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The poor reception of the European currency could have been avoided if the euro countries had conducted a simple currency reform without waging war on money-laundering and black-marketeering. The war is a never-ending conflict that ensues from the very nature of political authority over the economic lives of individuals. No government has ever won it, however brutally it waged its battles. But such wars do irreparable harm to economic life and social cooperation. Since January 1, 1999, when the euro was launched, the conflict has cast much doubt on European productivity and the future of the euro.

Worst of all, it may inflict immeasurable harm on millions of individuals throughout Europe whose savings may become worthless or who are forced to exchange them at steep black-market discounts. The weak euro and the strong dollar are visible symptoms of this damage.

I suppose that pointing out a decade of falling crime statistics doesn't earn me any points toward proving that government can offer protection?

I suppose that you accept it as coincidence that your decade of falling crime statistics mirrored a decade of economic prosperity? (which is another matter entirely - Misean economists say the boom-days were artificially induced by cheap money, and we're now beginning to see the fallout from past monetary policy... check out their newsletter archives, read and think about it for a bit).

even though the page makes it sound like government is pointless and useless.

The buildfreedom site is far more than just another 'government is baad, mkay' page. The many pages make (what I believe is) a convincing argument that not only is "government" pointless, but is actually harmful, coercive, contradictory, anti-freedom, etc. "Government" can actually be quite useful, say, if someone has something you want ("money"), and you think that everyone should help out poor people. You can use "government" to take the producer's money and redistribute it to people who produce nothing of their own. Now, maybe in a few cases this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but for the vast majority of cases we have at best a "win-lose" situation ("welfare" recipient/tax-victim), but most of the time we have a lose-lose situation (welfare in the classic sense is like a snake pit, once it grabs you it never lets go).

The economic downturn was caused by an excess of easy money (see Alan Greenspan, Fed, Printing Money) leading to malinvestment; the downturn is the liquidation of the malinvestment. That malinvestment can be euphemistically called The Dot-com Frenzy. Here's an article to that effect.

So, in order to maximise shareholder value, they gamble on these illusory measures. Terrorism is still quite rare, so they take the chance.

I don't think this is the case at all. Planes are expensive, lawsuits from families of passengers are expensive, reputational damage is expensive. Given the choice, the average airline would have excellent security. If they didn't, the auditors employed by their insurers would up the premiums.

More than anything, these are publicity stunts. By harassing the general public, they create the false sense that security is strict.


No, this is just general, federal-grade cluelessness. Like there is a no standing rule on some flights now. Exactly how does that help? How does being asked to empty your pockets more than once help? How does banning metal cutlery from the diner in the waiting area help?

What we are seeing here is officials who have absolutely no idea how to deal with the threat grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to show that they are doing "something". I certainly don't feel any safer; all this has proved is that security is *worse* than anyone suspected, since these people clearly don't know what they're doing.

Yeah, but it later states that

Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are "backed" by all the goods and services in the economy.

AFAIK, the gold backing thing was mandated by the gold exchange standard of 1920's, which has been replaced in 1971 by the Smithsonian Agreement which established fixed exchange currencies and was itself replaced in 1973 with the so-called "fluctuating fiat currencies", i.e. exchange rates are set by the market according to supply/demand laws. So now currencies, including the US dollar, aren't really backed by anything except the strength of the economy of the country where they are issued. See this link for a documented study of the whole thing.

"If you're not a criminal you have nothing to worry about" - famous last words. See this story.

Maybe they never read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises

Being it doesn't have any pictures, I doubt that any CNN reporter or producer would be interested.

Bob-

according to a recent Ludwig von Mises institute article (warning: libertarian writings ahead) on the dot com crash, we can blame the federal reserve bank:

...
Sure enough, when you look at the Federal Reserve policy of the late 1990s, you find dramatic inflation of the core measures of the money stock (M2, M3, and MZM [M1 no longer has much meaning because of financial deregulation]). These core measures hit bottom in 1995 and then began a straight upward climb until peaking in early 1999. By 2000, a long fall in the rate of increase was evident in all three, until earlier this year, when the Fed turned on the spigots once again. Why can't the Fed keep going indefinitely? That way lies hyperinflation.

This pattern closely tracks the run-up and subsequent collapse of Internet stocks. Because of the loose money policies of the Fed, venture capitalists enjoyed a huge increase in funds available for investment. What they may or may not have known is that the funding was an illusion created by the central bank. It wasn't based on savings (which actually fell during the same period), and the investments they made were not based on a realistic assessment of firms' earning potential.
...

Pretty stupid.

Remember the recent riots in Cincinatti? The ones that got started when police shot a black man who was running from them? Does anyone know why they shot him?

Read the rest of it here: "... Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. He had received several seat-belt violations and hadn't paid any of his tickets. He had refused to respond to court orders. So, when they pulled him over on that fateful day, all the police knew about him was that there was a warrant for his arrest. They didn't know at the time that it was for seat-belt violations.

As for the man, we don't know what he was thinking, exactly, but he clearly didn't want to be arrested by the police. He took off in his car and led the police on a high-speed chase, which ended in his own death when the police thought he reached for a gun and shot him. He died over the seat-belt law."

your error is in thinking that what you decry as the "future" is the result of technology. the fact is that humanity has spent the vast majority of its existance in abject poverty, pestilence and squallor.

but a funny thing happened: private property and capitalism. i recomend reading Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises for some real information on economics.

want to prevent poverty? defend property rights.

want to prevent polution? defend property rights.

on the SUBJECT, remember that stored energy increases with mass on a linear basis, but exponentially with RPM's. so you're better off with a light flywheel turning really fast, than with a slow heavy one.

Bob-

This review/commentary of the movie suggests that in reality, "for at least a year before the attack, FDR pursued a policy of goading the Japanese to do it. He saw no other way to overwhelm American isolationist sentiment and get the country to enter the war against the Axis powers."

Don't know whether that's accurate or a conspiracy theory, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention.

(a) Whose bright idea was it to give them venture capital?
(b) Where did the credit to fund ridiculous indulgences like Eazel come from?

The Austrian theory of the business cycle - as expounded by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek et al states that the expansionary policies of the central bank (ie. low interest rates and the general printing of money during the Dot Com Boom) create a cluster of investments in higher-order capital industries which are later revealed to be erroneous. Eazel is simply one of many of these 'business errors'. How many more companies riding the Linux bandwagon are revealed to be similarly hopeless? (Almost all of them, most likely).

It may be that Free Software is a noble aim. However, the notion that it is possible to base any kind of business model around it - apart from vanilla software contracting - is not a reality, unfortunately. (And don't come up with the usual half-dozen 'examples' with which to counter this notion - I will bet you that the majority of their revenue comes from other sources).

So how long before Helix / Ximian chews up its VC? Six weeks at the most?

Anyone familiar with the Austrian theory of the trade cycle will know that Japan's economic woes of the 90s were exacerbated by yet more neo-Keynesian expansionary measures, such as negative interest rates etc. The Fed's gratuitous money pumping of 1999 (under the guise of pro-active Y2K measures) was performed with similar goals in mind; unfortunately they will make the liquidation of malinvestments all the more painful.

Greenspan's godlike status is already looking decidedly shaky; perhaps the inevitable recession will make the world realise that you cannot 'turn a stone into bread' by printing money.

Check out this review by the Ludwig von Mises Institute for more details:

http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control =280&sortorder=authorlast

Such statism does imply a zero-sum picture of the world. The pie, after all, is never increased by government tax-and-spend.

Personally, puzzle games are my favorite. The good ones are simple, easy-to-learn, and require a good grasp of logic. No hidden premises either!

-- Diana Hsieh

Yes, but far more important than mere nutrition or sanitation, our modern computers will enable our capitalist ruling class to finally achieve their centuries-old dream of enslaving and monitoring everyone on the globe!

OK, so the Panopticon prison is really an old idea, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. For that matter, Lucian, in ancient Rome, invented, but could not implement, the manned Lunar expedition... But Bentham's panopticon originally was applied against the inmates of a single penetentiary, not the population of the whole planet; and with the limited technology of his time even that was practically impossible to implement. No longer! The millenium is in sight!

One might argue (if one were unafraid to be labeled as a Kommie subversive) that such a scheme is deeply immoral. Arguments such as that, however, have never restrained any ruling class ever. Besides, we know that the one and only moral imperative that counts in this world today is that one which demands, "greater, and greater, and ever greater returns for stockholders".

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

A good example of a less stringent libertarian view of copyright can be found here at Mises.org which is as libertarian as any group I can think of. They say that patent law should be liberalized if people are worried about the high price of drugs. This will bring in faster competition from generics.

So don't go painting all Libertarians as copyright fascists because this is still and will perhaps indefinitely remain a topic of debate among libertarians. Oh Yes and take a look at The Libertarian case against intellectual property here

Mises.org response

Reason Online response

Bottom line, the agenda held precious by Borsook and her colleagues is being torn apart by free thinking. They're terrified, and Borsook's awful writing confirms it.

1. my review, submitted to Slashdot a week ago, and
2. a comprehensive listing of reviews on Paulina Borsook's own site; both the positive and negative and in-between.

For you to even suggest what we are "moving towards" is a "command economy" from what we've seen here is a pretty sad little knee-jerk. Have you've studied much history, let alone economics? Would you know what a command economy sounds like if you were getting spanked by one? Have you any idea the details of what Microsoft had to do to get themselves in the position they're in?

Why yes, I've studied just a wee bit of history (mostly U.S.) and economics ;)

My feeling that we're headed in the direction of a fully state-controlled economy comes from my observations over the last 12 years, the historical record of the U.S. before and after the 1930's (the period when statist economic policies exploded) the recent resurgence of antitrust enforcement, and from listening to C-Span every day on the car radio.

Most of all, this irks me because monopoly law is so basic. The fact of the matter is, capitalism screws up. It's logical for it to be screwed up. It follows easily that consolidation of wealth and mergers across interests will progress until they become self-sustaining. The more consolidated a marketplace, the less incentive there is to compete, and the easier it becomes to fix prices, with or without explicit collaboration. In many situations it's possible to end up with a single dominant entity controlling an entire market, with barriers to entry which are too forbidding for anyone to challenge. In these cases, the only thing between you and economic, technical, and social stagnation is a well-organized democratic government. The state where competition benefits "consumers" is, in many industries, a transitory accident.

This is a misconception about capitalism that was first propagated by Karl Marx, and has become very popular in the U.S. during the last 75 years.

Consider that consolidation is not always bad. Sometimes it brings with it economies of scale, which can lower price and increase quality for consumers.

Alan Greenspan wrote once in a piece called 'Antitrust' that if entry into a given field of production is not impeded by government regulations, franchises, or subsidies, "the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return." Investors are constantly seeking the most profitable uses of their capital. If, therefore, some field of production is seen to be highly profitable (particularly due to high prices rather than to low costs), businessmen and investors necessarily will be attracted to that field; and as the supply of the product in question is increased relative to the demand for it, prices fall accordingly.

In other words, when capital is allowed to flow freely, even a large conglomerate that has 99.9% market share cannot raise prices with impunity, or VCs and potential competitors will start eyeing that market as a profitable one and will move in to take a chunk of it.

Captialism is not a panacea. Nothing is, besides collective intelligence. Reactionary belief in capitalism as somehow stronger or more productive a force than democracy shows a failure to understand what makes trouble for democracy in the first place.

What greater manifestation of collective intelligence is there than the trillions of economic decisions made every day in the marketplace?

That is the exact point of capitalism (aka free-market economics) - that the collection of economic choices made by billions of free individuals drive efficiency and productivity far better than some committee of suits in Washington could ever dream of.

The worst part is that you're sitting there on your Windows computer writing this. Hard-core, Reagan-era capitalism didn't give you a very good operating system, did it?

Actually I'm writing this on my Linux-Mandrake 7.0 computer. Occasionally X or Netscape will flake out, but the OS itself never crashes :)

Here are some links you may find useful in learning more about the free-market point of view:

http://www.laissezfaire.org/ (Laissez-Faire books)

http://www.free-market.net/

http://www.mises.org/ (Von Mises Institute)

CATO Institute

To flesh out Russ' example (hey Russ, fellow Potsdamite here, I'm a ugrad at CU):

Russ issues his offer to me. I now judge several things.

1. My need for five dollars right away.
2. My assessment of his ability to pay me the annuity of $1 over the long-term (if I know he's got a terminal illness and might die next year, would I still take the annuity? of course not, that would mean I wait for a year and get $2, when I could get $5 up front).
3. Economic variables. If I'm worried about inflation, do I want the annuity? No. To outpace inflation, I would want the $5 up front to invest as I see fit, in order to reap greater dividends in the long term.

True free markets are nowhere near as near-sighted as you would suggest. The problem lies in the fact that there does not exist (nor has there ever existed) a true free market.

Some good reading for those interested would be "Human Action", by Ludwig von Mises and "The Ethics of Liberty", by Murray Rothbard. Both can be found at www.mises.org

Capitalism. Don't knock it before you try it. And you haven't tried it. :-)

Please explain to me how privitization does *not* resolve the tragedy of the commons. Given several property in a resource, each participant is incented to maximize the knowable social value of the use of that resource. This is *precisely* the problem of the commons.

And they can feel free to pass on the expense - just about everything you buy is artificially cheap because of externalities.

This is entirely true. But *by how much?* You don't know. Indeed, you *can't* know without a method of valuation, which taxation cannot provide. cf: Ludwig von Mises' Human Action

That the Libertarian Party occasionally endorses causes that are traditionally characterized as "liberal," such as a woman's right to choose or narcotics decriminalization, only emphasizes the fact that on most issues, Libertarians are closely aligned with "conservative" issues.

• freedom of immigration
• freedom of speech and the press
• separation of church and state
• equality under the law for gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities (and for everyone else too)
• opposition to the draft and to militarism
• opposition to corporate welfare, stadium subsidies, and other forms of corporatism
• protection of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments against "law-and-order" police powers, wiretaps, unwarranted search-and-seizure, and the like
• (for some libertarians) opposition to the patent system

The left/right, liberal/conservative, single-axis political spectrum, dating back to the French Revolution, is an inaccurate model for the diversity of political views. It is more useful to describe people's political positions in terms of the set of rights or freedoms which they support, or conversely in terms of the set of restrictions on freedom which they support. One such model is the two-axis system proposed by the Advocates for Self-Government. I think even it is too simplistic, but it is a damn sight better than the usual spectrum.

I'm as doubtful about blaming the ills of "Big Brother" on a faceless Government as I am of the Government blaming crime and the ills of the world on a faceless population.

Other philosophers were more realistic. They did not try to guess the designs of Nature or God. They looked at human things from the viewpoint of government. They were intent upon establishing rules of political action, a technique, as it were, of government and statesmanship. Speculative minds drew ambitious plans for a thorough reform and reconstruction of society. The more modest were satisfied with a collection and systematization of the data of historical experience. But all were fully convinced that there was in the course of social events no such regularity and invariance of phenomena as had already been found in the operation of human reasoning and in the sequence of natural phenomena. They did not search for the laws of social cooperation because they thought that man could organize society as he pleased. If social conditions did not fulfill the wishes of the reformers, if their utopias proved unrealizable, the fault was seen in the moral failure of man. Social problems were considered ethical problems. What was needed in order to construct the ideal society, they thought, were good princes and virtuous citizens. With righteous men any utopia might be realized.