gdp's Comments

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Sports Stadiums: Temples to Crony Capitalism - Salmaan A. Khan - Mises Daily

Sat, 4 Oct 2014 00:13:39 +0000

ergo we must all surrender it to dear leader who shalt make it pure once more all praise to dear leader and any who failest to "surrender" all lands unto Dear Leader, shalt be declared Kulaks and slaughtered.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Sports Stadiums: Temples to Crony Capitalism - Salmaan A. Khan - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 22:26:22 +0000

That's not an example of unregulated capitalism. Money is regulated.

who implied money? no one did, but you even managed to mess that one up - as not all monies are regulated.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Sports Stadiums: Temples to Crony Capitalism - Salmaan A. Khan - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 20:07:44 +0000

What are we pricing you at then? or would you need a bag over your head and we need a few too many drinks first? sometimes zero is still too high a bid.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Against the State: An Interview with Lew Rockwell - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 19:11:56 +0000

And you have choices; you can ignore the mafia, and they'll ignore you you can choose which mob to use for each particular job - you don't have to wait for an election to see which bunch of clowns you are stuck with for the next x years. and a mafioso knows - if he doesn't deliver on his promises, his rivals will gain and he'll become a joke.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Against the State: An Interview with Lew Rockwell - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 19:03:29 +0000

Satism is mob rule, as in "the" mob, but with the assumption of total impunity.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Gun Control: Controlling the Government\'s Guns - George Reisman - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 18:58:57 +0000

If they can afford them, why not? There was a very nice private tank collection auctioned off in the united state a couple of months back (The Littlefield collection, auctioned by Auctions America in July 2014). I don't see any problem with that. "Weapon" is a concept, there is nothing intrinsic in any object or substance which somehow defines it as "weapon", whether that object is a stone on the ground, a fork in a restaurant, a tracked vehicle or an explosive charge. A nuke is just a particularly size and weight efficeint explosive charge, for when you want a big blast. Assuming that a civil engineering contractor or a mining contractor had a potentially proffitable use for a big bang in a small and very expensive package (for example one shot to fracture a whole porphry copper deposit ahead of insitu leaching) - why shouldn't they do it, subject to all of the usual tort claims if others suffered a loss?

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Gun Control: Controlling the Government\'s Guns - George Reisman - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 18:41:23 +0000

If those guns are only in the hands of bad people then they are being used to do the things that bad people use guns to do The usual statist response is "oh, but that's why we have cops" remember, when your future depends on seconds - the chubby boys and girls in blue are only minutes away... are Chicago and DC cities without cops? they have lots and lots of gun use by bad people doing what bad people use guns to do they are also cities with a great number of onerous restrictions which are piled onto good people who want to own guns. When that is pointed out, the usual response goes something along the lines of "but those restrictions are needed - things would be even worse without them" this is usually embellished with one or more of the following: but think about the children, Wild west shoot outs, gunfights breaking out over parking spaces / roadrage incidents / school sports. Whether you take things empirically, as john R Lott has done with county level data as gun posession and carry laws have gradually been relaxed over the past 30 years or so accross the united state. Or whether you apply Misesian praxaeological reasoning. The conclusion is the same; ordinary people are remarkably resistant to ever killing another human (this is well known in military circles too). The possibility of meeting an armed (and hence potentially highly dangerous) target, acts as a significant deterrent on interpersonal agressors. In answer to your question

so, what are the guns killing now?

I offer the observation that homicide rates, allong with other crime rates associated with an aggressor confronting a victim - have decreased in association with increased access to defensive guns. Those guns in the hands of ordinary descent people are not killing, they are deterring the killings now.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Scotland and the Hoppean Blueprint for Secession - Andrei Kreptul - Mises Daily

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 12:30:18 +0000

Only if legal tender laws are used, and in very small areas, legal tender laws are almost impossible to enforce. With free choice in currencies, individuals are free to use whatever non aggressive means they want to receive payment in their preferred currency, or to price their goods and services according to how easily the currency being offered can be exchanged for the amount sought in the currency which is preferred. In one of Selgin's lectures, he cites a journal entry from an English circuit judge, complaining that his coins of the realm were only accepted at a heavy discount, compared to privately produced token coinage. To a limited extent, that freedom actually applies now. as an example, If you can have your borrowings denominated in a currency which is undergoing rapid debasement, and is expected to continue to do so for some time. Let's say for example, your mortgage denominated in Japanese Yen, then you can have the poor suckers who are forced to use Yen every day, subsidizing your house purchase. While you can seek currencies or assets which are better able to hold their exchange value, for any savings. The house in the speculative Yen denominated mortgage would be an example of that. Mises is Brilliant, but he does have limitations; he'd spent his first day job career in Austria as a policy adviser. Stuck with contemplating the fail of statist policies day after day, he really had not considered the possibilities of anarchy. He had enough on his plate without looking at anarchy. That said, he probably achieved more with what he did look at, than any other twentieth century economist achieved. The later generations of the school have significantly built on the firm foundations laid by Menger, Bohm Barwerke and Mises, and exploring a fully free market is one of those areas of building. Great as he was, sound economics neither started nor finished with Mises.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Mises’s Contribution to Understanding Business Cycles - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Thu, 2 Oct 2014 09:42:49 +0000

The original Lord Keynes, when refuted, would casually state "Oh that, I haven't believed that for quite a while" The general theory is written in a very ambiguous manner, so there have been many interpretations amongst the followers of what Keynes might have meant. The blogger calling himself "Lord Keynes" appears to operate in a simillar fashion. If you can come up with some unambiguous statements from him, rather than his usual unsuported "Austerians are wrong" I might have a go at it. as for empirical refutations, how? By definition, someone printing new paper base money, prints themselves purchasing power - they can exchange the new (next to nothing) for real goods and services, thus bidding them away from their most urgent uses on the market, and diluting the purchasing power of those who exchange on the market from actual production. further expansion of that new base money by fractional reserving results in a lowering of the interest rate which had arisen by the interactions of savers of real resources, and tthe borrowers of those real resources. On an undistorted market, forgoing present consumption in order to save for greater consumption later, allows resources freed up by lower present consumption to be used in the earlier stages of production, as longer more productive processes of production are created. The savings are then used to buy the products of those longer processes. Enter the distortions, and the lower rate of interest discourages saving, and encourages borrowing and present consumption. No resources are freed up because present consumption is not being reduced - hence prices rise as borrowers bid those resources away from their most preferred uses - this is the overheating of the boom. eventually when the monetary expansion slows, the market re-asserts, the borrowers can no longer afford to bid resources away from present consumption, it becomes apparent that there are no savings to pay for the products of the longer production systems, and that the projects will never make a profit - and must be liquidated. People who had been enticed into working on these failed investments must find new jobs in line with what consumers are willing to pay for. If you think that that can somehow be refuted, for example lower interest rates would somehow encourage more saving than ceteris paribus higher rates would or that additional fiat money would somehow increase the purchasing power of existing holders of money, rather than diluting it or that people would ceteris paribus, be more inclined to borrow with higher interest rates than they would at low interest rates please fire away.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Mises’s Contribution to Understanding Business Cycles - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Wed, 1 Oct 2014 19:03:45 +0000

The "free rider problem " What, you mean those evil, self serving, profit seeking capitalist pigs are providing excess service, and community benefits over and beyond what they are getting paid for?

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Lowering Taxes Is the Only Decent Tax Reform - Laurence M. Vance - Mises Daily

Wed, 1 Oct 2014 11:31:29 +0000

and must compete with all of the others offering a similar service. next please..

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Mises’s Contribution to Understanding Business Cycles - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 18:08:26 +0000

The united state dollar is a very interesting phenomenon. The imposition of the dollar as a "global reserve" at Bretton Woods, provided an artificial demand for united state fiat, outside the lines on a map that mark the turf of the united state's fe'ral gang. With demand, over and above what is available on their home turf, the fe'ral gang have been able to inflate and so transfer purchasing power to themselves way beyond the area and amounts that a mere national fiat ever could. small threats to that fiat dollar's supremacy, such as late Sadam Hussein's offer to accept euros as payment for oil, and the late Murmar Khadafi's proposal of a gold dinar for cross border trade in Africa, have been dealt with militarily by the fe'ral gang and its vassals. Now there are big threats, externally by the BRICS, offering their own rival system and internally, due to growing dissatisfaction with the increasing rate at which printing is penalizing any who hold dollars and dollar denominated paper. This latter threat has been temporarily hidden (as David Howden explained a few days back) by the fe'ral reserve now simply buying fe'ral government debt at a pre arranged yield, and issuing yet more dollars to pay for it. Eventually this will lead to a repudiation of dollars and dollar denominated instruments. arguably this is already underway internationally, and as those dollars find their way to the last place on earth where they are accepted, they will chase ever fewer goods, and will eventually be repudiated there too. The various popular repudiations of fiat during the 20th century never had the dynamic of masses (tsunamis) of fiat returning from overseas. As recipient of the wealth transfers, and the site where the distortions have occured, and where the standard of living of the favoured few has expanded to soak up all of the wealth transfers and more - it is in the united state that the majority of the mal investments will be revealed and will need to be liquidated. Just wait until those fe'ral welfare and pay checks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Will a statist cop turn up for (what he mistakenly believes is) his ever so dangerous job when his monthly pay check won't buy a donut, and his pension is revealed to be an empty promise? It's time to get hedging - brass and lead are a hedge which should keep their value well in what is coming. Shares in currently favoured cronies like Betchel, Brown and Root, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin etc - not so much... Belated happy birthday Ludwig von Mises.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Mises’s Contribution to Understanding Business Cycles - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:31:34 +0000

People ignorant of history continue to advocate anarchy.

Ignorant of his story, who's story would that be? The story of the court chronicler, employed to paint all that can be portrayed as good as being due to the wisdom and goodness of the ruler, and all that is bad as being due to the foolishness of those who would doubt the ruler. I suggest that you go to wikipedia and look up "gaslighting". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Mises’s Contribution to Understanding Business Cycles - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:10:39 +0000

Even without Mises' insights, coercion can be shown to fail to satisfy the claims made for its existence. The basic claim of minarchists is a variant of the Hobbesian myth that In positive form; a state is necessary to provide defense and dispute resolution services In negative form; That a free market either cannot or will not provide these services. even on the basis of classical economics, ceteris parabus; a monopoly will provide fewer and lower quality goods and at higher price than freely competing providers. Other than in a tautological sense (without kellogs we can't have Kellogs' cornflakes and without Heinz, we can't have Heinz beanz) there is nothing about defense and dispute resolution services which require hocus pocus and a sprinkling of statist pixie dust to provide. This was the position reached by some of the pre-Austrian Spanish Scholastics (eg de Mariner) , and by the Pre Austrian, French Laissez Faire school, arguably Bastiat, and explicitly de Molinari. If we add in the Misesian insights that without private property in the means of production and a free market for prices to arise, then there is no way to rationally calculate the allocation of resources to their most urgent needs - Ie, the claims that "socialism is a more rational system" must fail on its own terms (Mises, 1921 economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth). A further development of this was Hayek's "the use of knowledge in society" which examines the idea of central planning with its brains trusts and panels of experts. What Hayek explains, is that that must also fail on its own terms, as the knowledge necessary for central planning is not available in a form which can be collected and passed to the central planners, the knowledge is instead distributed ammongst individuals, and communicated only in the form of individual bids contributing towards a market price arising. In each of those stages, an economic proposal is examined purely on its own terms and is found to fail on those terms. Thus simple, mundane, value free economic analysis shows that, even at its most basic, stripped bare form; the minarchist defense and dispute resolution state, must fail on its own terms. As an anarchist, I'm not going to claim that the state entirely fails; it is a highly effective institution of theft in favour of an unproductive psychopathic elite - which is a "service" that no free market will ever provide.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Clean Water, Scarcity, and Market Prices - - Mises Daily

Thu, 4 Sep 2014 16:40:02 +0000

An interesting one from Ireland a few years back All of the trash collection which I saw was private, you either bought a sticker with your name and address on it and stuck it to your bin, the sticker included a prominent expiry date and would not survive being peeled off. Or you bought one time tags if you had extra bags to go. The only input which local councils had was issuing licences (at a high price) for the privilege of collecting and transporting trash. One of the councils in the Dublin area; Rathdown and Dun Laoghaire (pronounced like "Done Leery", which would be fitting for the corrupt bastards) decided that their corrupt cronies were not getting as big a slice of the pie as they thought they were entitled to The council therefore rescinded the licenses of all but about five of the trash collecting businesses - their words at the time were along the lines of "this is to control excessive competition..." Following the bursting of the bubble in 2008 (where the "Celtic Tiger economy" was revealed as just another of the PIIIGS ) my clients who had waste businesses, all got seriously hassled by council bureautw@s, looking for pretexts to levy additional license fees. Incidentally, municipal water supply and sewerage treatment in Ireland was a very bad joke - with major outbreaks of cryptosporidium dysentry in Galway - due to insufficeint treatment of sewerage entering Lough Corrib - followed by leaching of lead from old supply pipes when a different source was substituted. Parts of County Carlow and also County Meath were also frequently on "boil water" notices, due to cryptosporidium from inadequate municipal sewerage treatment upstream on the rivers Barrow and Boyne (respectively).

Ludwig von Mises Institute : States, Cartels, and the Anarcho-Capitalist Opposition - David S. D\'Amato - Mises Daily

Thu, 4 Sep 2014 08:10:54 +0000

Feel free to have a go at the Rothbard Institute for being too Misesian http://rothbard.be/english

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Is This the Libertarian Moment? - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily

Wed, 3 Sep 2014 09:42:12 +0000

One of the popular sayings amongst the members of the Fabian society (founded in 1884) was "Even if it takes 100 years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society David Goodman, in a piece published earlier this year on Mises Canada, argues that this was the true origin of the title for Orwell's 1984 http://mises.ca/posts/articles/the-60th-anniversa... and inspiration for the grey, totalitarian, warfare and surveillance state which Orwell predicted and which we are arguably seeing today. I'm guessing that our long march will happen much faster - as you point out, we have far better communications, and with the continuing economic crisis, and another approaching fast (the dollar loosing its international status, un-manageable government debts, the Chinese real estate bubble rapidly deflating, European economies being hurt most by sanctions on Russia...) So long as the idiot politicians don't get us nuked, there will be plenty more people looking for answers and the Austrian School provides the best answers available.

Ludwig von Mises Institute : Police States and Private Markets - Jeff Deist - Mises Daily

Sat, 30 Aug 2014 20:44:10 +0000

Will Grigg, being interviewed about police militarization and Ferguson, by Jeff Berwick on Anarchast http://anarchast.com/front/2014/8/29/anarchast-ep...

Ludwig von Mises Institute : States, Cartels, and the Anarcho-Capitalist Opposition - David S. D\'Amato - Mises Daily

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 23:00:41 +0000

Thanks I'll check up on that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Big_Business...

Ludwig von Mises Institute : States, Cartels, and the Anarcho-Capitalist Opposition - David S. D\'Amato - Mises Daily

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 19:46:08 +0000

Paul, there is some interesting info on Ford bankrolling the early stages of Hitler and of the Soviets, Contra the lefty view that this was simply an example of capitalists seeking special favours... Between the world wars, there were significant tensions between the British interests and the progressives in the united state, even to the extent of contingency plans for the united state to invade and carry out total war (including chemical warfare and terror bombing of cities) with Canada and engage in naval warfare with the British Empire ("Operation Red"). I'd be very interested in your thoughts on whether the support for Hitler was perhaps a united state effort to build a European rival to keep Britain busy?