Nope. He’d be ignored, and besides that forum is pretty much dead. Right here.
Well not so much begging for help (my mistake) as making his trolling publicly known.
Political genius. LAWLZ
I just noticed another error in his post; Bryan Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist, not a minarchist.
That is not a mistake. It is actually part of a masterplan to corner you and prove austro-economics wrong.
We define Capitalism different. There is a difference between “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth” and “omg govt is evil, abolish teh govts!!1”
I am a Capitalist. I live in a Capitalist country. I agree with New Keynesianism, but I think that Monetarism is a good way of explaining Keynesian concepts to Libertarians.
I’m not an Anarchist, because I think the government has a useful role to play, but I admit I do have some Left-Libertarian and Marxist Anarchist leanings, because I like Henry George and Proudhon, though I’m not a Georgist or a Mutualist. I acknowledge the existence of both market failure and government failure – as any decent economist should. While I’ve typically considered “voluntary taxation,” absurd and am an American Liberal (who likes John Rawls), I like Nozick also and it occurred to me recently that Nozick’s voluntary taxation might be compatible with Rawls’ social justice if the government was made a publicly traded corporation, where only citizens can donate. Despite this, I refuse to call myself a “Libertarian” because of how it’s associated with radicals like you.
Nathyn, I’ve heard good things about this program.
If you think it is only the Austrians who question market failure, you have another thing coming for you. Many of the public choice economists have problems with it too. The public choice school and the Austrian school are perhaps the most closely aligned, in spite of criticisms the one has for the other from time to time. But I’m sure you knew that. I am also sure you’re aware that many major Austrians are minarchists, being as well-informed as you are.
Nathyn, if you truly lived in a capitalist system, 60% of your tax dollars would not go to social programs which have a stated goal of redistributing wealth. Furthermore, if you truly lived in a capitlaist system, then we would not have the unnecessary overregulation of business that we have today, nor would such things as Eminent Domain or socialized medicine even be questions. They would already be answered by government with a flat-out, “no.” The fact is, however, that we do have welfare, we do have politicians who seek media censorship, we do have calls for government ownership of the presses, we even have had good old Nancy Pelosi state that she wishes to, “level out wages in America.” If all that is “capitalism” then I would like to know since when capitalism and socialism became synonymous. You will find that many of us here - and in fact, quite a number of Austrian economists - do not seek abolition of government. What we seek is for government to get its nose out of our lives.
Then there are those others who believe (accurately or not is not the point of discussion here) that government will always grow too large and will always seek to control the lives of the people, and therefore government always turns bad eventually. Therefore, the best way to keep government from turning bad is simply not to have one. At all.
Edit:
By the way, if government is oh so good, then why is it that the only time most people have any interaction with government, it is of the extremely negative kind? How often do governments invade foreign nations without provocation? Or fabricate provocation? How often have governments (even the US government) deliberately and knowingly lied to their people? Government has throughout time been rampant with true racism, with eugenics programs, with persecution of disenfranchised classes, with class systems, et cetera. Is government inherently evil? I’m sorry, but I cannot think of any government the world over which does not have at least a few dark marks on it.
Nathyn, are you sure you live in a Capitalist country? At what point does government control and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth become excessively burdensome and non-capitalist? How much ownership can a legitimate owner lose and still be considered a “free person”? The only difference between a lesser coercive act and a greater coercive act is the degree of injustice done.
Not wanting to reject the ‘mainstream’ I feel I must start out my argument with an ad hominem attack since that seems to be their way…
That is complete BS and you are an idiot for even suggesting that the labor theory of value is contained in Austrian economics. Never heard of Marginal Utility as a valuation theory?
From An Introduction to Economic Reasoning with some snipage:
Perhaps if you don’t understand something you should seek out alternative sources that explain it better instead of just making bad guesses, don’t you think?
You assume that he is assuming that demand for money can’t increase when he is in fact showing that the value of money can be determined in the exact same way as any other commodity. Basically that money isn’t special.
I’m starting to get the general impression that you are the only one who is demonstrating poor scholarship…
Doesn’t that actually prove the point that monetary policy is the primary tool of state aggrandizement? War isn’t as you openly admit so it must be something else, huh?
And these are really minor wars compared to the world wars where the whole world wide economy was subjugated to the war effort.
But yes, you are quite correct in stating that the powers of the government hasn’t grown in the least because of the War on Terror. No new layers of bureaucracy such as the Dept. of Homeland Security, no federalizing and militarization of the police forces and certainly no encroachment of basic rights by the very same government that is supposed to guard them.
Nope, the War on Terror hasn’t led to the growth of the State at all.
Because it’s in their (the State’s) best interest to have a big budget. And they distribute much, much more money to the wealthy than they do to the poor through their corporate welfare programs and such.
It would be more accurate to say that they distribute money from the middle class to both the rich and the poor. Oh, and farmers, don’t forget the farmers.
A slight hijack, but doesn’t redistribution occur within income bands, not between them? Rothbard noted this in For a New Liberty based on Tax Foundation statistics (and I checked more recent ones, noting little change.) The statistics indicate the poorest and richest having the highest tax incidence, with little variation in all the bands between. Basically it’s redistribution from the productive to the non-productive, as opposed from rich to poor. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Another one to toss in the list: The claim that economies should be modeled based on “human action” is particularly presumptuous, since it seems to totally ignore the impact ecology has on human action and thus, while assuming scarcity to be true, implicitly rejects it by suggesting human beings all seeking their own utility can’t lead to a reduction in overall resources, which diminishes future potential for utility.
Though theories like “peak oil,” (or even worse, “peak food”, like Malthus) are clearly nonsense, there is a lot of evidence to support this. See Wikipedia’s list of extinct animals.
A biology professor I spoke with gave an even better example: The natives of Easter Island appeared to have died out due to lack of wood, since the island is totally devoid of trees, but archaelogical evidence suggests that in some time in the distant past, their society and culture just vanished.
Learn nominal prices first, then we’ll talk.
I misspoke. You were right, btw.
See? I’m humble enough to admit when I’m wrong.
The natives of Easter Island died out from lack of wood? Great science there, Nathyn. You should publish a paper on it and become a famous scientist.
Okay, serious response. Economics in general, and Austrian economics in particular, make no such assertion. They show that people don’t trade unless both parties believe they benefit, and they show things like a decrease in the supply of some good or service, all other things being equal, will lead to higher prices, thus providing incentives for improved production, substitutes, etc. This does not mean that overall resources can’t be reduced. It does mean people have strong incentives for making improvements, substitutions, etc. Given the history of the world, such overall reductions just haven’t happened except under uncommon situations (Easter Island? Maybe, maybe not.) Most shortages that have occurred have occurred because of restrictions and regulations in trade.
Somebody could start a “Fallacies about Economics” based solely upon your numerous posts…
People don’t trade if they don’t see a benefit. Whether this actually leads to satisfaction of utility in the long-run is not established.
Such overall reductions have happened in a fair amount of cases. Just take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions
A lot of those animals would still be capable of being used as resources today were it not for them being hunted to extinction or near-extinction. American bison are an excellent example, since they provide more meat than cows while also greater strength than horses. You see the same thing in India and Africa, where certain tigers and elephants are being poached to near-extinction. In the meantime, it’s true that the natives are desperate to just make a living. However, in the long-run, once the tigers and elephants are gone entirely, the people will be even worse off than had the governments restricted hunting and fishing to ensure its sustainability, the way they do in America.
Screw extinct animals. Nathyn, when you can build me a house out of Spotted Owls, let me know. If a species was so valuable, surely some capitalist would have preserved a few specimens, and, owning the only such specimens in the world, would have made a ton of money back? Get real.
Species have gone extinct for billions of years. In fact, Mother Nature has gleefully inflicted catastrophes that have wiped out 90% of all species in one blow. And there are new mutated species constantly being generated, e.g. I once had a Cornish Rex cat as a pet; it is a mutation only a few decades old. I pray for increasing environmental damage from man, as it will spur nature into developing more novel species. And we now can create genetically-modified organisms. Why hunt down an animal when you can design one from scratch? I’m sure we’ll soon be able to recreate previously extinct organisms like dinosaurs and who knows what else in the future.
How are you measuring “long-run satisfaction of utility,” and by whose standards?
Blaming man as the sole extinguisher of animal life is a nice fallacy, but it doesn’t actually address it as an economic issue.
Apparently, the animals, though you may find them delicious or cost effective for their abililty to pull heavy things, did not survive the test of natural selection. In relation to their ability to withstand economic tests, apparently they were either not cost effective, were not capable of being domesticated, or ignorance drove people to kill them off purposefully - think about the American wolf.
Is this aesthetically displeasing? It certainly is.
Is it an economic inefficiency or a market failure? No, because the standard for economic well being is essentially a human concept. Animals do not think about resource allocation, investment, or conscious trading. If a particular species does not serve as particularly profitable for enough human beings, then like Pepsi crystal, it will become extinct.
If you suggest that the reason for the extreme poverty in Africa is poaching of animals, then you’re really on the edge of insanity.
The natives of Easter Island never died out. You can meet them even today if you go there. In any case, besides the influence of natural ice-age/global-warming cycles, the trees on Easter Island were largely taken down to facilitate the erection of huge stone statues. That, obviously was a “government” religious institution. . . undertaken perhaps to call upon the ancenstral spirits to bring back rains as the climate cycle brought draught to the island. As usual, the government barked up the wrong tree (literally this time), and the felling of trees in order to build bigger and bigger statues eventually deforested the entire island in the midieval little ice-age cycle (which meant draught in that lattitude).
There’s been a certain lack of property rights involved in the extinction of certain animals. This is especially obvious in the case of the regulations of ivory trading. Instead of allowing property rights and courts to settle the problem, ivory trade was banned and created more problems. The ban has since been lifted in recognition of the problems it created, but property rights have still not been emphasized to address the issue.
http://www.american.edu/ted/ivory.htm
Or compare privately-owned woodlands to public woodlands, and tell me which has been managed better, and caused fewer problems.
Since Austrian economics stresses property rights, it’s the solution, not the problem, of well-managed natural environments (ecologies?).