No they don’t. They are not an association, do not have sovereignty, and do not represent a population.
The definition of a free market is an exchange between two parties undertaken by free will of both parties and without coercion.
I don’t know much about Krugman, but I have read his opinion articles. So I’ll only judge those instead. If his reasoning is as flawed on his views that we need a central planning system to decide how economic transactions should work, then how can I as a non-versed (or barely versed) person in (general understanding) economics trust him on his more academic (and/or analytical) works? I’m not going to just write off the guy, but I am going to be skeptical of his supposed greatness.
The reason why I found Hayek’s work amazing compared to a guy like Krugman isn’t that I agreed with Hayek, but rather how much of Hayek’s work applied to my studies in AI theory and the theories found in computer science; particularly spontaneous order. I can’t seem to find any of Krugman’s work being significant in a cross-disciplinary fashion as Hayek’s by comparison. So, yes, imho, Hayek is a ‘better’ man than Krugman as Godel is a ‘better’ man than Pascal in many respects (in his case for his Incompleteness Theorem). It doesn’t mean that Krugman or Pascal are idiots, but it does mean they’re not the among the ‘pantheon’ of the greats. At least from a subjective context.
Free markets require complete and utter freedom in exchange of privately owned goods. Certainly not central banks. Definitely not compulsory health insurance. No SEC. No state courts. No state subsidies and so on. Simply saying we have a “free market” because some corporation is unhindered in its activities is imprecise and wrong. All one is entitled to say is a certain corporation is free to act whilst others are not.
-Jon
Just a shot in the dark after your last appearance here defending the violent commies at the RNC.
And the whole ‘Freedom without Socialism…’
Feel free to substitute ‘commie’ with whatever neo-marxist school you follow since I just use it as a blanket term like your usage of ‘capitalist’.
Proof?
Or more unsupported assertions?
Is it even called violence when committed against property.
I was actually refering to the labor movement’s use of legal violence against anyone who dared to cross their picket lines. Or anyone who dared to try to work for a company where they claimed a monopoly right on ‘bargaining’.
I looked at his website;
Quite the opponent of Big Central Government it would seem.
Didn’t see anything about 20th century labor movements, though. Maybe a history of the “bomb throwing anarchists” is what you were referring to?
OK, I want you all to look me into the face and say “Nobel Prizes are awarded because of an individual capabilities, not political factors” without laughing. Let’s see… Rowland and Molina got their medals for supporting the DuPont-sponsored… sorry, that one slipped out, I mean the ozone-saving ban on Freon, while Kissinger and Arafat got theirs for being such shining beacons of friendship among people. And let’s not forget good old Al Gore and his IPCC chums.
Ooops, perhaps I said too much!
Thank you, Pat Buchanan.
[8-)]
Quite simple really, and Sun Tzu did a great job of explaining it.
Deception is the greatest tool to use to defeat a cause. Hidden statists are deceptive, open statists, on the other hand, at least show you where they’re coming from.
No, that’s the only blessing of it - or them, I should say.
And no, I don’t believe that, but what I do believe is that it is better to take the best from each individual and use that as opposed to throwing the baby out with the bath water when the baby is still usable. The fact is that people take what Paul Krugman says seriously. Using him on his correct points is profitable and collecting from many different sources is impressive - you’d know this if you went to college and wrote a thesis.
I’m not accepting contradiction. I’m accepting that Paul Krugman is a fine choice for the Nobel prize. This is a position that other reasonable Anarchists agree with - like Bryan Caplan. The man is an economist; he developed and popularized a new way of thinking for economists with international trade. This is something that is noteworthy and deserves praise. I would say it was a better choice if they, say, chose Roger Garrison for his work in capital macro-economics, but they probably won’t - at least not for a while.
See, I, unlike most people here, think it’s important to mix with others and use impressive sources to impress. Using the same website - mises.org - over and over again isn’t impressive - it’s partisan.
No, people should accept the good things that Hans-Hermann Hoppe or Milton Friedman contributes and scorn the bad. You seem to believe that the Nobel prize is for best economist and not best contribution by economists. Krugman was recognized for his work on international trade, not his NYT articles. Have you ever even read one of Krugman’s books?
I bet not. You obviously got the summary on Mises.org. [8-)] Or maybe worse, you were channeling Ayn Rand?
It’s not really arbitrary. It’s based on data.
I was addressing everyone.
But he isn’t winning a prize for best op-ed columnists. Krugman is winning a prize for international trade contributions.
See, now I’ll actually disagree with a lot of what is said here, but I’ll take what good parts I can find.
My position is that the New Deal was a failure - an obvious one - but not for the people it was meant to serve - that is the very, very rich.
As are most - if not all - labour laws. I think it is a mistake, as Kevin Carson eloquently points out, to merely look at something from the perspective of, “well, the politician says it will benefit the poor, so it must do that.”
This is a mistake made by both the capitalist sympathizers here and socialist-democrats elsewhere.
You know…I really didn’t understand your point on this matter until you posted it the tenth or eleventh time.
Talk about a fanboy.
I thought you were supposed to be banned or something?
Funny how you skip the most important feature of a state: A territorial monopoly of jurisdiction, taxation and coercion.
Wikipedia isn’t too great for political economy, it seems, maybe you should diversify your sources 
Landlords don’t have a monopoly of jurisdiction over their land, , nor taxation, or coercion the state does. In a free society, no one would have such monopoly.
Statism is deception the same as contradiction in philosophy. Who cares where it comes from?
And why is collecting a bunch of useless economic knowledge like trade patterns important to anarchism? Especially that which tries to make economics a obfuscated science in order to promote the need for “experts” to plan and make schemes – which is the goal of Krugman? Do you really think it should matter at all to anyone that a violent state also fucks up trade patterns? And what do you think will be the end result of gathering random bits of economic knowledge and put them together? Since anarchism depends on ethics and does not depend on expected results – that is economic outcome – why do you think economic data gathered by Krugman would be important at all?
If someone’s opinion of the state is based on something so small and petty as how well they manage trade patterns and subsidies (something that can forever be reformed, changed, legislated, etc.), do you really think they could or even should be convinced of a non-statist position? Apparently not if Krugman isn’t convinced.
The data is real but the criteria for “importance” is arbitrary. Hell, your own criteria that the wider world of economics in general is so crucial is also arbitrary. Based on this “data” it seems that economics is not helping anarchism one bit. It seems more like every single one of the “top economists” is more interested in mathematical models and useless studies at their universities than it is about finding truth or furthering knowledge. Just as the swedish bank isn’t interested in economic knowledge but something that furthers their own system of corruption.
But the same epistemology and conclusions that Krugman derives his more analytical work derives his op-ed articles. Therefore, any attempt to falsely parse his ‘popular’ works from his ‘academic’ works is at best stupid, and at worse immoral. Specifically, if you accept that all statements that one makes from one’s own epistemology (and methods of epistemology) are constant from situation to situation (Krugman doesn’t unbecome himself when he writes his research papers no more than Krugman as a ‘researcher’ unbecomes himself to write popular op-ed articles).
Not really.
Krugman’s book, Pop Internationalism was an example of academic work. Krugman’s NYT columns are an example of journalism work.
Are you saying that if someone gets one thing wrong, they are no longer able to make a better point?
Do you want to learn useless economic facts or do you want to establish anarchism?
You can spend your whole life reading indiscriminantly – wasting your whole life away – or you can choose what is important personally and what is not. For that reason, economics is not a science that is important for its own sake. In fact, on the free market the theories espoused by Krugman would be useless to anyone. And no one would pay him for the information – except people who just like reading about the state and have no interest in its being dissolved any time soon.
If he doesn’t acknowledge the errors in judgment, then sanctioning his other work would be stupid, yes. Krugman isn’t literally split between two-brains as he has to use the same basis of thought to conclude one wrong answer then produces a right answer by the same basis, which could mean two possibilities: 1) He’s deliberately evading the facts in one situation versus another as to placate a given set of views in one sphere of reading versus another (meaning: he knows he can BS his way through an NYT article, but he knows he’ll get pwnt by any old grad student on his acdemic work if he should frack up big time) or 2) He’s implicitly evading the facts as to comfort his emotional ‘loyalty’ to his beliefs. But either way, to say that it’s okay to ignore whatever it may be and to sanction any part of his work without proviso that the work itself is good due to its factual substance is still stupid on anyone’s part in doing so.
I think that depends on who the person is. To some, economics for economics sake is important and yes, Krugman’s theories are useful to market forecasters.
Being able to determine the economic climate for which a company is involved in is definitely important to the market. Furthermore, not applying to anything other than political economy didn’t seem to stop your precious Rothbard or Mises.
So, no tolerance law on the basis of correct answers.
By the way, the Mises Institute is quite a little authoritarian dictatorship. I think there’s a small man on top with a very big power trip going on.
Same applies for most Austrians and libertarian thinkers in general really.