Sell Austrian economics to me

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This must be addressed.

This thread is devolving away from the issue.

 

I don't necessarily agree with Keynesian, Austrian, Chicago, or any other economic theory, because I am currently learning macro-economics. Basic macro-economics and micro-economics is classically-based. From my perspective, learning classical macro-economics and micro-economics, and then examining all alternative theories to make an educated decision on what you prefer is the proper way to determine your economic viewpoints. However, this is merely my opinion, you can agree or disagree with me.

 

The reason I stray away from theoretical arguments with people on this board is they lack the simple understanding of how our current system works operationally. As in what role Government spending plays in our macro economy. If you are still under the impression that Government spending must come from the private sector, then any theory you follow will be useless to argue since you don't even have the fundamentals of the economy correct. It's impossible to argue economic theory when you don't even know how the thing works.

 

I know, government spending comes either from the private sector, or from the government proceeds from selling animal spirits. Or wait, maybe its that the animal spirits come with buckets o spirit cash from the spirit world. Hmm, something like that.

 

Most people argue from the standpoint of alternative theory (Keynesian, Austrian, Chicago, Supply-Side, etc.). The problem is that if you don't comprehend classical macro-economic and micro-economic principles, you will not fully understand alternative theories, thus arguing with one hand tied behind you back. I'm taking an advanced placement macro-economics class this year, and one of the last lessons we will have is on alternative theories due my aforementioned argument.

 

I absolutely agree. Economics is an incredibly complex field at times, and the fact that anyone here could rant and rave with rabid certainty regarding their view, without obvious understanding of all fields of economics is shocking.

I know enough to know what I don't know. I've gone through basic economics, read Galbraith, a little Friedman, a few random authors I can't even remember, Mises, read different takes on the causes of the great depression, watched dozens of videos and still.. I don't entirely trust my opinions on the matter.

I'm forcing myself to finish reading Keynes and constantly revisit classic economic texts. Even then, I will likely have to go back over Austrian economics, throw in a little bit of devil's advocate Chomsky reading and hope that I am able to balance all of the view points (along with what I know of the history of money) against the reality of what has been transpiring with the monetary system in recent years and try to form a very knowledgable opinion.

How much economic understanding do you think the average poster here really has?

 

They know enough about an alternative theory to support their arguments in a sophistic manner.

 

Math in evolution? Where?

In order to cross 1 meter you must first cross .25 meters. In order to cross any distance you must first cross an infinite amount of finite distances. And infinite doesn't exist outside of math. Math is a tool, not a basis of reality. As an engineer I can tell you the math is *never* right. Never once have I ever seen the math completely line up with reality.

Like it or not, his theories derive from austrians whether or not he agrees with them. I've seen him quote mises and Hayek. Einstein believed Newton was wrong, that doesn't mean he didn't borrow calculus from him.

See above. Disagreement, and derivation are two different things. I disagree with my father on many things, but my views are undoubtedly alterations of his views.

Keynesian, isn't what keynes actually taught. Keynesianism today is a trick to play on the masses that you can spend ridiculous amounts of money and the economy will benefit. He also said to cut spending in the boom cycle, which never happens. He also said alot of things which modern day keynesians ignore, because it doesn't fit their political motive to keep the power they hold and keep getting voted in. The dems love having the keynesian money spent on them. And the ones they put in power love spending money on them because they get the power.

 

Determining the age of bones, gauging time frames in which such species existed.

So if I give you two cookies and you give me one back, you don't have one cookie?

Of course he obviously made contributions to economic thought. But he was a philosopher, there is the actions of people, then there is recording those actions of people. Us mainstream economists use the data from individuals actions to try and determine what can be done to reach a certain targeted growth. Economies can be more controlled than one would think... we actors are not as irrational as people think, and when we are irrational, the Govt is set up to be the rational actor and counteract our irrational actions.

Keynes is also a trick to force feed conservatives in to thinking the Govt is taking over. If you apply just basic math to "Keynes", every President for the past 80 years used a Keynesian approach to recessions. No one technically uses a Keynesian approach to economic growth periods.

Even Friedman cronies like Martin Feldstein understands the mathematics behind stimulus and mathematical reasons for recessions.

 

What "math" does Keynesian economics use? Equations that don't work when applied to real life?

 

Your embrace of economic philosophies depends a lot on how you view the world, society and your place in it. In one side are those who believe that the world and society is for everyone and so everyone should derive benefit from its advances. On the other are those who believe that that the world ans society is for individuals to take what they can get from it.

To extend this view to economics, there are those who believe that the economy should serve society and those who believe that society should serve the economy. Socialists are in the former camp, Austrians in the latter. Keynesians and Monetarists fall somewhere in between.

Austrians start by making the case that all human activity is based on the individual rational consideration of purely economic choices. Thus, society must be organized to best serve only economic considerations.


It is from this completely unsupportable foundation, entirely discredited by actual research into human motivation, that the entire edifice of their belief is built. It does have undeniable appeal to selfish anti-social psychopaths because it provides many solid economic arguments for their activities if the basic foundation of their premise is ingored, forgotten, or otherwise brushed aside.

It is like the chcken and the egg, which came first, the economy or society? Austrians chose the chicken, everyone else chooses the egg.

 

Economic misconceptions are commonplace on this forum. One misconception is that economics is the study of money. On the contrary, economics is the study of scarcity.

 

The country wouldn't go into a depression if the government weren't interfering in the first place.

 

free markets lack government privilege to select entities, the heart of corporatism, and my answer doesn't have to "better" anything.

 

Actually, even if Austrian economics didn't exist, I don't believe that violence against peaceful people serves "society".

Austrian economics makes no normative statements about how society "should" be organized. Libertarians may do that, but libertarianism is a political philosophy and the Austrian school is solely about economics. You attempt to inject morality into the economic system.

Also, Libertarians don't try to organize society. Instead, they prefer that everyone be left alone to peacefully organize their affairs and their associations (which is society) without interference by government and its threats and use of violence.

The basic flaw of your premise is that an economic system should take into account anything other than economic transactions. You are building a strawman and attacking it.

What research is that? Is there a body of research that shows that people act commonly without purpose or intent? Just because people make choices that you wouldn't make, does not make their choices irrational. Particularly their economic choices. Even the schizophrenic who acts on the voices he hears is acting with purpose and intent. While his mind, to a sociologist, may be providing information that is not rational, you cannot deny that his choices when he acts are rational because he acts with purpose and intent. A zombie, on the other hand, is irrational. Perhaps you have evidence that the zombie apocalypse has already occurred? If so, I think they are all working at the DMV and the post office.

So, please provide this interesting research and we can have a conversation about the meaning of rational when applied to economics as opposed to what is more likely a word with strong moral overtones for you.

This just proves my point. Your claim is that an anti-social psychopath is not able to act with purpose and is therefore is irrational when making economic decisions. You are here applying subjective morals to an objective system of thought.

Utterly meaningless drivel.

 

empirical evidence ? Mathematics ?
You don't even know the variables, let alone a functional relationship ?
You couldn't model the behavior of ten individuals in a room, forget billions in an economic system. You just don't know it yet.

 

You are obviously ignorant of the history of philosophy, logic, and science. That is no surprise. If you'd like to educate yourself, you can start with Socrates, who could be referred to as the father of logic (or that could be Plato or Aristotle, also philosophers) and a classic philosopher if there ever was one. From there, there's much to be gleaned from the Greeks and Romans, but you can also fast forward to the Renaissance and all of the famous natural philosophers of the time, including those who discovered the scientific method and much of the laws of nature that we refer to today.

The word "scientist" didn't even appear until the 19th century. Up until then, "scientists" referred to themselves as natural philosophers. Anyway, you can go tell all of them that philosophy is the opposite of analysis, logic, math, and the acquisition of knowledge.

Considering your ignorance of history and science, I'm thinking that it matters little what you'll "go with" as you don't have much reason behind why you would go anywhere.

 

In that case I guess austrian is mathematical because it's about the economy, which has numbers in it!

Lol, Darwin didn't use a spec of math in his theory, he observed birds on an island and concluded they are related to other birds. And that they specialized in such a manner that gave them the most offspring. There isn't one number in that.

Math is a derivation of logic, thus logic has all uses of math...and more. Austrian school is a logical theory, that simply says when people are open to consequences for their actions, they make smarter actions.

You obviously missed the numerous parts of my post where I define the fact that reality is not math. If you want numbers to go along with austrian school, look at the only depression we had which the government sat on it's hands...the recession of 1921. Quickest and most painless recession in american history. OOO numbers! Look at Japan stagnant for all of the 90's, more numbers.

The whole basis of the austrian school is that we learn from our mistakes. Find me one simple occasion where the government can act more rationally than people. Aside from police, military, firefighting, and infrastructure. Give me a good one that actually involves buying and selling a good.

Really? You think the government is trying to turn conservatives against it? What? I thought the government was a rational actor?

Why would the government act any more rationally than the people running it anyways?

Understanding isn't agreeing. And I understand them too, I understand that they don't work. When a stimulus works it's the tax cuts not the spending, but I've never seen one work in the long term. When a recession happens in a large economy it's usually an external force. I.e. CRA, OPEC, Dustbowl, fraudulent .com businesses.

Actually most austrians believe themselves to be utilitarian. I don't know where you get your "facts", but you should probably stop watching that channel.

 

While Keynesians pretend that Austrians are just simple minded, they are forced to overly simplify the impacts of price fixing in order to argue in favor of setting the price of liquidity. Then they blame "free" market forces for the resulting uneven inflation that leads to asset bubbles. Yet when they point to those forces (margin purchases of stocks in the 20s, real estate speculation before the most recent Fed created bubble) they are only explaining why the bubble that central planners created took a particular shape, they don't explain why it exists in the first place (excess liquidity follows the path of least resistance to create a bubble). Otherwise they would be forced to admit that no individual or group can possibly central plan, and Keynes is shown for the hack that he always was.

No amount of math can help you if you completely misunderstand what causes a recession in the first place. Keynesian Economics is like a modern version of Astrology. My condolences to those who spent the time and money to get a PhD in this garbage.

 

So, I should stop reading Von Mises writings on human behavior which was the foundation for his economic theories which are the underpinnings of Austrian economics?

OK, good advice. It is all crap anyway.

If, as you claim, Austrian economics has veered into utilitarianism, which is not where Von Mises started, it is definitely regressing in a convoluted downward spiral of ethical misdirection towards a method of explaining pure selfishness as a form of morality.

 

The austrian solution is that job scarcity will never exist, because if it does, people who are left out of jobs will simply starve to death and thus no longer exist such that they need jobs anymore. It would make sure that job scarcity rarely exists, but not in a very good way IMO.

The keynesian solution is to run from problems by creating money out of thin air in the hopes that spending will increase aggregate demand and that more people will have jobs. That's very risky.

My solution would be to enforce reasonable responsible reproduction standards so that unproductive people who couldn't support their kids, didn't have 8 kids. However I also believe that making everything absolutely private is dangerous. I accept what I call "public property rights" for this reason, as well as private property rights.

 

Austrian economics doesn't support selfishness it supports non-intervention of the government. Those are two completely different things, the government is not the only body capable of compassion. Austrian economics just says that the government fails at helping people. It's a denial of big government, not a denial of compassion.

Read above. The only way to stop people from having 8 kids, that they can't support, is to let them feel the consequences of their actions. It is not a denial of compassion, it's a denial of irresponsibility. If there are people who do not deserve the pain they bring upon themselves, people will just as you do feel compassion for them and *privately* aid them. The austrian school simply says the private sector can make decisions of who needs what, better than the government. And it's true, compare who our non-profit and charity organizations (which have as much $$ as the public sector) support and who our government supports. The charities help people who not only need the money but are willing to seek it out and help themselves, while the government simply makes the needy complacent to their problems and encourages them.

The basic fault in non-austrian principles, as with all market transactions, is that central planning cannot possibly make better decisions than the market. And it really is ludicrous to think otherwise, that a select few politicians can guess the true value or need...better...than perhaps millions of people making minute adjustments in their decisions.

 

And make these 8 kids, who didn't ask to be here, starve.

And also flood the market with people who need jobs but don't have them, contributing to unemployment percentage.

 

I hear this alot, as a libertarian. You think this is the first time I've heard this?

First you need to make an actual argument. Tell me, show me, make an argument about how 8 people are going to starve because x family isn't going to get free money. It's not going to happen. How are 8 people not going to support themselves? Give me a break. Secondly, what makes you think that you're the only bleeding heart in the entire world? You think that the government is the only one capable of helping these people? Wrong. Charity is a multihundred billion dollar industry in the united states.

Overpopulation is not a problem in the united states, our population is close to stagnant. The only reason our population is growing is because of illegal aliens.

People who need jobs but don't have them, are either not looking for a job or not capable of being productive. A truly motivated person will work for almost nothing if he has to. Most people collecting unemployment, however, are simply waiting around for the golden ticket of job offers, not realizing they are simply not worth what they think they are.

Finally, the nail in the coffin of bleeding heart liberals. If you're such a bleeding heart, why in the hell are we giving money to people who unemployed when overseas there are people who are starving. Riddle me this, why is that unemployed person more important than a human life? The answer is, you. You want the security net. You know you aren't going to starve, so you don't give a flying (*)(*)(*)(*) about them, you know that if we have social programs you can be a couch potatoe if you ever are fired for being worthless. You're greedy, for taking money from the rich and giving it to the less rich, instead of giving it to the poor. 50% of our budget, that's 20% of our gdp, goes to giving away free (*)(*)(*)(*) to people who don't need it. All I desire is that if you're going to take 20% of gdp, give it to the people who need it. Not joe shmoe who (*)(*)(*)(*)ed his own life up, give it to the haitian who hasn't eaten in a week. That means medicare, and social security should be replaced by foreign aid. I'm calling your bluff, be the true bleeding heart liberal that you think you are. Instead of buying internet, or a flat screen tv, buy food for a month for a foreign child. If you are so truly compassionate you will not have any of the luxuries the poorest of the poor do not have. But this won't happen because you are not willing to make the sacrifices you condemn others for not making. You want the social status of bleeding heart, without any of the work it takes to really help.

And besides, the more wealth I create the more I am capable of giving away. The whole theory that it is more efficient to take money than let me donate it myself, is simply bunk. I can spend my money better than you, because I actually earned it. And the more money I have, the more I can earn, and the more I can share. The more people I can hire, the more money I can donate, and the more wealth I can create.

Why does a homeless man in my coffee shop have internet and a laptop? Because the rich were aloud to do there thing, without some angel omnipresent central planner telling them how to spend their money.

 

It's tempting to insult you for shoving words in my mouth, but I'll restrain. I didn't say anything about "free money". I mentioned preventing the parents who couldn't support kids viably, from doing so. Otherwise they're creating human beings and then exposing them to a difficult life, beyond said human beings' control.

That's unjust towards these kids, IMO. They don't deserve that.

If there is a resource and/or job scarcity (the two go hand in hand), then of course they might not be able to support themselves, or at least live a very rough impoverished life.

That doesn't address the lack of jobs and resources problem. Your solution is to let them starve that way they no longer need jobs, because they're dead. My solution is to prevent unproductive incompetent parents from making them in the first place.

Perhaps. But that's totally irrelevant. I'm saying IF an overpopulation problem exists, that this is how we *should* deal with it. Reading comprehension.

That's an idiotic view of reality. If there simply aren't enough jobs or resources out there, then overpopulation is the problem.

Look at certain places in starving Africa. If you lived there, you wouldn't have a job either. Would it be solely because you're a lazy retarded piece of crap? Or because there would be a lack of resources and jobs?

You seem to lack critical thinking skills as well as decency.

As I said, the solution isn't necessarily "free money/wealth" in the first place. You're purposely trying to bastardize my arguments, like a fool.

I wouldn't expect any more from someone with absurd senseless theories like that humans lost their fur due to overheating because of fire that they developed, LOL!!!!