jirikiNorth Korea actually had better standards of living than South Korea until about 40 years ago, at which point improvements to efficiency (replacement of labour with capital goods, like a gang of workmen with pickaxes being replaced by one workman with a pneumatic drill) overcame them. Rather than pneumatic drill factories, the Koreans were building tank factories. The reason why, Jiriki, is because they feared that the US was going to invade them.
How do you come up with these arguments. Yes their military budget was massive like Soviet Union, like many totalitarian states have, but that is not the reason their agricultural industry was fucked up their while South had massive increase in agricultural productivity. The same thing in other production.
GayWell one reason is that the “modern economists” that you like turn out not to be the only economists in existence. Some other economists think that "the market" is a model/construct that represents only demand that is backed by money - if people demand something and don't have the money to be able to bid on it against others who do have money, driving up prices, the price mechanism will never reflect that demand.
According to which economist? The price can reflect only existing demand. Higher prices induce increased supply which pushes the price to the marginal cost.
GayProduction is geared towards profit rather than demand, so people without money will not have their needs met. The fact that one of your heroes, Hayek, actually advocated progressive taxation partly because of this principle unfortunately appears to have escaped elucidation for you on whatever shitty Austrian blogs you read.
Money is just intermediary that makes exchange easier because barter would require perfect information. In theory, you could have a perfect market economy without money at all. What you are saying is that some people cannot produce stuff someone else would like to trade with them voluntarily, so they have to force someone to buy their products or get paid some other way or reason. It is obvious there will be people who cannot work etc, the real question is whether these people are taken care by private or public means.
Also redistribution hurts incentives. Equality is kind of like how the pie is shared and economic growth is the speed how fast the size of it increases (this is from my textbook). The more you have former, the less you have letter. Many government redistributional things are likely to come pareto-inferior in higher timespan. If you think we need a welfare state, then fine I don't care - I am not interested in arguing about that with since we cannot agree on much simpler issues.
GayThe reason why I have a pretty healthy dose of scepticism regarding popular views amongst establishment economists is because a lot of them are, if not outright corrupt, pretty overly enamoured by the idea of promulgating views that will gain them tenure/a pay check
You can read about some of it here -
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Inequality-Thomas-Byrne-Edsall/dp/0393302504/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305477365&sr=1-3
I'm sorry but if you think your book which one guy has reviewed on Amazon (maybe it was you) claims to show why like several thousand (if not dozens of thousand) academic economists in the world have got the basics of their own profession wrong because of some world global corruption conspiracy, don't expect me to reply.
GayOr, if watching the facial contortions of liars is your thing, this film has some fun interviews-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_%28film%29
Movie as an argument. Is this a joke?
GayIt might also be worth pointing out that Austrian economics (let alone anarcho capitalism) is widely considered bunk by mainstream economists. So maybe you’d like offer your own response as to why you don’t just kneel to the consensus.
The thing is, I do respect mainstream economic consensus. They agree on things like price controls are bad, marxist ideology is a dead end etc. but then they have a million disagremeents, especially how much the government should intervene in the economy. I always respect economic-based arguments by good economists (even Paul Krugman). I have no problem with them. Almost all my opinions have been endorsed by some Nobel laurates.
GayDon't be stupid. I didn't say the current Intel production line was created by the public sector, I said computers and the internet were.
No they weren't. It wasn't that first there was no computer, government comes and bam we have a computer. First we had mathematics, then someone made mechanical devices to calculate mathematics, someone invents logic games, someone makes Neumann, somone makes prototypes etc. There were companies like IBM, Henschel involved. Just look at the damn
timeline. As you can see its full of steps, not a single big leap made by government.
GayThe fact that the private research was then turned over to private companies to refine specific products (and of course make genuine progress) is no more interesting than pointing out that the government believes in the market. The fact is that massive, massive funding of computer research during (and after) WW2 produced a knowledge base conducive to private investment.
Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his famous essay,
What is Seen and What Is Not Seen, that things that were produced by government can be seen but it is impossible to say hindsight in what would have been developed if people had kept their money. We are never going to see those things.
GayThis of course is but one example where the private sector is left inadequate when our destination is progress. The reason why is because for the capitalist, progress is incidental; it’s profit that is desired. When a society needs infrastructure, services and innovations that don’t provide an immediately obvious return on investment, the capitalist is no where to be seen.
GayBut it’s not just schools, railways, roads, hospitals, firemen, policemen, the courts; it’s also the projects that offer humanity a real road forward. Think of the human genome project, nuclear fusion and the LHC.. Who on earth in the private sector would have funded these initiatives, the fruits of which are yet to be fully realised. The answer is no one.
First of all. You might think this makes for a scientific analysis, but it doesn't actually. The question of public good is a debate in economic circles. Some economists left-wing ecnomists see public goods everywhere, indeed lighthouses were used as an example of a public good until Ronald Coase proved that market can and has provided such things aswell. You have to also remember that government crowds out private forces. Welfare states for example crowded out a lot of charity (and true caring aswell).
GayYou’re projecting problems that manifest in capitalist economies. Why on earth would a Marxist or socialist government deign “others not be allowed to use it” with regards to a new technology in order to protect private rent seeking? The whole point is that if some genius constructs a generator with an incredible energy coefficient, the state would appropriate it and put it into mass production in order for the whole of society to reap the rewards. Rent seeking and the co-opting of the state by private power is a problem for capitalist economies and in particular capitalist economies with a weak state, not Marxist ones.
Hahaha. Exactly like Marx. He thought as soon as you get "rid of those capitalist scum", the economy can be easily fixed, just a bit of algebra. Ops wait, need linear programming. Oh fuck, wasn't that easy. Hold on, I'll figure this out..
That is like saying when we produce an efficient way to produce food, the state should start running the farms. Yeah those things are called agricultural subsidies.
GayMy above response is basically the same for this (obviously I don’t support them, quite how you made that jump I have no idea), but I’d just like to point out how devastating this is for the argument of superior productivity within the private sector.
Well when you said that "let government intervention to the hands of private firms to make profit" is like company A saying that "the company B made profit out ouf
our idea". So it may not have been your point but it sounded like you were making the case for royalties or something.
GayWhat kind of effect do you think the dissolution of patents would have on private investment?
The book of Boldrin and Levine covers the issue of patents pretty well. A lot of Austrians are actuallly against IP (patents and copyright), and you might want to check
this video from 03:20 onwards, that is where I took the Wrights example from, its from the Boldrin book originally.
And if Patents are of any interest to you, the book is excellent but also Stpehan Kinsella's writings on mises.org should be interesting. He is a former patent attorney and was kind of sick of all the patent wars that did nothing but promote rent seeking.
Lots of arguments against IP can be made from economic theory to history of innovation. The problem with patents and IP is that they create artificial
scarcity to a place where there is not. We need property rights because real resources (like land and items) are scarce, but ideas are not. Everyone in the world can benefit from an idea because the marginal cost of information is zero.
I remember one of our more known politicians hearing from Indian prime minister that if medical patents were abolished, the health situation in India would improve considerably.
GayIf you mean how is the government going to track someone doing some covert plumbing jobs for a few extra pounds on the side then no, it’s not something I care about and you’d struggle pretty hard to find any Marxists who advocate a stasi 2.0 in regards to blunting inevitable black market activity. I’m not particularly worried about giving the government power to monitor transactions within certain limits though, because I’m also not worried about creating large elected and bureaucratic watchdogs and constitutional rights to ensure that any abuse of power is stifled.
Yeah well iirc. corectly Soviet Union's production was so inefficient that the black market outcompeted the state in many areas.
GayI would think “oh look it’s social justice” and then probably feel rather bummed out at becoming poor. I’m not arguing that rich people would enjoy having their wealth redistributed; I’m saying it’s the right thing to do.
My point is the same as it was with Bangladesh, it wouldn't improve the living standards of the people in the developing countries a lot and would probably create perverse incentives. In fact, you need to have supply side in order to be able to afford food or clothes on constant bases, fixing he demand side can only go little way ahead.
GayWait a second I thought you said you weren’t an ancap? If you are then can you say so and if you aren’t then can you answer this question properly please.
It is a proper answer. Milton Friedman said pretty much the same and he sure isn't an ancap. Ancap's dont want state at all.
GayThis is tautological and doesn’t respond to my point that no one inherently owns property or resources on this planet; meaning that if you use them privately, then you are in effect guilty of the same imposition you identified with regard to government preventing others from setting up rival internet services (the idea of any private network actually being able to set up a better service than what the state could produce is laughable by the way).
Well given that most Internet is owned by private means your statement kind of falls on its head. Indeed most of the network infrastructure is owned by ISPs and their collabaration organizations (like non-profit organization FICIX in the Finland). Internet is great example of what people working freely with each other can achieve.
GayPut simply, when you take land or use a resource, you are saying “you can’t use this” to someone, the same way a state would be taking internet services from capitalists would be saying “I think it’s time we started running this a bit better and you stopped bleeding the poor to fund your car collection, dickface”
When your understanding of marginal utility is at this level, you should read more economics.
GayWell that’s funny because the only ethical principle you’ve so far professed axiomatic is the deontological right to private property.
I ain't no dogmatic Austrian. While I find some axiomatic ethics useful, any sane person needs to be open to proper consequential ethics. But usually me consequential ethics reasoning means strong economic arguments (by professors of economics).
GayHearing this from someone who subscribes to an economic theory that outright rejects empirical falsification is pretty lol. Even if we were talking about the conclusions of economists who don’t subscribe to the Austrian rubbish, the appellation of “science” to their theories is the science of sociology and history, not the science of chemistry and physics.
You should really investigate Austrian arguments better before calling them rubbish.
GayHong Kong owes its success to being a tax haven protectorate of a world spanning empire. Comparing it to actual nation-states with geopolitical concerns and economies geared towards resource extraction is dumb.
According to which economist?
GayYou were quite clearly trying to justify Africa’s impoverishment in terms of their intellectual failings. Maybe you thought such an argument should have been read as a defence of eating chocolate cake, but given the context of the remark being made as a reply to my allegation that capitalism exploits the impoverished and that our wealth is essentially built on it, I think my interpretation probably falls a little short of “putting words in your mouth”. Feel free to elaborate on exactly why you started talking about African IQ levels though Jiriki.
I am not justifying anyone's death. If a study concludes that the situation in Africa is because of weather, IQ or whatever how is that justifying anyone's death?! How can seeking the truth be some kind of gravejumping.
And I think if they just could run same policies as Hong Kong, or perhaps some Western countries could set up Hong Kong type charter cities, they could improve considerably and make beacon of progress for others to imitate. Why they haven't been able to reach better market policies is a more difficult question that involves politics, history and perhaps IQ, but that wasn't
my study. I point that as a one
possible explanation and you just go on for several posts how I'm using low IQ as justifying their death, great logic.
And I didn't "start talking about IQ levels", I said "excluding things like IQ" regards to Africa. I gave the economic reasons why their policies are not working. Why they have such bad policies is another question. IQ is one hypothesis, and it isn't mine.
GayOf course I don’t think CDOs were the only reason for the crisis you clown. Marxist thought is a fucking laundry list of exactly why systemic problems in capitalist economies will lead to crises like this. But the IMMEDIATE reason the economy tanked is indeed because of CDOs. Now can you please produce the comedy routine I requested in my last post, which is for you to describe what the Austrian solution to the CDO problem would be.
First of all.
Gayyou clown
Gaythe comedy routine
How do you expect us to have a decent conversation if you can't stop just adding ad hominems and all kinds of ridiculations all the time. What does it tell of your thought process. Why is that so many left-wing people act like these. Tom did this before.
Austrian solution would probably to remove central pank, don't do do bail outs (like in 1921) and remove like most federal government agencies and regulation. But the question of how much central bank affects business cycles is a scientific question and even if the answers turns out to be "considerable", then it doesn't necessite an "Austrian solution" of removing all bank regulation.
GayWe weren’t discussing who had the burden of evidence, we were just exchanging case studies in the effectiveness of public Vs private management. The point I was making was that putting forward your case examples as
as good as public ones isn’t good enough. You need to show that they’re
better, for the reasons I gave in my last post.
Look the academic debate whether government should run the production is over. I'll just give you
Use of Knowledge in a Society by F.A. Hayek. It is in my opinion the best argument against command economy, and it still is among the Top 20 articles by AER. I think in fact it is probably the best insight to anything. I didn't understand the significance of it at first but over the years I've come to appreciate it more and more. It is pretty thereotical in the nature, but I think that is at the bottom of it.
GayAs fun as it would be asking you to elaborate on just what grounds you were ascribing the ENTIRE OF HUMAN PROGRESS since 1800 to the “free market”, you’re going off on a completely irrelevant tangent here. Equating feudal age government achievements with the potential of modern day Marxist/socialist ones is the equivalent of me equating current day laissez faire markets with stone age communities that lacked any formal government. i.e it’s fucking stupid.
First of all, if you socialize all the means of production, you are going to have decide who is going to do what. This is exactly the Marx ignored, he didn't realize how complex a market economy is and just cleansing capitalists doesn't solve the problem of designing. Lenin had to figure something out there.
GayAnd have you yet concluded in your thesis whether or not we have reached the “optimal” language? The fact we have more than one language would probably be a pretty quick route to suggesting that we haven’t. We have reached a
sufficient language that allows us to run the society we live in, but that’s not what the hardline free marketeer needs to show emergent order results in. They don’t need to show that the markets are “quite good” at self regulating; they need to show that they’re
perfect.
On the contrary, do you need to show Internet is perfect to prove that it doesn't need government intervention to work? There's nothing perfect in this world because humans are imperfect.
GayIf people like you got into power google wouldn't exist because Microsoft would have obliterated any competition by not allowing anything they deemed a possible threat to run on windows.
Like pirated software? Yeah very easy. The difference is that I do not want any power. All political power corrupts. And second of all, can you say which economist backs up your claim? In fact running monopolies under international competition is incredible hard.
Anti-trust laws have likely caused more problems than they have created.
GayThen I guess we could talk about the billion other examples where a market leader could essentially monopolise a sector by using the numerous adavantages such a position endows a company with (and i mean the advantages outside of state manipulation) and how your political ideology would be left standing there saying "don't worry mate, the market will work it out soon enough, just you wait!!"
The government run economy will work out soon in North korea, just you wait!!
In fact historically, before the neoclassica explanation of monopoly, nevermind any anti-trust laws, monopoly was defined as
state-sponsored privilege to produce something. Like intellectual monopoly, where government limits who can produce something. In our legislation pharmacy and taxi monopolies are an example of that. Massive rent seeking.
GayAlso known as the thought experiment that demonstrates how private companies will rape the world (commons) into oblivion despite the fact that they will burn along with the rest of us. You keep bringing up climate change, so maybe you’d like to explain how your ideal neo mad max society would deal with companies who appear to be killing our planet yet don’t want to stop doing it. Is environmental regulatory legislation somehow preventing the CEOs of polluting companies realising the effects of what they're doing? Would ending environmental legislation sudenly result in these compines suddenly deciding that actually yes, ending pollution would be a good idea?
You can read about externalities and their from Wikipedia or your nearest Economic textbook. I can't be arsed to explain everything to you.
GayThe actual reason why these companies continue to pollute despite it being bad for everyone is because to the institutionalised capitalist, things like world destruction are considered "externalities", their primary concern is producing good figures for the next quarter. It's the government that has the foresight, will, and mandate to make sure such "externalities" like starvation and environmental destruction are actually dealt with.
If you like ie. a Pigovian solution to externalities, then fine I have no problem with that. There are certain problems with that too.
GayIt’s axiomatic in the sense that you consider it the correct method to analyse data. The fundamental axioms concerning the data (how humans act) that you feed into that analysis was described below that paragraph, which you didn’t respond to:
“Markets have all the information that governments have in the same sense that the universe has all the information that the government has. The problem is that the market isn’t an agency that regulates in any meaningful sense.
IF individuals were rational (they aren’t, not even in a nominal sense), and IF they were solely motivated by self interest (they aren’t), and IF they were omniscient (they aren’t), then the notion of the markets creating a truer democracy than elected politicians could ever achieve might become something other than a very, very depressing fetish of rich elites and useful idiots.”
Like I said the debate over means of production is over, I can't arsed with this anymore. This is so full of logical problems. I mean I can say that if politcians were rational, non-self-interested and have perfect information, socialism could work. Otherwise it would become a very depresisng fetish of rich elites and useful idiots. Was that meaningful academic analysis? No, and neither was yours.
GayI’ve already said that the state is hugely affected by private power, but there’s also the fact that while just about every mainstream politician espouses neo liberal mantra, a lot of them know that outsourcing jobs to China isn’t actually a good idea.
It is, comparative advantage proves this.
Ask Paul Krugman, the intellectual leader of American left-wing.
GayAh yes, another piece of game theory that assumes everyone to literally be a psychopath. Great. Out of interest, why do you think there exist fringe parties? Given that people in those parties know they essentially stand 0% chance of getting elected?
Are you seriously saying that as a serious argument? Andy got all this figured out, he just skipped whole academic research by saying that they think they everyone is a psycopath, smart.
GaySo what you actually mean is that because you’ve managed to cram part of the capitalist driven exploitation of Africa into the “government did it!!!!!” paradigm, that you’ll now let them off the hook for just having a low IQ. Good thing this doesn’t come off as you being a dogmatically ideological retard or anything.
Oh please, can you not enter a debate without calling other people ideological retards? Is it really that hard? And you are going against whole mainstream academia with marxist doctrine supported and calling other people ideological retards, impressive.
You can't really give up on the IQ thing can you? It is like mentioning Austrians, it seems to set off some kind of a emotional overdrive with you.
GayYou have literally never read a book by anyone other than a right wing fanatic, have you. I’ve actually already given you a specific example not just of famine under a market system, but one that actually demonstrated a state response was superior in dealing with it (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bihar_famine_of_1873%E2%80%9374
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378 )
Oh right, in the 1870s? That recent, gosh. What was their GDP per capita? 100$? I mean, yeah famines can happen in market economies but when you let prices function, they bring higher supply because people respond to monetary incentives. I don't actually deny that redistributional means on the demand side cannot work, I just think the supply side should be left to work itself out.
GayAs for the “no atrocities”. Is this a joke? The colonization of Africa? India? Latin America? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?
Oh right, so markets are to blame for government colonisation of Africa and whatever.
GayWait let me guess…. Capitalist doctrine doesn’t explicitly state that you should invade other countries in order to create markets and ensure supplies of essential resources. Maybe you should actually try and answer the first point I made in my last post this time – “Sorry but the status quo is the manifest realisation of implementing a capitalist system in the real world. Remember that argument? It’s your one.”
Where did I say I defend status quo? I've said Western countries are imperfect examples of capitalist countries. I have never approved any invasions, stop putting words into my mouth. What US or UK does is
your problem. Capitalist states, communist states, fedual states have all invaded other countries. Politicians and kings are like that. Power corrupts.
GayThe stuff about debating being “overrated” and NS/starcraft is rambling nonsense and I’m not going to respond to it because this post is far too big as it is and these tangents aren’t at all interesting or important. I’ve also left out some of your really irritating habitual recycling of generalised points (like the end of your post)
Me too. I can't be be arsed to respond to economic analysis by a linguist, just pasting several pargraphs text and expecting me to explain that. Maybe I will start doing that too, oh definitely!
