paragon1 posted:

jrod why do you think google spell check refuses to recognize "libertarianism" as a word?

theshim posted:

Jrod do you still subscribe to the belief that there are women who get pregnant as a means to collect more welfare?

theshim posted:

Jrod do you still subscribe to the belief that there are women who get pregnant as a means to collect more welfare?

Caros posted:

Closing arguments. If jrodefeld returns for even a single additional comment his general poo poo posting will have outlasted my marriage.

Stop and think about how much time you have wasted jrodefeld. I hope you learn to do something better with your life you heaping sack of poo poo.

VitalSigns posted:

If child labor laws only make poverty worse, and the only reason they seemed to work in the US is because we just happened to become prosperous enough to not need child labor anymore at the exact moment those laws were passed...then why do businesses lobby so hard and spend so much money trying to repeal them?

Are these businesses irrational market actors that will soon be driven out of business by plucky competitors who don't waste money lobbying to repeal ineffective laws and pass the savings on to the wily consumer?

jrodefeld posted:

I'd hope you'd agree with me that a good job with a good wage is more valuable to a poor person than being dependent on a State hand-out.

jrodefeld posted:

just restitution would require that he pay the baker back when he is in a position to do so. In fact, most decent people would gladly provide a starving person with a loaf of bread with an agreement to be payed back later.

Juffo-Wup posted:

I'm still worried about this

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Hey, someone made Jrod's AV more honest!

Fake edit: It was me, I did it. I have $80 in the bank that I will use AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN until it's gone for him to keep that AV

DrProsek posted:

We got real lucky with segregation too. Banned it just as racism became such a small problem we didn't really need to ban it anyway. So let's just legalize it again, just for shits and giggles. I'm not a racist, I probably wouldn't ban any people from my businesses (unless they look like the thug gangsters or Arabs), but the government wastes infinity trillion dollars stopping segregation, so lets just legalize it, mkay?

jrodefeld posted:

I've explained this to you many times over the course of this thread, but I'll try once again.

If your primary interest is the well-being of the most poor, then what you ought to support is a society in which the most prosperity can be generated. A more physically productive economy with higher economic growth and capital investment creates the conditions by which people can be taken care of. To create the wealth in society that would be needed to generate a comfortable living standard for the maximum number of people, as history has taught us, you need to embrace a free market economy, private property rights, and keep the State restrained to the adjudication of disputes and the defense of individual rights.

I've cited studies that rank the countries of the world in accordance with their adherence to economic liberty as defined by libertarians to bolster this position. There are many such studies that have been done by libertarian and free market institutions. Instead of understanding the larger point, all you replied with was "why are the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on the list?", "This just proves libertarians are really racists."

This is so staggeringly disingenuous. I never claimed to be any sort of expert in the policies of Qatar or UAE and my goal was simply to give a sample of the sort of literature that has been done on the subject of economic freedom around the world. If you would look at the broader picture, you would see a very strong correlation between adherence to free market principles and the general prosperity and living standards of the populations of those countries.

It has almost become conventional wisdom in the past twenty years or so that if we really want to uplift the poor of the world, the single best reform to advocate is economic liberalization. It has succeeded where foreign aid, charity and State controls have failed. Hong Kong is oft cited as a success story. The ease by which an entrepreneur can start a business and the legal defense of contract and property are critical to capital accumulation and investment which creates prosperity and enables a middle class to emerge.

If you deny that market liberalization and restraint of the State are necessary prerequisites for creating the prosperity needed to provide the poor with jobs and a decent standard of living, we only have to have a thought experiment. Take all your favorite Progressive policies, workplace safety regulations, minimum wage laws, occupational licensure laws, punitive high tax-rates on the highest income bracket and so forth and apply them to Malawi (one of the poorest nations in the world), see how much better you will make the poor in that country. The logical result will be, at best, no discernible effect on poverty rates, and more likely an even worse experience for the people who have to suffer in that third world nation.

Exporting "Progressive" policies to third world nations has actually been tried, with predictably disastrous results. Eliminating child labor in third world nations had the horrifying result of sending children into child prostitution and other more dangerous and degrading occupations. The reason should be obvious. Children don't work in poor countries because they want to, or that they all have horrible parents. They work because the economy is so poor and unproductive, they will starve if they don't. The most effective way to improve working conditions for the poor and eliminate child labor is to adopt policies that attract capital investment to make the economy more physically productive. This raises real wages and stocks store shelves with an abundance of goods that allow people to work less hours, have more leisure and purchase the needed products that allow for a comfortable standard of living.

The message here is that by moving towards greater economic freedom, making it easier for entrepreneurs to start businesses, eliminating occupational licensing, reducing tax rates and government spending which allows more capital investment, the predictable outcome will be greater economic productivity, which results in lower consumer prices, higher real wages and more economic opportunities for both wage earners and entrepreneurs.

The effect of these reforms would be that less people would need charity and there would be more disposable income to provide for those that still did. It is an absolute fallacy to think that the private economy would need to match, dollar for dollar, the amount spent by the State on social welfare. If observable reality about the way governments and the private market work has taught us anything, it is that private sector enterprises can produce equivalent or superior results at a fraction of the cost of the State.

What I'm trying to get across to you is that it is economic freedom and the market economy which is the engine by which prosperity is created and adopting policies which needlessly hinder free economic transactions and opportunities hurt all in society but especially the poor.

Even places like Sweden which have State-funded social programs so loved by the left are only able to finance them due to decades of relatively laissez-faire, free market policies which produced such a level of prosperity that their economies don't crumble under their weight.

It reminds me of the Progressives who argue that the general prosperity and healthy middle class that we observed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States is attributable entirely to the GI bill and the high marginal tax rates imposed on the wealthy, somehow ignoring the century of relative laissez-faire economic freedom which permitted such a massive creation of prosperity, capital accumulation and physical productivity. THAT is the source of the vibrant middle class and the living standards we enjoy. The State interventions and programs piled onto this productive base only hinder the rising living standards and economic opportunities that would help out the poor and vulnerable.


I'd hope you'd agree with me that a good job with a good wage is more valuable to a poor person than being dependent on a State hand-out. I also don't believe that people are as helpless without daddy government as you seem to think. Free people, communities, charity, mutual aid societies, entrepreneurs and churches will be able to assist the few remaining poor people in a free society as well as any system could ever help them.

To think that only the State is capable to helping people is to someone assume that the motives of people in politics are somehow much more pure and altruistic than people in the private sector. You'd have to assume that perverse incentives don't exist in politics and social welfare programs are really designed to ultimately help uplift people rather than buying off people with bribes in exchange for votes. I'd really suggest you check out a field of study called "Public Choice Economics" which evaluates the motivations of public officials through an economic lens.

What you are falling victim to is the inevitable inertia of tradition. We've been taught for several generations that the only way to help out with social problems, take care of the elderly, provide medical care to people and help the poor is through government policy and democratic elections. Public schools inculcate these ideas in peoples heads and we lose the ability to imagine innovative alternatives. We assume they don't exist.

Nolanar posted:

Let's play the syllogism game!

1: Theft can be morally justified under certain circumstances
2: Taxation is theft
3:

TLM3101 posted:

Same here.

Please be okay, Caros.

Caros posted:

Breakups are never pretty, divorces even less so. Still, that is what whiskey is for. Sweet, sweet whisky.

Juffo-Wup posted:

jrod look what you've done

Grand Theft Autobot posted:

Jrod, it would really benefit you to get information from sources beyond Mises.org. Simple research shows you to be completely out of your depth on basically every topic.



The chart above shows that prior to the Great Depression (which, really, was the ultimate climax of the old laissez faire order), American recessions were far more frequent and far more severe than recessions post-Great Depression. The major reasons for this increased level of stability were: 1. Tighter regulation of the financial sector, 2. Deposit insurance, 3. The creation of "automatic stabilizers" aka "welfare state" programs to put money into peoples' hands when they lost their jobs, 4. Creation of government "pump priming" policies and subsidies.

In the 19th century, after the failure to recharter the Second Bank - which accounted for roughly 20% of all issued bank notes in 1836-, states were essentially free to issue more bank notes than they could support with specie payouts, which they proceeded to do. The obvious result was massive over-leveraging in state banks, large money supply disparities between states, and susceptibility to runs and panics. Central banking, lender-of-last resort, deposit insurance, some healthy degree of inflation, and the existence of state-backed safety nets would almost certainly have made for a more stable economy.

Edit: fixed my own retarded inability to read charts.

jrodefeld posted:

So I'll just ask this question because I am genuinely curious. Forgetting the historical gold standard, why don't the left support a mechanism which limits the expansion of the money supply in order to limit inflation and curtail the enrichment of the corporate class and the endless expansion of the State? This, to me, seems like a very Progressive cause since this is one of the biggest drivers of inequality and corporate privilege.

jrodefeld posted:

I get information from other sources and I'm well aware of the conventional narrative. But you are making some errors here, the first of which is your assertion that the Great Depression was "the ultimate climax of the old laissez faire order". This is a rhetorical trick that is designed to make us forget that the Federal Reserve had been in existence for twenty years prior to this crisis intervening into the economy and expanding bank credit, especially in the "roaring" twenties. This is hardly an example of "laissez faire" and the Austrian explanation of the business cycle blames central banking and expansionary monetary policy for creating an artificial boom due to malinvestment which leads to an inevitable crash. This is what Ludwig von Mises blamed for the Great Depression, so to claim that we had a libertarian "laissez-faire" economy for the decade or two before the Great Depression is dishonest.

So be clear that the Great Depression occurred under the Fed's watch and no economic crisis that occurred before the Fed was established could compare in either length or severity.

Furthermore, your contention that economic crises before the fed were "far more frequent and far more severe" is misleading. In the first place, you conveniently choose to start counting after the Great Depression so as to implicate the free market as having caused the greatest economic crisis in US history. But remember that libertarians and Austrian economists blame primarily central banking and artificial credit expansion for causing the business cycle, so you ought to be looking at pre-Fed and post-Fed periods not pre and post Great Depression.

Christina Romer, hardly a libertarian, found in her research that the numbers and dating used by the National Bureau of Economic Research exaggerated both the number and the length of economic downturns prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Contrary to your contention that the economic crises were "far more severe" before the Fed, economist George Selgin stated that they were "three months shorter on average and no more severe". The average peak to bottom was 7.7 months before the Fed as opposed to 10.6 in the period after World War 2.

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/WorkingPaper-2.pdf

The economist Richard Timberlake said "As monetary histories confirm,...most of the monetary turbulence - bank panics and suspensions in the 19th century - resulted from excessive issues of the legal tender paper money, and they were abated by the working gold standards of the time."

https://books.google.com/books?id=y...20time.&f=false



Even many mainstream economists have been reconsidering the narrative that was commonplace a few decades ago about the economic volatility before the Fed.

But, setting aside the issue of recessions for a moment, what about the value of the currency as a predictable store of value? During the entire period of the Gold Standard, through all the unprecedented economic growth, the value of the currency grew by 7%. This is a boon to savers who could accumulate dollars and simply put them away knowing that they will maintain or appreciate in value simply by saving them. Economic calculation could be made more predictably since the value of the currency was relatively stable.

Even John Kenneth Galbraith, no libertarian or fan of gold, had it correct: “In the last [19th] century in the industrial countries there was much uncertainty as to whether a man could get money but very little as to what it would do for him once he had it. In this [20th] century the problem of getting money, though it remains considerable, has diminished. In its place has come a new uncertainty as to what money, however acquired and accumulated, will be worth. Once, to have an income reliably denominated in money was thought…to be very comfortable. Of late, to have a fixed income is to be thought liable to impoverishment that may not be slow. What has happened to money?”

And the gold standard serves to create a limit on the expansion of the State, which is one reason why it is attractive to those who want a hard limit on the expansion of State power.

I think it is important to note hear that there were many shortcomings to the classical gold standard that we had in the 19th century and virtually no libertarians want an exact copy of those policies. We seek a new, 21st century hard money, or even the de-nationalization of money as Hayek proposed. Mistakes were undoubtedly made in the implementation and adherence to the gold standard in the 19th century, and we want to improve upon what we had then.

I've always wondered why there wasn't a popular left-wing "hard money" movement. Why wouldn't an independent, un-electable and audit-free group of private bankers having the power to expand the money supply at will and give low interest loans to private businesses and government not tend towards corruption and the enrichment of a privileged class at the expense of the middle class? This is in fact exactly what libertarians have been arguing. If you care for accountability in government whatsoever, there ought to be some limit to how much the money supply can be expanded on a whim. There is nothing special about gold inherently. It is simply a shiny metal and any other commodity or other mechanism which imposes discipline on monetary policy could suffice. Gold simply has a history of being chosen as money when people had the free choice of currency. It satisfies the requirements of money, being that it is divisible, durable, portable, scarce, etc.

So I'll just ask this question because I am genuinely curious. Forgetting the historical gold standard, why don't the left support a mechanism which limits the expansion of the money supply in order to limit inflation and curtail the enrichment of the corporate class and the endless expansion of the State? This, to me, seems like a very Progressive cause since this is one of the biggest drivers of inequality and corporate privilege.

jrodefeld posted:

So I'll just ask this question because I am genuinely curious. Forgetting the historical gold standard, why don't the left support a mechanism which limits the expansion of the money supply in order to limit inflation and curtail the enrichment of the corporate class and the endless expansion of the State? This, to me, seems like a very Progressive cause since this is one of the biggest drivers of inequality and corporate privilege.

jrodefeld posted:

I get information from other sources...

jrodefeld posted:

...and I'm well aware of the conventional narrative. But you are making some errors here, the first of which is your assertion that the Great Depression was "the ultimate climax of the old laissez faire order". This is a rhetorical trick that is designed to make us forget that the Federal Reserve had been in existence for twenty years prior to this crisis intervening into the economy and expanding bank credit, especially in the "roaring" twenties. This is hardly an example of "laissez faire" and the Austrian explanation of the business cycle blames central banking and expansionary monetary policy for creating an artificial boom due to malinvestment which leads to an inevitable crash. This is what Ludwig von Mises blamed for the Great Depression, so to claim that we had a libertarian "laissez-faire" economy for the decade or two before the Great Depression is dishonest.

GunnerJ posted:

Cool avatar, dude.

jrodefeld posted:

the Austrian explanation of the business cycle blames central banking and expansionary monetary policy for creating an artificial boom due to malinvestment which leads to an inevitable crash. This is what Ludwig von Mises blamed for the Great Depression

Who What Now posted:

Whoever did that is my new favorite person.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Hey, someone made Jrod's AV more honest!

Fake edit: It was me, I did it. I have $80 in the bank that I will use AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN until it's gone for him to keep that AV

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Who What Now posted:

You're a cool, person, Twerkteam. If you're ever in the Lansing area I'll buy you a drink.


Edit:

We should get a gang tag. The J-Crew.

jrodefeld posted:

I've always wondered why there wasn't a popular left-wing "hard money" movement. Why wouldn't an independent, un-electable and audit-free group of private bankers having the power to expand the money supply at will and give low interest loans to private businesses and government not tend towards corruption and the enrichment of a privileged class at the expense of the middle class? This is in fact exactly what libertarians have been arguing. If you care for accountability in government whatsoever, there ought to be some limit to how much the money supply can be expanded on a whim. There is nothing special about gold inherently. It is simply a shiny metal and any other commodity or other mechanism which imposes discipline on monetary policy could suffice. Gold simply has a history of being chosen as money when people had the free choice of currency. It satisfies the requirements of money, being that it is divisible, durable, portable, scarce, etc.

So I'll just ask this question because I am genuinely curious. Forgetting the historical gold standard, why don't the left support a mechanism which limits the expansion of the money supply in order to limit inflation and curtail the enrichment of the corporate class and the endless expansion of the State? This, to me, seems like a very Progressive cause since this is one of the biggest drivers of inequality and corporate privilege.

Bryter posted:

The Federal Reserve does not expand the money supply at will and has in fact not set target ranges for money supply growth in over 15 years.

jrodefeld posted:

Even John Kenneth Galbraith, no libertarian or fan of gold, had it correct: “In the last [19th] century in the industrial countries there was much uncertainty as to whether a man could get money but very little as to what it would do for him once he had it. In this [20th] century the problem of getting money, though it remains considerable, has diminished. In its place has come a new uncertainty as to what money, however acquired and accumulated, will be worth. Once, to have an income reliably denominated in money was thought…to be very comfortable. Of late, to have a fixed income is to be thought liable to impoverishment that may not be slow. What has happened to money?”

Literally The Worst posted:

hi jrode remember this post

it's the only time that you've ever addressed me, because you're a basic fuckin bitch with balls so tiny that if you put them in a drinking straw it'd look like kernels of corn rolling into a storm drain. you don't have the fuckin nads to address me unless i scream at you about what a loving piece of poo poo you are, and then you have the chutzpah to play internet tough guy.

so

now that we've established what a pussy rear end babyman you are, let's talk about minimum wage jobs, and how they're useless for getting better ones. tell me what your actual personal experience with these jobs is, because i would like to hear how your anecdote trumps mine. tell me about how dishwashing alone got you a job doing literally anything that wasn't for minimum wage or barely above (call center work, for example, paid me 10/hr. it was still a poo poo rear end job and i didnt really make enough to get by easily)

or are you too much of a chickenshit pansy to actually argue about things instead of just proclaiming them to be true, oval office

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Hey, someone made Jrod's AV more honest!

Fake edit: It was me, I did it. I have $80 in the bank that I will use AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN until it's gone for him to keep that AV