Sell Austrian economics to me

There is no appeal. After all, they're Austrians.

Could I interest you in Australasian economics?

 

While your taxing the rich to pay for this un-enforcable program. You are killing potential jobs for them.

Job scarcity is not a problem outside over-regulated economies. As a bleeding heart, you probably agree people are naturally greedy. What makes you think people are suddenly going to stop demanding products/services? (and thus jobs)

Really it is? I was unaware of that. Thanks for informing me on what my opinion is. No. My solution is to get the (*)(*)(*)(*) out of the way of the only wealth-creating sector in the universe, the private sector.

No, this is an oversimplified completely misinformed opinion. If there isn't enough jobs nobody is willing to pay a worker *and* no one is willing to work. The only way to pay a worker is via investment. When we have the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the world, 40% of our gdp is spent on the government, 50% of middle and upper class income is given straight to taxes. This is an extremely investment hindering economy. Jobs, which are *always* always always always, paid via investment. Are not going to be there.

It would be because they live in an authoritarian dictatorship, and they have no rich people to offer them jobs. Notice a theme here? When you take the money from the rich you have no jobs. Government spending leads to poverty.

All I suggested was that you stop spending *my* money on the "needy" and start spending it on the truly needy, in africa. What is indecent about that? So which is it, are you a bleeding heart, or are you a greedy freeloader?

Any and all government programs are funded by wealth. By suggesting government does anything on any subject, you are suggesting free money is used.

It's not absurd...we are one of the only mammals without fur, and we are the only mammals which can shelter and warm ourselves without it.

If you think this is absurd you really should just shoot yourself in the balls, to prevent yourself from reproducing.

 

This trickle down theory crap is shot by two things:

1. the rich are doing better than ever before today. There are more than 1,000 billionaires. And wealth disparity is also increasing.

Yet, the U.S. is suffering a lack of jobs. How do you explain that? You can't, using trickle down logic. Period, no debate. And,

2. What's so different about 1 billionaire investing 1 billion dollars, and a million people each investing a thousand dollars? Why would 1 person investing a billion dollars necessarily have to be far superior, or superior at all, to many people investing the exact same amount?

You completely ignore resource scarcity. If you have 1,000 square miles with only a limited number of buildings and equipment (including restaurants, apartments, factories, vehicles, etc. etc. etc.; basically, the means of production), you can only shove so many people in that 1,000 square miles until the apartments are way overcrowded, until every restaurant and factory has every possible job position filled, and until it's resources simply, mathematically, do not meet the requirements of realistically sustaining the population, prosperously.

The same goes for any number of square miles, whether it's 1,000, or the entire Earth's surface. Period, no debate.

Yet another thing that baffles me about "right wingers". Guess what perhaps the biggest private entity in the world is? GOVERNMENT!!!

Government is not a public entity. It's operated by special interests. Anyone can theoretically become a member of the government, but the same goes for any other private entity.

There's not even any such thing as the "public sector". No organization in existence includes everyone. That's bogus.

I suggest that saving Africa in the way I'd like (which is to first largely slow down or even halt their reproduction and contract their population, then provide them with the resources and training to develop an economy) would be prohibitively expensive at this point. That's not anyone's fault.

The same cannot be said about impoverished people in this country. If it were even feasible to do this with everyone around the world, then yes I'd support it. But it's not feasible. THAT is why I don't support it. It'd be a futile effort.

 

Incorrect, another baseless statement. Even if it were true, wealth is absolute taking money from someone does not create wealth.

I can't? I just (*)(*)(*)(*)ing did. 40% spending of GDP, 50% of income is taxes at a measley $80k/year, and we have regulations which hinder business out the whazoo.

Thats what YOURE arguing, you're arguing that central planning can be superior to the ultimately infinite accuracy of the market in determining the value of investments and resources and jobs.

Then I guess your argument is irrelevant until the earth is fully occupied? Way to pigeonhole yourself into that corner.

This is ridiculously alarming. You believe that a private entity has the right to use force to enforce it's agenda? The government is NOT a private entity, it is supposed to uphold our rights and that is it. It is not supposed to act as a business. That is completely unconstitutional too, read the 10th amendment.

Did I ever use the term literally? AFAIK you're the one who brought up the "public sector".

Your saying, its economically unfeasable to give food to people who are starving? But it is economically feasible if...what? What makes it unfeasable? In your excuses it seems you've tied a knot of logic.

There is absolutely no reason to be helping anyone in america, until we help the truly needy elsewhere. Triage.

This is why the bleedingheart approach is irrational, illogical, and usually a form of excuse to be greedy.

 

What exact regulations are you talking about?

Central planning has never been something I've advocated. I advocate regulation of certain potentially dangerous products.

But, still, trickle down theory says that the rich are usually better investors because they're rich. Maybe the idea is that because they're so smart to have gotten rich, that they must be better investors. Who knows. I don't buy it either way; they hoard wealth, as evidenced by corporate titans of today.

The Earth is already by far past that point. Droves of starving jobless people exist in China, India, Africa etc.

There comes a point when an area is so overpopulated, it can't viably support itself. Any rational person must realize that. If you stuff too many people in one area with a finite limited amount of resources, there simply won't be enough resources to go around.

Having forceful entities such as government or mafias stealing things or inhibiting growth, isn't the entire explanation, even if it is part of it.

Yet a lot of self-proclaimed libertarians support making the police and military private businesses!! They do! Listen to certain posters on this very forum.

We'd have to largely somehow contract China and India and Africa's populations before it would be even remotely viable. They have so many starving people, it'd be absolutely impossible to give them all jobs, either directly or over a long period of time, reforming their nations.

No, the perspective you're taking simply assumes that you don't need any start-up resources in order to create wealth. It assumes that the restaurants that make food don't need spatulas and ovens and building materials for the building and wood for the chairs in order to operate, and that factories don't need metal and plastic and wood and laborers to create it's products. It assumes that you don't need a lot of resources to feed and water the human beings who make said transactions.

It's just simple ridiculousness.

 

Watch the CNN business channel on a weekday, or the fox news business channel. Probably 3-4 times an hour they have a business owner on the show talking about how it costs him i.e. 30% more to build a skyrise in NY then 1 mile across the border in NJ.

I'm a petroleum engineer, I provide the very most important fuel to the economy. It gets groceries to the store, it gets homes heated, it gets food to starving people in africa. But we have one such regulation where we pay a government worker $300k to come out for *one day* and say "yea you can drill here where you've been drilling for 30 years." How many cents cheaper would a gallon of milk be if we didn't have that one rule? And there are thousands and thousands of these regulations. One time they checked our pipeline for leaks, which we weren't using because it had a leak in it (yes we told them), they turned it on anyways leaked maybe 2 barrels of gas (probably enough for 2 barbeques), and then they fined us for the leak, and the gas they leaked.

To what point? You can always say more more more. What point is satisfactory in regulating "dangerous" products? Water is dangerous in large amounts! Should we hire 1,000,000 regulators for $40k/year to peak in through peoples windows to make sure they don't drink more than 8 glasses of water a day?

Let me let you in on a secret, the rich are rich because they saved money and invested. The poor are poor because they spend too much. Some simple calculus tells us that a man making $40k a year at age 18, can retire when hes 25 if he follows one simple rule, dont spend more than you need.

0 = te^rt - e^r/(e^r - 1)

A measely 8% interest saving $20k/year will return you $20k on the 8th year in interest alone. 8% is an easy, easy, find.

No it isn't, I'm living with 2 other people on 2 acres of land.

I don't realize that. Because that point hasn't been reached and I don't believe it ever will be. What point has been reached is that wealth is so squandered by the government the poor are doomed.

Look at the countries with the lowest revenue per GDP and you will find the countries with the most prosperity in the past 10 years. Qatar, which had a GDP of 20 billion, now has a gdp of 100 billion. If you're telling me the poor are not in on any of that wealth creation you are simply delusional. The 500% increase is because of their 2% revenue/gdp. America is at 27%. CHINA is at 17%, the "flagship" communist country in the world has a lower tax rate than us.

The difference is that the military and police uphold rights. You're saying a private entity has the right to redistribute wealth forcefully. Is that not the definition of a mafia?

It doesn't matter, $1 is going to help china more than it's going to help 300 lb joe shmoe with his flat screen tv, Iphone, 3 kids, and HBO.

No, you're perspective assumes that! because you're taking money out of the hands of the INVESTORS WHO PROVIDE THESE THINGS.

AGREED!

 

That wouldn't be something I support. I'd be against that sort of wasteful spending.

Well, answer me this: do you support dangerous, reckless drivers being taken off the road?

If not, then even most self-proclaimed libertarians would disagree with you. If you do, then you run into the exact same problem as you point out here: that you have to become arbitrary! At what exact level of swerviness and over-speed etc. do you think people should be pulled over?

Every ideology has to become arbitrary at some points, when it comes to the details of practical applications.

Are you a millionaire? If not, shouldn't you be, if it's so easy to become one, given the right knowledge (which you like most economic "right wingers" usually do claim to have)?

If you don't have enough resources to go around, that's called "resource scarcity". Period. To deny that is denying DEFINITIONS for Christs' sake!!

It couldn't have anything to do with those Arab countries having a monopoly on oil in their area?

And I didn't say that high taxation was a good thing. That's yet another bastardization of my points. Why can't you stop doing that?

Do you support the police being funded by tax money? That'd be forceful redistribution by definition. If you don't support them being funded by tax money, then you support the police being private businesses.

Yet according to you in your previous post, they're not constitutionally supposed to be private businesses.

Can you make up your mind? Are the police supposed to be private businesses, or are they not?

YET ANOTHER BASTARDIZATION OF MY POINT!!

I support PREVENTING PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SUPPORT A LOT OF KIDS FROM HAVING THEM!!!

THAT is what I support. It's very simple. You keep saying that I support wealth redistribution, which isn't necessarily the case. You keep ignoring what I do support: preventing certain people from producing kids that they can't viably support.

Rich people who own a factory (which would be a wealth creator itself) didn't produce that factory. They simply own it. Big difference.

The people who produced the factory were the engineers who designed it, the mathematicians who developed the math needed to design it, the physicists who discovered the physical laws behind it, and all the laborers who built the building and it's machines.

This is the fundamental problem with people who think that rich people are somehow some kind of necessity: they aren't the ones that directly produce anything. They confused "to produce" with "to own".

If someone makes something (like a factory), and you own it and then let others use it, that's not you being productive. That's the people who made the factory being productive.

 

It is understandable (because it is the correct way an economy functions), it doesnt get bogged down in pages of math equations that are a bore to slug through while not even being correct descriptions of human behavior.

Austrian economics also has a long track record of making correct predictions when other more statist leaning sycophants didnt, like for example Mises's explanation of why communism would never work because it could not calculate opportunity costs, he did this in 1922. Mises also predicted the great depression of 1929 years before it happened. Henry Hazlitt predicted the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1944 (it did collapse in 1969 I think it was), other Austrian economists like Irwin Schiff and Mises also predicted the 1970's stagflation, Peter Schiff another Austrian economist predicted the dotcom bubble and housing bubble (along with most other austrian economists).

As for people claiming that austrian economics is a biased science I can only say that you are 100% wrong, Mises himself brought this up that economics should be value free, that is should only describe consequences, this is what austrian economics does, it describes consequences. The reason why virtually all austrian economists are free market ''extremists'' is not because that is what austrian economics demands of them, it is because austrian economics explains how markets work and how government work and when you know this then it is very hard to be a supporter of government investment plans and its attempts to heal the economy since government is price blind.

The Chicago school is also not terribly different from Keynesianism, both schools advocate government take over the role of investor in the economy in case of a recession. This will never work however since government cannot calculate opportunity costs (just like a communist central planner cant) and this means that any government investment will only make the economy sicker in the long run.

 

No, you've got libertarianism all wrong. Most libertarians believe in 3 fundamental rights, property, body, and mind. Reckless drivers endanger other's rights to property and body, and thus libertarians believe they should be taken off the road.

It's not knowledge, it's discipline. You need to save money and it's as simple as that. The most effective way to create wealth is to invest, and in order to invest you need to have money to invest.

OPEC created an artificial scarcity on oil in the 70s. The resource wasn't scarce but there was slack in the supply. Likewise the chinese government is taxing the businesses so much they cannot provide for the demand of the economy.

Using this:http://www.google.com/publicdata/ex...ry&idim=country:QAT&ifdim=country&hl=en&dl=en
and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

To find me a country with low revenue which doesn't have extraordinary growth.

The police are meant to *protect* rights, once again. I am for private police force if the protect the 3 natural rights. Not when they are enforcing things like "you cannot reproduce."

You couldn't be more wrong. Who paid the engineers to build it, who paid the laborers and architects? The owner of the factory. I can mathematically prove that investing is more productive than workers, but first you have to understand that in order to build someone someone has to be paid to do it. Investors are the ones paying the workers to do it. And it cannot work efficiently any other way, if it were say the government paying the workers, they would pay them too much or too little on a massive scale reducing the productivity of the factory and it's creation. Things need to be valued in the market, if they aren't, the price is wrong guaranteed. In addition a government is no more capable than the people running it. So the people running it may as well be in the private sector feeling the consequences of their own failures instead of spending other peoples money.

Labor = work
Capital = work * time
Investment = Work*time*interest

Therefor, a laborer can never make more than an investor. Because interest is never negative.

A investor is capitalizing on perhaps decades of capital-creation as perhaps even a laborer. Whereas a laborer is only capitalizing on the current moment. Investment is infinitely more powerful.

 

Obviously, she is engaging in hyperbole to cover lack of argument.

 

There are many reasons why market value, and price, can be wrong. There are also many things whose value cannot be determined by market price alone.

It is idiotic to assume otherwise.

 

No it isn't, you don't understand value.

Market value is hundreds or millions of people bidding to find a good price. Any other method of finding price is going to be wrong. And the market value is always right. To say a price is "high" simply means your value of it is low, and vice versa. It is idiotic to assume you can value something better than the market.

 

This video might help.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MnekzRuu8wo

 

Define "value".

 

How does the market find the value of a road, or police protection? How does it determine its price?

You seem to be assuming that market participants always act rationally. This assumption has never been proven. Evidence from actual market studies shows that participants often act irrationally, even in aggregate, and have throughout history.

value
an ideal accepted by some individual or group

What is the market value of world peace?

 

Value: what something would sell for.

 

If it wasn’t scarce it would have no value, it would have been free for the taking, like the air you breath. Oil was defiantly a scarce resource in the ‘70s, although there were manipulators making it more scarce.

 

The value is priced into the land market... how much is land in the area selling for? That is the value of the roads, police protection and everything else naturally or publicly provided in the area in question.

 

The great flaw with Austrian economics is that it seeks to take everything (above subsistence) earned by labor and capital and cram those earnings into the landowners pockets, in return for nothing. It doesn’t matter whether it is the government or a landowner who is robbing the productive, the result is the same, the result is to decrease incentive to produce wealth. Austrian economics just seeks to replace the government with an even worse alternative, the parasitic landowner.

 

The price is not directly discoverable then, isn't that a market failure?

 

The road to my house is privately funded and maintained. The japanese hired samurai to police their country for hundreds of years. Price is valued the same way as any other good. I'm not necessarily for the government providing these things, but I'm not against it because it doesn't redistribute wealth or regulate interest rates or economies in doing so.

If you believe individuals act irrationally, then you must believe the government acts retarded. It is made up of individuals who are shielded from the consequences of their irrationality, the only force which incentivizes rationality in economic transactions.

Value is what people are willing to pay for something. Nobodies ever bid or asked for a price for world peace, thus the value is indeterminable. Likely impossible to value, because it'd have a seemingly infinite price. But, since the government is price-blind, they can and will shove thousands of billions of dollars trying to buy world peace, destroying their economy in the process.

Are you saying the oil spontaneously appeared after the gouging was over? That since the price of a barrel was almost double in january what it is today, that the earth created so much oil the resource is now half as scarce as it was 6 months ago? No, scarcity determines the absolute limit of how cheap a resource can get, not the limit of how expensive it will become. As goods hit the market they get cheaper, not more expensive, we approach the limit from the infinite side of the spectrum not the 0 side.

In return for nothing? The laborers aren't paid? Then why the hell are they doing labor? Laborers don't earn anything without the "landowners", because the "landowners" pay them. Since the landowners pay the laborers, they must make more money otherwise they would not be able to pay the laborers. You obviously have no understanding of economics whatsoever.

 

I'm reading The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek right now.

I've read it before but it's the right time for a re-fresher!
I'll be glad to discuss it with you as I go through it. Or if you want to learn about Mises and Austrian Economic Theory first hand, I suggest you pick up a copy yourself.

A fun video that gives a high level overview of some of the basic tenets and differences between Austrian and Keyenisian is

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc"]The Fight of the Century - Round II[/ame]

 

How do you know if it has been accepted?

 

To whom? To be paid in what?

 

You said that in the 70’s oil was not scarce. Just because manipulators made it more scarce doesn’t mean that it wasn’t scarce to begin with. For as long as I have lived oil has always came at a price, that price is a reflection of scarcity.

Right, the land preexisted the landowner, so the landowner indisputably doesn’t provide the land.

The laborers have to pay the landowner in order to have access to what nature provided, the only other alternative is starvation.

Because the landowner is privileged by government with special rights. These special rights allow the landowner to exclude others from using what nature provided, thereby violating everyone else’s natural rights. The laborers work for the landowner because this is the only way to avoid starvation. The government makes sure that the landowner gets something for nothing.

There are no landowners in Hong Kong, hasn’t been in over 160 years, yet labor still earns a wage, they just don’t have to pay a landowner for permission to work.

No, the laborers pay the landowner.

The landowner does not pay the laborers, the laborers must pay the landowner or starve to death..(repetition helps you learn)

Sorry, but it is you who are ignorant of economics. The landowners only economic role is to collect the rent of land. The landowner doesn’t produce or contribute anything, he just collects the rent. The founders of the nation knew this, that is why their original intent was for landowners to pay all taxes.

When landowners are fully taxed for their state issued privilege, they can no longer live off the production of others. Personally, I don’t think individuals should be allowed collect the rent from state issued privileges (favor), I think everyone should be paid according to their productive labor.