I think it’s quite obvious that the less influential members of the Eurozone are subject to the demands of the 3 sloth economies- Italy, France and Germany. My mother said to me in "04 “it makes more sense to be in debt than to have savings”. The real interest rate was patently negative in Ireland. Inflation was out of control yet government CPI was registering 3%. The whole thing was nonsense. Credit expansion was the originator of Ireland’s boom-bust but of course the “speculators, developers and private bankers” are to blame, according to the politicians.
What is the min. wage in Spain? €2 or €3 per hour seems dreadfully low but if that is all their skills are worth…
And what makes you think he is clueless as opposed to trolling - or even better, trolling cluelessly (check his posting history as Lockesthenes)? If you have a problem with my moderation style PM me btw. Don’t waste space in threads.
There are much easier ways to censor than banning. I don’t ban people for holding “objectionable” views per se otherwise I’d dispose of Jimmy Jazz too.
I think one partucularly European problem might be, that Europe consists of different countries, but has the same Central Bank. Those different countries have by nature different “natural” interest rates, because of different economic states, different mentalities, time preference, etc.
When the ECB fixes interest rates on 5%, this may be just right for the large, industrialised economies like Germany, the UK and France, but too low for Spain, Ireland and Eastern Europe. That’s why one and the same monetary policy causes a huge boom-bust cycle in some economies, whereas others are only minor affected.
Minimum wage in Spain does not go per hour, but per month. IIRC, it’s somewhere around €1,000 or €1,100 per month. Let’s say the average work week is eight hours; that’s roughly €6 per hour. But, I don’t know if the average work week is that long. In regards to agriculture, their labor might be worth more, but the market price is that low. There are a lot of workers and too few jobs.
No, not really. And especially not ones formed by force of law. Austrians merely argue that anti-trust is futile, unnecessary and unethical, and that cartels might in any case be economically efficient. This does not apply in the case where the cartel is propped up by the government.
Austrians claim that cooperation between firms is a good thing so long as the market remains competitive. Anti-trust regulators see cooperation as bad and attempt to outlaw it.
Cooperation between firms is, under the Austrian model, a more efficient form of increasing scale. Instead of merging into a single, large enterprise, firms remain independent but adapt their products to work with each other’s.
Jonathan, yesterday evening I went to have a peek at your entries at economicthought.net and I must commend your work. On the down side in less than an hour you managed to dash my hopes about Europe being able to “muddle through” for another decade or so. You effectively managed to convince me that the undressed labor problems will probably be an even greater problem than Social Security/Welfare issues in the near future. Reading in the news yesterday that the Italian government is considering a law mandating the profits of an enterprise being shared among the employees made me think even harder about what you had to say about governments desperately trying to prop up wages in an attempt to bolster consumption. The fact that even more strip malls (including one of Italy’s largest a mere thirty miles from my home) are being built with complete disregard to economic trends (read: retail sales in steady decline) and to infrastructural deficiencies (no roads, insufficient parking etc) is also leading me to believe that there may be a childish belief in “1)more shops 2)? 3)lower prices for everyone!”.
I really hope I’ll be able to open more posts about Austrian economics applied to the peculiar European situation in the future!
I assume this is in response to my request to prove that it has a freer market than the U.S. I think it is impossible to prove that it is freer. You cannot go by the number of regulations. You would have to analyze each regulation to see what its impact is on the market. Ireland may have lower corporate taxes, but my experience has been that where one tax is lower, another is higher. A better question is what are its taxes per capita as compared the the U.S.? One would further have to analyze legislation. Do they have minimum wage laws, union laws, anti-discrimination laws, and such. One would also have to analyze their court system and its “fairness” as opposed to that of the U.S. There are probably plenty of other factors one could analyze. Really, the only conclusion one could come to is that neither system is a free market.
I think all the Anglo-Saxon nations have roughly comparable court systems
You are correct. Low corporate tax is offset by a higher income tax (which is still low by European standards). I think the Heritage Institute’s measurement of economic freedom is the most accurate possible
Wow that’s pretty low. Teacher’s are underpaid in the USA, which could be a cause of the US’s recent poor performance in high school academic tables. But what else can one expect from monopsonies like the Departments of Education
The most fundamental point is that collusion does not really happen. If it made sense for people to collude rather than compete, everyone would just collude in everything and competition per se would not exist.
Fine. Still, I am sure the courts are not the same. Their rules will be different. How much of an impact this makes on “fairness” would need to be analyzed. Regardless, none of them are in any sense of the words “free market courts”.
I didn’t claim they were identical, but rather they are broadly similar. They all espouse common law, for example, which is an evolutionary and experiential legal system. Differences exist but all Anglo-Saxon countries have strong traditions of strong Rule of law and upholding of property rights, in contrast to countries which employ Civil Law such as France