Wednesday, January 17, 2018

House conservatives say there are enough Republican opponents to reject GOP leaders' plan to prevent government shutdown.


Maybe time to consider euthanizing all the libertarians?  They are never going to change...







20 comments:

Noah Way said...

Euthanize all of them, not just libertarians.

Noah Way said...

Not that shutting down this government would be a bad thing. Permanently.

Time to start over.

Bob Roddis said...

Why don't you funny money advocates get busy and once and for all locate that magical point in time when "laissez faire" resulted in something less than perfect full employment. Come on. Justify your endless kleptocracy. I bet you're afraid to even try.

Tom Hickey said...

What laissez-faire economies? Were ever there any laissez-faire economies since the advent of industrial capitalism? I am unaware of any. Obviously, there were none under feudalism when the kings and feudal lords that constituted government owned and controlled everything.

Providing full employment used to be done through the servant class that supplemented the predominantly landless agricultural workers under feudalism.

Technology made many workers redundant as mechanization improved productivity. Increased productivity resulted in chronic unemployment after the servant class began to disappear in developed economies.

Matt Franko said...

Tom a lot of that tech coincided with the big rise in libertarianism too... ‘49 gold rush, civil war, Darwin, John Wilkes Booth, then all of a sudden Statue of Liberty shows up out of nowhere from France, etc...

Matt Franko said...

“Out of money!” is just a natural outcome of a heavy libertarian bias in these people .. this is a libertarian utopia we’re living in...

Matt Franko said...

If yin is authority and yang is liberty, we have been under a heavy dose of yang since about starting in mid 1800s... it’s a long cycle... maybe starting to finally come out of it but we’ll see...

These coins and block chains are a bit of a setback ...

Calgacus said...

Matt, why do you want to euthanize all librarians? They look great once they take their glasses off and let their hair down.

Matt Franko said...

Just a play on Keynes “euthanize the rentier!” is all...

Bob Roddis said...

“Were ever there any laissez-faire economies since the advent of industrial capitalism? I am unaware of any.”

Then there is no basis to claim “free market capitalism” has failed and requires government “stimulus”, funny money creation and/or government spending to stop it from failing.

What evidence do you have to refute the Austrian analysis that the problems are caused by the funny money system certainly since 1913 and exacerbated by Keynesian and MMT style policies?

Matt Franko said...

Bob you guys should be counting your blessings... you never had it so good... got your own free statue right in New York harbor .... morons going all around saying "we're out of money! all the time....

Grass looks pretty green over there to me anyway...

Tom Hickey said...

"Free market captialism" working (no rents) assumes perfect competition.

That assumption is utopian. The question is how to get from here to there practically.

I assume the answer is Murray Rothbard.

I regard Rothbard, Rand, etc., as utopians. Their solutions ain't gonna happen either in the US, or as the basis for the global economy.

If national governments are eliminated in effect through transnational corporatism, the result will be billed as "free market capitalism" but it will be riddled with rent extraction owing asymmetries, especially of power.

And how is Hayek's neoliberalism working now?

Bob Roddis said...

"Free market captialism" working (no rents) assumes perfect competition.

Totally false. There is no such assumption.

And how is Hayek's neoliberalism working now?

As you constantly remind us, MMT simply DESCRIBES THE WORLD AS IT IS. How can a universal funny money kleptocracy be blamed upon Hayek? It can't. What a pitiful and baseless "argument".

Finally, there is no "rent extraction" without a large state granted plenary power purportedly to fix the problems that do not exist absent the plenary power. Read "The Triumph of Conservatism" by Kolko.

Tom Hickey said...

Finally, there is no "rent extraction" without a large state granted plenary power purportedly to fix the problems that do not exist absent the plenary power.

Huge assumption.

The ability to extract rent is derived from asymmetries — power, information, endowment, etc. In addition, economies of scale also lead to asymmetries. Government capture is one of many potential factors.

In addition, as long as there are potential adversaries, groups will need to combine resources for defense. Defense necessitates hierarchal organization to compete with traditional militaries, which are successful for a reason — hierarchical organization is superior, as the Romans proved in warfare against tribes. This involves top down governance. That's how governments got started.

Matt Franko said...

“hierarchical organization is superior”

Tom start thinking about these coins/blockchains... NO hierarchy (authority) .... they are having much much more success than we are... these things could just blind side us and blow us out of the water...

Matt Franko said...

Tom you have to consider if it comes down to

1. What we have now; ie numismatic systems in place but operated by libertarian morons

or

2. these blockchain things

People may go for door #2 as the better option... especially in the turd world shit holes as the US walls up and acts to repatriate the USD balances...

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Calgacus said...

Bob Roddis: The problem is that while they have some good things to say and are more logical than other economic schools, Austrian theory is built around a theory of money which is completely wrong. (Most mainstream theorization is essentially "not even wrong.")

There isn't, never was and cannot be any other kind of money than "funny money". Gold for instance was and is only a valuable commodity because you can get "fiat" money for it. If you abolish "funny money", you abolish money. Austrian monetary theory passes over the heart of the matter, which is that money is credit and absolutely nothing else. It is not credit "for" anything (like gold or whatever). It is a relationship (albeit one treated as a thing, which is what makes it money) - but it is NOT a thing, like a lump of gold or a coin or whatever.

That being said, one can identify periods in time where people believed more in gold standards, in the falsehood of gold being money, when there was a smaller government sector etc. Something that I think you would identify as more laissez-faire late 19th century US or UK. So to answer your question, as MMT & other economists, maybe even some Austrians have observed, such societies are rather more financially and economically unstable than the ones they evolved into. More dramatic booms and busts, for the Big Government is an "automatic stabilizer". For the US in particular, people that MMTers quote (William Vickery, maybe Harold Vatter) have identified various dates from 1905 to the 20s after which the old laissez fairish system could never seem to deliver anything like full employment no matter how ardently the old religion was re-embraced.

Bob Roddis said...

There isn't, never was and cannot be any other kind of money than "funny money". Gold for instance was and is only a valuable commodity because you can get "fiat" money for it. If you abolish "funny money", you abolish money. Austrian monetary theory passes over the heart of the matter, which is that money is credit and absolutely nothing else.

That is just beyond baseless and preposterous.

For the US in particular, people that MMTers quote (William Vickery, maybe Harold Vatter) have identified various dates from 1905 to the 20s after which the old laissez fairish system could never seem to deliver anything like full employment no matter how ardently the old religion was re-embraced.

The Fed was established in 1913 and immediately went about financing WWI, along with the other new central banks. That is the very fiat money system that Austrian analysis eviscerated. It is not an example of a market failure, much "the old religion"..

During World War I, federal expenditures ballooned and although the new income tax was able to partially finance the war effort, most of the financing was done through federal borrowing and by the highly accommodating monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. The role of the Federal Reserve at this time was expressed unambiguously by the New York Federal Reserve Bank Governor Benjamin Strong, who told a Congressional committee in 1921 that ‘I feel that I, or the bank at least, was their [the Treasury’s] agent and servant in those matters’ and further added that the wartime inflation caused by the low interest rates maintained by the bank were ‘inevitable, unescapable, and necessary’ for prosecuting the war (Strong, 1930) [emphasis added}

This is the pure Rothbardian explanation. Wars are funded with fiat money which robs average people of purchasing power without the victims understanding exactly what is being done to them and without any due process of law. If the citizens had to make an immediate sacrifice in the form of a forced contribution of tax money to fund wars on a pay-as-you-go format, there would be far fewer wars. Kuehn then notes that the inflation encountered by the populace had been caused by the “expansionary policy of the Federal Reserve” and thus not any alleged “market failure”. After the war, such policy was “sharply curtailed” as was government spending leading to the predictable bust which was cured by allowing the government doing essentially nothing and allowing prices to readjust.

http://bobroddis.blogspot.com/2012/08/daniel-kuehn-provides-factual-basis-for.html

Tom Hickey said...

Tom start thinking about these coins/blockchains... NO hierarchy (authority) .... they are having much much more success than we are... these things could just blind side us and blow us out of the water...

Until the hammer drops.