you on pure faith in your leadership.
They will make their decision based not on their comprehension of the means, but on their approval of the ends. But yes, leadership is critical.
Well if 10 candidates are for change, how are they going to choose whose plan to back? It is all the same end, only the means are different.
Hi guys. What do you feel about a project to handout books on economics (something relatively small and interesting) to highschool students or those entering college? I think the problem – at least here since there isn’t an economics class in the public school curriculum – is that people haven’t developed any thoughts about it… We really got to spread some information around.
Kids at that age feel excited about making money, they are still deciding what they want to do, etc. So I don’t see why schools would object to it (of course it can’t explicitely state that “government is bad”, and we wouldn’t want it to state it like that anyway – just point out intervention flaws and possibly explain how intervention begs further intervention), and I’m sure a lot of the kids would read it (Johnn Stossel in one report shows kids in a poor school, that do poorly academic, getting all excited when talking about making money, opening businesses etc).
The financial support would be the real problem – I personally could barely afford one school. 
With regard to the material, I like Economics for Real People – it would need to be extended of course. I guess Jonathan’s Gullable would be very funny, but don’t think it is really appropriate…
David Gordon’s introductory text on economics might be appropriate for that purpose, perhaps if combined with Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
-Jon
Economics in One Lesson is incredible! I read it when I was 13; it turned me from anti-utopian into pro-market.
The British and Italian left-wing governments owe their recent and catastrophic defeats to a very simple fact: people felt like “the Government isn’t doing enough about his economic crysis”. Talk for five minutes (if you can manage it) with your average Joe from the street and it will be all about “the Government should set a cap on fuel/bread/whatever prices, the Government should increase pensions, the Government should subsidize this or that”. They do not realize that their worst enemies are actually the one they are desperately turning to for salvation, they do not realize that they are willingly delivering themselves in the hands of rapacious demagogues and extremely dangerous social engineers. The man from the street actually dreams about a “strong man” who will give him fixed prices, a fixed income each month, cheap credit, a generous pension… think about a Scandinavian social-democracy run by Mussolini and you get the picture (and a few chills down your spine as well).
Europe is now facing a choice: they can continue towards the present path (which will mean an accelerating economic and political decline), they can start serious, real free-market reforms or turn once again to authoritarian regimes. Everybody in politics, even the most hardcore Communist survivor from the Cold War, knows that reforms are desperately needed. The problem is nobody’s willing to do them. The first step would require an hefty cut of the fiscal pressure (which in most countries is now over 40% of the GDP and in Sweden and Italy over 50%), which would be quite obviously followed by an equally hefty cut of the welfare state. Politically speaking is a suicide: every single European country has a sizeable chunck of population living solely on welfare and an ever bigger part that can afford a cushy life because of overgenerous Government intervention (think about the French, Italian and Spanish farmers and fishermen who get paid for not working). My bet is tha Europe will try to go ahead, muddle through, if you like using the present system and will resort to some authoritarian and/or Socialistic measures (fuel rationing? Price caps on some goods?) in the future to try to appease at least part of the population. Should the crisis get worse, I am even prepared to see authoritarian figures stepping in (Italy’s Berlusconi and France’s Sarkozy are two early and quite sedate experiments of the shape the future could get).
Finally let me close with yet another quote from The Clash “Why not phoning up Robin Hood and ask for some wealth redistribution?”.
I am not sure the presentation is very appropriate; I mean you need to sell the idea to schools or the municipe, you are not going to sneak them in :), so you need something that looks more like a textbook. Besides, it seems more targeted for someone with some background on economics; though I guess it does make people think… Some short FAQ could be provided…
And of course, I would want to cover business, to incentivate entrepeuners. Explaining how McDonald’s, Blockbuster, etc are franchises, they don’t actually own the stores, they provide the framework for entrepeuners. (It’s actually funny how a few coffee shops are exhibiting the same menu with a few quick meals – as like the icecreams billboards – I’m guessing some business is providing this service, to enable small coffee shops to compete for customers from the fast food chains). Private vs public companies, and the stock market. Some enumeration of taxes and regulations. Not the chunk of it, but it has to cover it…
Anyway, will post here a thread about it when I’m in a situation to get something like this going. But education is the only way I see to fight the trend – well, I wish they had the guts to go fully into socialized economy, instead of the mix parasite one. Would self-destruct much faster. 
Even those that are not actually in welfare, don’t make enough to afford being unemployed for awhile, so they want unemployment pay. There’s plenty of unemployment, so people want it to be extremely difficult to impossible to fire anyone, so they feel like they have job security. Etc, etc. This kind of thing of course just aggravates the problem in reality, but people will blame the capitalist or whatever (people also dislike politiceans, but because they don’t do enough! they feel like they are in bed with the “powerful interests”). Btw, Salazar, our Mussolini-like dictator, was recently elected as the Greatest Portuguese in some TV show.
Also, the truth is people don’t really care whether they are exploiting others, and the exploited don’t care much either because I guess they feel like the cost is going to be socialized, so they aren’t hit much. Politiceans have lost elections because they proposed paying highways for usage (tolls), instead of through taxes for everybody. Teachers just organized some massive protests here, because the minister wanted to change the pay-raise model – instead of every teacher getting promoted every two years, they were trying to get some evaluation system to raise the better working half every year. (now, such system would hardly work that well, but most teachers didn’t even had a look at it, they just didn’t want to lose the steady career progression.) I dunno why there weren’t much protests when the social security retire age increased from 60 to 65 years old – if social security was private, you can bet those responsible would be serving jail time for fraud, and the all thing would have been more transparent in the first place.
Recently I was thinking about how could one teach some basic economic sense to the masses in a palatable way and found the following:
Forget money, think in real goods, as if it was a barter economy.
Forget ownership, think in terms of consumption.
If we do just these two things suddenly everything snaps into place. For example, say, one guy owns a food factory worth a billion while others don’t own anything but their houses - how unfair! But thinking in real terms and in consumption what we see is that the factory feeds tens of thousands of people while what the owner does with the profits is basically that he consumes a somewhat better quality food than his customers: not a very big difference at all. And so on.
I was in an argument recently with an acquaintance railing about the oil companies. I pointed out that a commodity in relatively constant demand, like oil, would necessarily rise in price with more dollars being printed. The response was along the lines of “You’re one of those kooks who think the Federal Reserve is run by the Freemasons.” No, I responded politely, the Fed is run by its member banks, whose every interest is in favor of monetary inflation. Wrong again, according to my opponent! The oil companies own all the banks!
This was a person with a graduate degree.
Yeah, if you are going to touch some economic concept with someone, you need to make the situation simple, trying to involve as less as you can. So, it makes sense to talk barter if it’s a dynamic between two parties. Money is an important issue though… With regard to property, just avoid getting much capital involved. Talk about farms and cattle, or services, not manufacturing. Stuff that need less investment.
The problem is when dealing with social problems. People want a fast fix, they don’t want to hear you about how some problems come to be, some sustainable approach to it…
In general people are badly informed, and don’t give much thought to economics either, so avoid coming across some smart-ass is important. 
Avoid using extra-ordinary terms, and sometimes its better to not correct people at everything, and just let them breath a bit, that hopefully they’ll make sense out of it.