if they have unlimited god given power maybe they would choose 100%. it could be fun being a pharaoh.
I did not intend for this thread to be about the merits of spending X% of GDP. I just want to know what Hazlett et al would spend, even if you think they were wrong in their choices.
Sometimes I wonder if even you know what you are talking about.
Hey, Nirgrahamuk, I’ve generally considered your posts to be far more intelligent than Daniel’s, even when I disagree with you. Can I persuade you to have a guess at some percentages?
P.S. if you agree with Daniel I will slash my wrists.
I dont want your death on my conscience. [:P]
You’re the one who started to calculate. So If I say $10 for police, don’t start to question my estimate
I give up!
I just had an idea to make it easier for you all and save on the detailed calculations. Let us say that the cost of the things in Hazlitt’s list as a percentage of GDP as it is in the USA today is “P%”. Then feel free to express your answers in terms of P. Like 0.5 x P or 0.1 x P or whatever.
From 1789 to 1849, federal expenditures averaged 2.5% of the GDP. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, this figure averaged 3.8%,
http://chartingtheeconomy.com/?p=409
1929 government size 5%
if we reason that Hazlitt was for the small state as present in the early years of constitional usa we can check the record of the size of government as it was at the times that hazlitt looks back on fondly.
the above sources indicate between 2.5-5%
we cut cut down further because im sure that even the early government had departments and spending outside of the services you listed as hazlitts ‘keepers’
so knock off whatever further percentage you feel that represents.
i dont see what the point of all this was really though.
Thank you for your well argued guess for Henry Hazlitt 
I’m trying to learn about economics. Peter Schiff is my favorite economic commentator that I’ve discovered so far. He says he bases his thinking on Austrian economics. So I thought I’d better learn some. I read some Austrian stuff (which I mostly liked) and then came to this forum. But that’s when the trouble started. Everything I said seemed to be attacked by anarchists. This was a surprise to me, I had no idea the Austrians school would be so full of anarchists. I do not agree with anarchy and I never got the impression Austrians were anarchists from anything I read, so I began to suspect that perhaps the “famous” Austrians were not anarchists, but their followers tended to be. This thread is testing my theory.
dude seriously! have you figured out how to build a road or not yet! it takes two hands and coercion isn’t going to move the shovels. it’s not that difficult and so you therefore ignore the simplicities. yes ignore seeing that you’ve ignored any post that scares you! truth is scary![8-|]
300,000,000/150,000 = 1/2000. How exactly did he fail?
Rothbard was an Austrian and an anarchocapitalist - his major contributions are probably why the two are so strongly linked today.
Thats a discussion from another thread. Send me a personal message if you’re really keen for me to answer something. If you want to follow up this mail, do so on the other thread. Lets not screw up the thread system.
Oh, okay. I totally misread that last part. I figured “in 2000” meant “in the year 2000”.
Yes, that’s what I thought! But then I thought a bit longer and worked out that Daniel thinks that 150,000 has so many zero’s that it must be a big enough number to cover all requirements government workers. But of course america is a big country and 150,000 has to spread very thinly! I don’t think Daniel is very good at math.
well, to give you some background and context…
a large proportion of the senior faculty of the Mises institute are anarchists, and the founder of the mises institute is himself an anarchist. The historical tradition is http://mises.org/daily/2519 Jean-Baptiste Say and Gustav Molinari then modernised,fleshed out and popularised by M Rothbard. Hoppe, Block, Murphy etc are Rothbardians as much as all Austrians are Misesians…
150000 would be 25 government employees per square mile, a figure that could work if the government provided very few services(I’m not sure we could manage courts and prisons on that number).
Let’s not get into ineptitude, because you’ll win that award. Why exactly do we more than 150,000 government workers?
Thank you… its all becoming clearer now.
I still wonder about Peter Schiff. I think I’ve watched every single Peter Schiff video on youtube (there’s hundreds of them!) and I didn’t get the slightest hint that he was an anarchist. Any thoughts?