Slashdot Mirror

Here is the book you want to read if you want to learn economics that makes sense and has real predictive powers.

http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf

I've been reading about Austrian Economics for years and it has made me much better at understanding what is going on.

I have also saved myself quite a bit of money. While everyone was using their home like an ATM I was paying off that debt and buying gold. I wasn't able to convince my wife to sell the house and rent for 5 years but that is mostly because where I live the rental homes were not very nice. The brilliance of this book is that it takes the fact that humans act as the given. It doesn't try to push a moral code on how they act or judge them for not behaving the way the author thinks they should.

Many of you are completely missing the point, compounded by anyone criticizing Ron Paul's economics by saying it's "stupid" has utterly no understanding of economics. Net, We in the US have two choices: take a good deal of pain now (slash government expenditures - and departments), or take apocalyptic pain later. That really is the basis of the choice. I'm going to go through this pretty fast, so try to keep up.

This is the best presentation I've found that really characterizes where the US and world economy is right now. One of the worlds smartest hedge fund managers giving you a real education of the state of the world. It's really a brilliant video: Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst 2010 | 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWgtzwqWh60

The economics are sound despite the 3rd grade level retorts I've read on this thread. There is clear empirical data demonstrating that the money multiplier effect from government spending and lack thereof (expenditure cuts) that support Ron Paul's plan -support data follows:
"The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," by Christina Romer and David Romer. Working Paper version.
"An empirical characterization of the dynamic effects of changes in government spending and taxes on output", by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002. Online version dated July 1999.
"What are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks?" by Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2009. Earlier Working Paper version (no charge).
Here's a higher level view for those that don't want to get into the minutiae of the data and want a MTV education of economics: Watch this:Fear the Boom and Bust then this: Fight of the Century
Then the tired argument that Ron Paul wants a gold standard is just not right: Go look at his campaign page then read this: A Free-Market Monetary System http://mises.org/daily/3204
It's really surprising really, because technology and Internet people like us should really be the most capable of understanding the Austrian economic ideas. It's a complex self organizing system like the Internet. Hayek's absolutely beautiful essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" captures it perfectly: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

A good place to start is with Liberty Defined. That site is really just a brief summary of the book. What I like about that book is that he goes through each of the most common issues, but he does a good job at citing so you can look up his influences and deeper arguments on specific topics. You could also check out the Mises Institute, which he helped to establish. BTW, I'm not a supporter of Ron Paul because of his views on liberty and such, I am a supporter because he supports the rule of law. For example, he (an OB/GYN) believes that life begins at conception, yet he votes against bills that make such beliefs law because he feels the Constitution does not grant the Federal Government the power to regulate medial procedures.

http://mises.org/

He doesn't believe in magic economies, he believes in sustainable ones.
But I'm sure you're more knowledgeable than anyone else on the matter.

Actually, he co-founded the Mises Institute, which is chock-full of details. He's published books like Liberty Defined where he breaks his arguments into easily understandable explanations. The real problem is that mainstream media doesn't cover him.

Your post is full of nothing but Democratic talking points, so I'm not sure why I would even respond to it.

You say you "still support" a 1%'er tax hike, without any justification for why (envy?). Your statist talking points don't even address the fact that the 1% pay about 30% of the federal taxes while earning 18% of the income.

I'm not impressed by anybody's plan for better and more efficient slave factories.

The US is NOT a democracy - it's a democratic Republic. It actually works very well everywhere except at the Federal level, because the Federal government has entrenched (yes, FASCIST) policies and far too much power both over its own people and in foreign relations. I can't support ANYTHING that will supply even MORE power to it.

Perhaps it's time that we re-thought our entire monetary system? Indeed, What has Government Done to Our Money? Many of our problems stem from public misunderstandings of the proper role of money in our society and those who benefit from and seek to perpetuate those collective misunderstandings. The Occupy Wall Street people need to do more than simply expose what happened and who was responsible, they need to learn why it was even possible in the first place. Without that understanding, no meaningful changes, however well intentioned, can prevent the same things from happening again.

I highly recommend thus book. The problem stems from the definition of property. It's main characteristic is that it is scarce. Real goods are property. Ideas are not. The problem with patents and copyrights are they are trying to make a non scarce good artificially scarce.

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

There is no such thing as a 'natural monopoly', but there are economies of scale and there are government created monopolies - franchises and AT&T was one of these, and over 3000 companies were destroyed by the government to achieve that.

Monopolies are only created by government intervention. The lawsuit is brought forward by companies, who are afraid of incoming competition from a larger entity, but the only real monopolies are always enjoying government protection.

Free Market is market that is free of GOVERNMENT intervention, not a market that has no larger economies of scale. Consumers gain from economies of scale, and in this case especially, this is a good move for consumers, as they will see increase of competition, not decrease of it. Government cannot create free market by decree, it only destroys free market by regulations, taxes, subsidies and by creating franchises.

Absolutely. The current situation is nothing more than a false sense of security, which is worse than no security.
Privatizing Air Security

Yeah, those bastards, paving roads and building bridges and schools.

Jesus, not that stupid canard again.

It does not follow that because government does something, that it can't happen otherwise. Read and learn.

Is there a word for anti-learning? I scanned it a bit. I fear that I'd get stupider if I tried to read every word. From the foreword on, it appears to be nothing more than typical libertarian bullshit.

We'd have a far better and cheaper transportation infrastructure if what to build, where to build it, and how much to spend was left to the market to decide.

Prove it.

No, I don't accept the endless stream of disingenuous special pleading in Mr. Walter Blockhead's ebook. Prove It. Find a place where the primary infrastructure such as roads is built mainly by private enterprise and show that it's unquestionably better than the conventional method of getting roads built.

If you can't prove it, then fuck off. Stop pretending that libertarianism is the only possible solution to the world's problems if you don't actually know whether it is. Bullshit like the ebook you linked is pretty offensive -- I just looked at it again to make sure I'm not missing some erudition, and found the bit where he talks about competition, and now I'm pretty pissed off that you wasted my time by linking such trite crap.

See, I skimmed to the bit where even Mr. Blockhead tries to deal with the fatal flaw: free markets require (among other things) lots of competitors if they're going to provide semi-optimal allocation of resources, and there is no way to have lots of competitors in the market for a road (or set of roads) to any given destination. So what does he do? He just tries to handwave it away. Says, paraphrasing, "oh, you don't have to have PERFECT free market conditions for a market to work", and then proceeds to jizz some more about how great it would be if roads were built by free markets. The fucktard. In the first place, you're going to be lucky if lots of important roads could have even two competitors, and ideal free markets are about Many-with-a-capital-M competitors, not one-to-two, three at the most. In the second place, the effectiveness of free markets is a spectrum. Markets which are inherently far, far away from ideal free market conditions (such as roads) are simply not going to work very efficiently. If all 3 of us have done our homework on basic econ 101, then he knows it, you know it, and I know it. But he just glosses over this as if it's not a serious problem with his assertion that the FWEE MARKET must be able to do a better job than the government at building and maintaining roads.

Then again, that's a mental blindness which is practically required to be a full-blown libertarian, so I shouldn't be surprised. Free market fundamentalists are never going to be pleased to admit that there are any circumstances where markets are less than perfect.

Yeah, those bastards, paving roads and building bridges and schools.

Jesus, not that stupid canard again.

It does not follow that because government does something, that it can't happen otherwise. Read and learn.

We'd have a far better and cheaper transportation infrastructure if what to build, where to build it, and how much to spend was left to the market to decide. Bridges to nowhere aren't profitable.

As for schools, we sure as hell aren't getting what we pay for.

-jcr

A long time ago members of the American Medical Association wrung their hands about how many doctors there were, and how doctors like them were losing face because competing philosophies didn't kill their patients nearly as often. Bloodletting and Quicksilver (mercury) were the tools of their trade, and anyone who suggested otherwise was a fool.

So, like any competent guild, they started lobbying the legislatures to make competing medical philosophies unable to practice medicine without a "license" from the State.

By the early 1900's, the AMA began the process of weeding out "substandard" medical colleges... But they couldn't do it on their own, so the Carnegie Foundation (which was a proxy for the drug trusts) stepped in to help.

Flexner Report --> closing of 1/2 the country's medical schools --> doctor shortage.

But I'd guess you'd rather go with the USSR model and have unqualified people teaching others to be unqualified doctors who'll then cause large amounts of damage due to their incompetence just to get a "cheap" doctor.

Overtraining doctors makes it easy for them to "miss the forest for the trees"... Like my friend's kid, who had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on his case, over a 2-3 year period. Just recently his mom, who's been reading and reading and reading, took initiative to start Vitamin A and Vitamin B12 supplementation. And many of the kid's problems started going away. She's rather pissed that the supposed "experts" couldn't figure it out. :)

The Carnegie Foundation made sure that doctors trained in their schools use pharmaceuticals as a first resort (high blood pressure medication, for example), instead of something that you might use temporarily while figuring out the specific cause of the undesired condition.

In the great flu of 1918 (or whenever), conventional doctors turned their hospitals into death wards by suppressing the patient's fever. They didn't even bother to separate flu patients from everyone else.

Osteopathic hospitals were much more survivable... Osteopaths separated flu patients from everyone else, and allowed the temperature as the body's natural response to the pathogen. And their manual treatments helped too.

An excellent history of modern medicine is covered in Steinreich's 100 Years of Medical Robbery.

hth.

Citation on the 2002 bit please.

Here you go.

-jcr

http://blog.mises.org/18018/no-wonder-there-was-a-revolution/ Google is your friend.

You cannot count on people acting in their own interests.

- over 99.99% of people act in their own interests or whatever they perceive as their interests most of the time. That's a made up statistic, but go ahead, tell me that it's not so. What are you saying, whose interest are people acting for?

In this day and age I'm astonished that it would even be suggested given that most of the country is still reeling from the real estate debacle

- that's a perfect example of people, who were acting in their own self interest, or so they thought. Of-course the government created the moral hazard of free money on one side and regulations that basically forced loosening of lending standards on the other. If you care to find out more, here is a speech given to Mortgage Bankers from Nov 13th 2006, which described in great detail what was going to happen in 2008 and exact reasons as to why it was going to happen. The market was spiked by the government pushing for this bubble, just like the government created agriculture stock bubble in 1929.

It's also disingenuous to compare the politics leading to Chernobyl with the politics of Fukishima, the governments are very different especially given the time frame of Chernobyl.

- it's NOT disingenuous, it doesn't matter what the ideology of a government is. What matters is that it is a government bureaucratic system, there is no reason to think that one bureaucracy is more responsible and is more knowledgeable and less corrupt than another.

Most people do not see the consequences for their actions because usually someone else ends up baring the cost so they continue until there is no one else left and then bust.

- Most people don't see the consequences of their actions because there is a government standing there, with all sorts of moral hazards. From 70Million USD liability caps for deep water oil drilling to FEMA insurance, to SS, to FDIC, whatever it is that government "insures" and "removes risk" from ends up being destroyed one way or another because of the moral hazard. Just like money, by the way. "Full faith and credit", give me a break. What faith? What credit? Biggest debtor in history that is also the biggest liar in history.

The market is only as good as the regulations force it to be.

- market regulations.

You might notice that when ATT was broken up there was a huge increase in productivity in the pieces bringing phone lines to increasingly rural parts of the country.

- and you might not have noticed, (because you weren't born then), that AT&T monopoly was a government creation in the first place, which incidentally killed about 4000 competitors by government regulations and taxes.

Bad regulation is obviously bad for everybody but bad regulation is usually lack of regulation due to non-enforcement.

- the only meaningful regulations are those, that are voted for by individual market participants with their money. All government regulations have a blow back (unintended consequences), like this babysitting law in LA, which is going to kill a lot of babysitting jobs. The only real regulations are money that are invested or spent by individuals.

I'd go back a few years further to LBJ removing silver from American coinage, a key event in the ongoing destruction of the dollar. The 1965 minimum wage paid in 1965 90% silver dollar coins would be worth around $30/hour in today's fiat money. FDR confiscating gold and devaluing the dollar was bad but not catastrophic. Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve enabled the later mischief. The rot had set in when Nixon officially took us off the gold standard and engaged in assorted other economic stupidity. Of all these events, LBJ's economic manipulation to cover the expense of his welfare/warfare state was the worst in my opinion.

Throw in the dividend double-tax that discourages dividend payments that help keep public companies honest (accountants can fake many things but not cash payments), the massive leverage generated by Wall Street banks (derivatives, options, CDOs, etc) that enables all sorts of heads-we-win/tails-you-lose mischief, the federal government encouraging real estate asset bubbles (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, mortgage interest deduction, CRA, etc), and you come to realize that this hasn't been a capitalist nation in a very long time.

Austrian school economists have been warning the world of the dangers of the Keynesian economics practiced by "mainstream" economists for generations now. It looks like we're heading for the "crack-up boom" they predicted, with the Obama Administration accelerating the end-game dramatically. What's fascinating is that Marx understood the danger of undermining currencies as well.

Anyhow, if you want to steal wealth from the average family there's no surer way than printing lots of new currency, which dilutes the value of existing currency, and handing that new currency to your buddies on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs/etc) and politically connected corporate socialists. Talk of manipulating the income tax is laughable misdirection in comparison to this.

The flaws in Marxism were all figured out in the 1920s. Here, let me explain:

If you have goods that are directly consumable like bread or cheese you can divide them up among people evenly. That works. What doesn't work and is essentially an NP hard problem without money is how goods that are used to make other goods are used. Let's take an example of a freight railroad. What do you ship on the railroad? Shoes, fuel, tiny sub-assemblies of combine harvesters? If you have a piece of construction equipment, what do you build with it? A school, a factory, a playground, a road? In a modern economy all this creates an astonishing amount of complexity that is intractable from a central planning point of view.

How does this work in a capitalist system? Simple : Prices. The price of everything determines what the railroad ships, what the construction equipment builds, etc. In a complex investment decision, such as where to build a factory and what to produce in it, the managers use estimations based on prices of the factors of production and how much they can get for the goods produced to determine whether to build a factory, and where to build it. Prices are a distributed highly multi-threaded information system that tells people what is scarce and what is plentiful from moment to moment and thus directs production.

Prices are somewhat distorted by bank credit money creation and the associated credit cycles, which is what causes the booms and busts in capitalism. That can be fixed, but that's a topic for another day.

The history of the Soviet Union is full of massive planning errors. They built many towns in the middle of Siberia that they abandoned once the Soviet Union fell because the production output was minimal, they cost an enormous amount to heat and deliver supplies to and nobody wanted to live there. They didn't know this until they knew the real prices for running these cities. No communist government, except for the psychopathic regieme of Pol Pot ever dared to completely get rid of money, and even he admitted it was his biggest mistake!

If you want to dig into the theory of the planning problem in capitalism, I'd recommend Mises "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"

http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=71e20725-ee72-4adb-ade2-34dfdabf7755

But wait a moment. AT&T's monopoly was established by the government, which killed a few thousand competitors in the process.

So we have government creating a monster and then 'fighting' it? (seems similar to everything else government does, from Iraq with Saddam, to Afghanistan with OBL, to Iran with the Shah).

Really, think about all the blow back that you get when gov't gets involved. But now I am going to ask you this question:

IF you believe that AT&T and T-Mobile will NOT bring prices down then answer this question: how does any of this hurt customers of Sprint and how does this hurt Sprint?

The ONLY way this could hurt Sprint if AT&T in fact did bring prices down and/or was able to hold off raising of prices longer given the levels of inflation that is created by Federal reserve money destruction.

Come on, at least be consistent.

When your only alternatives are two companies charging the same overinflated rates, how is that a free market?

- Free Market by DEFINITION is what you have when there is no government involvement into it.

By definition.

As long as market is allowed to operate enough time without government involvement the market will find the correct prices, will find the right quality.

Of-course you have government printing free money, bailing out companies, buying out private debt, forcing investors to lose money (GM and shareholders, inflation,etc.)

There is no free market as long as government is allowed to destroy the market by regulations, taxes and subsidies, and especially as long as using a competing currency (gold/silver) is impossible due to special taxation provisions, which treat these Constitutional money as if it's just a commodity, while printing the fiat into the eventual hyper inflation.

The subsidies to the companies, the government franchises, the so called public utilities that are just government monopolies, all of this destroys competition.

Thinking that any government action, even if it is superficially directed at breaking larger entities into smaller ones makes sense is against free market, not for it. If these companies form a more efficient entity and start more competition by providing LOWER prices, and Sprint and others are forced to LOWER their prices, then you are complaining that this is putting Sprint out of business.

If they are charging whatever they are charging today for SMS, etc., you are complaining that their charges are TOO HIGH?

So you believe that the prices must go down, but you believe that prices going down will hurt companies and competition?

And people are moderating all of my comments in this thread as 'troll'?

If you believe that the companies are overcharging for SMS, then you should be FOR competition, so if AT&T merges with T-Mobile, then to survive others would have to LOWER PRICES. So where would be the FIRST place to lower prices?

It's going to be where it does not COST anything to lower prices, so Spring just may lower SMS prices, and this would force others (including AT&T) to do the same, and you are arguing AGAINST lowering prices while complaining about high prices?

I am tired. I believe this site has gone insane, with everybody on it. Good night.

Yes, roads and sewers and water pipes all should be privatized, that's the way to have competition and destroy monopoly power of gov't and to provide real choices

I'm sure these companies understand the importance of R&D. I think what the article is saying is that if you invest tons in R&D but the economy is such that only a small portion of the population can purchase then there is no way to make that money back. We live in pretty uncertain times. The US seems to be in a downward spiraling course and the solutions being presented by the politicians is just variations on how quickly they want it to go down. I personally am sending my investments abroad and I'm looking to expand my business in emerging markets.

Don't just take my word for it, the Austrian economists have been saying it for years now. Just look up Peter Schiff or go to Mises.org.

First of all a suicide bomber would constitute an immediate threat to life granting anybody in the vicinity legitimate reason for self-defense. I'll recommend reading The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard as it answers most of the common questions and counters most of the common criticisms people have about libertarianism.

As for collecting compensation from a penniless dead man, you can't do that now, so it's not really a criticism of libertarianism but of modern technological limitations. There isn't a modern society on the planet that can bring a dead man back to life in order to enact justice against him. In such a case you would rely on insurance just as you do now.

All those patents are useful and unique - right?

Right. According to IP industry insiders, what we need is a Patent Stimulus to end the recession

The nice thing about this Patent Stimulus Plan is that it will cost only a small fraction of the amount of money we have already wasted on failed economic stimulus. What we need to do is have President Obama issue an Executive Order directing the Patent Office to start allowing patents. A 42% allowance rate during the first quarter of 2009 is wholly unacceptable. So while you are at it President Obama, order the Patent Office to issue a patent UNLESS there is a reason to deny it.

If you mean "Somaliland", (the top part), that is much more promising. It has a clan-based legal system. Some libertarians *have* seriously considered establishing businesses there and/or moving there. Unfortunately, the main advocate for doing so passed away in 2002 and nobody else has since stepped forward with quite as much public enthusiasm. The War on Terror made things a little tricky. It does seem like a fascinating place, though. Some background here: http://mises.org/daily/2066

riiight, like they tax copyrights and trademarks and patents.... It's only real/personal property that tends to get taxed. Imaginary "property" that actually actively undermines property rights doesn't.

Actually, as I support the abolition of both copyright and patent, I'm wary of proposals to tax them. Once they're a taxation revenue stream they'd be much harder to abolish (we have that problem partially with patents already, the government is addicted to the filing fees and treats the USPTO like a piggy bank).

and it should not have been, electricity would have been much cheaper and more abundant, with more capacity, so would telecommunications providers. As to Internet, something was happening anyway, there were networks before TCP/IP was created and private companies were able to 'invent' telephone electrical switches just fine without government.

Yeah, you can't legislate competition, when all your actions are directed against it.

Government is the only reason for formation of monopolies, there is no reason more pervasive than government regulations (laws), taxes, subsidies.

As to US being lowest taxed - this is nonsense. In particular when I had corporation in Canada, it was paying much below what corporation in USA would be paying. Same with Switzerland, and more so with Asian economies.

See, I don't believe in natural monopolies, you'd understand better why, if you read this. Natural monopolies are a myth propagated by government that prefers to give out franchise deals and maintain actual monopolies that it creates by regulations/subsidies/tax code.

In any situation that has space for profit there will be competition as long as there is no government enforcing a monopoly.

a pretty good read. Government creates monopolies out of thin air, justifying them by saying they are natural, while there is absolutely nothing natural about them, they are all government established, subsidized, taxed for, regulated and protected, especially any type of infrastructure.

something to look at

The biggest myth of all in this regard is the notion that telephone service is a natural monopoly. Economists have taught generations of students that telephone service is a "classic" example of market failure and that government regulation in the "public interest" was necessary. But as Adam D. Thierer recently proved, there is nothing at all "natural about the telephone monopoly enjoyed by AT&T for so many decades; it was purely a creation of government intervention."

Once AT&T's initial patents expired in 1893, dozens of competitors
sprung up. "By the end of 1894 over 80 new independent competitors had already grabbed 5 percent of total market share . . . after the turn of the century, over 3,000 competitors existed. In some states there were over 200 telephone companies operating simultaneously. By 1907, AT&T's competitors had captured 51 percent of the telephone market and prices were being driven sharply down by the competition. Moreover, there was no evidence of economies of scale, and entry barriers were obviously almost nonexistent, contrary to the standard account of the theory of natural monopoly as applied to the telephone industry"

The eventual creation of the telephone monopoly was the result of
a conspiracy between AT&T and politicians who wanted to offer "universal telephone service" as a pork-barrel entitlement to their constituents. Politicians began denouncing competition as "duplicative," "destructive," and "wasteful," and various economists were paid to attend congressional hearings in which they somberly declared telephony a natural monopoly.

"There is nothing to be gained by competition in the local telephone business," one congressional hearing concluded.

The crusade to create a monopolistic telephone industry by govern-
ment fiat finally succeeded when the federal government used World War I as a n excuse to nationalize the industry in 1918. AT&T still operated its phone system, but it was controlled by a government commission headed by the Postmaster General. Like so many other instances of government regulation, AT&T quickly "capturedn the regulators and used the regulatory apparatus to eliminate its competitors. "By 1925 not only had virtually every state established strict rate regulation guidelines, but local telephone competition was either discouraged or explicitly prohibited
within many of those jurisdictions."

The complete demise of competition in the industry, Thierer con-
cludes, was brought about by the following forces: exclusionary licensing policies; protected monopolies for "dominant carriers"; guaranteed revenues or regulated phone companies; the mandated government policy of "universal telephone entitlement" which called for a single provider to more easily carry out regulatory commands; and rate regulation designed to achieve the socialistic objective of "universal service."

That free-market competition was the source of the telephone monopoly in the early twentieth century is the biggest lie ever told by the economics profession. The free market never "failed"; it was government that failed to permit free-market competition as it concocted its corporatist scheme to the benefit of the phone companies, a t the expense of consumers and potential competitors.

No regulation at all, then?

- obviously, there should be no government regulations at all in any business and there should be no subsidies or any bail outs to any business or person, and there must be no income taxes, corporate taxes or payroll taxes, no taxes on work.

And I'm sure many people don't like monopolies or businesses cooperating with one another in order to gain more profit.

if people don't like it, they should stop their governments from creating them, which is what government's real role in economy is - creating and maintaining monopolies, because that's where the real money for governments are.

Government regulation works.

- BTW, this.... I have no doubt that gov't regulation works as intended. Except that it's intended to make sure government gets more and more power, the politicians get access to monopoly type money and the voters are used in a ploy to destroy any type of economy that works, by creating monopolies and destroying free market.

Government regulations exist in order to destroy any semblance of real competition and to provide politicians with a way to stay in power.

No it isn't, because in exactly ZERO of those cases is the person actually promoting such a society

I used to think so myself. And then I saw a libertarian on Slashdot giving links in response:

http://mises.org/daily/5418/Anarchy-in-Somalia#.Tg0iTSER62U.email

And there are any others like if you care to look, with the gist of the idea being that Somalia is indeed developing quickly to the better thanks to anarchy, and it's not up to Western standards of living yet only because it was that far behind. Some also add a modicum of conspiracy theory - apparently, the only reason why UN supports a central government in that place is to hinder successful development of anarchical society.

You do realize that State governments are (at least under the US Constitution) allowed to have their own established religion, right? I don't like it, but the Feds have no legal power to prevent that sort of thing. The concept that they have the power to stop it is a legal fiction that someone just made up called the Incorporation Doctrine.

Uhh.... no I don't think he supports vouchers. I don't think he wants government money to be entangled with education. In fact he believes that education is an issue best left to the State and local governments. Again, the Constitution grants the Feds no authority over the issue of education.

And of course RP supporters look at his record, that's WHY they support him. Most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional and Ron doesn't vote for anything that is unconstitutional. It's just that simple.

Either you are ignorant, or you are a troll. If it's the former, please take time to educate yourself. http://www.mises.org/ is a good place to start.

but you don't understand how the Fed works. It doesn't really print money -

- thank you, I know that the Fed is not actually printing money, they are marking up their accounts that the member banks are holding, and then the banks actually issue credit from those accounts.

It's the same thing as printing money.

Regulating FRL is the Fed's purpose and that is where the evil comes in.

- no it's not. Fed's mandate was 'price stability' and for some reason now it also became 'maximum employment', but in actual reality their actual powers are in inflation generation, which is now their actual mandate, as stated by Bernanke. Of-course the Fed is an abysmal failure in both: price stability and maximum employment.

They physically cannot fail in the mandate of generating inflation, because that's easy. That's money printing (and I don't mean physical printing with paper and colors, etc., spare me.)

Here in so many words by Bernanke himself

The Objectives of Monetary Policy ...
Recognizing the interactions between the two parts of our mandate, the FOMC has found it useful to frame our dual mandate in terms of the longer-run sustainable rate of unemployment and the mandate-consistent inflation rate . ...
The longer-run inflation projections in the SEP indicate that FOMC participants generally judge the mandate-consistent inflation rate to be about 2 percent or a bit below. In contrast, as I noted earlier, recent readings on underlying inflation have been approximately 1 percent. Thus, in effect, inflation is running at rates that are too low relative to the levels that the Committee judges to be most consistent with the Federal Reserve's dual mandate in the longer run. ...

s for deflation, no, it is not "great". I'll tell you what would be great: steady predictable growth, just like population. No bubbles, no crashes.

- a fools errand. You can't have economy that is stable and non-dynamic, in a non-dynamic economy you'll only have worsening economy. There are no benefits to preventing the market solutions at work to the bubbles. The busts are solutions, not problems. Bubbles are the problem, and bubbles will always form since people are not perfect in decision making even when the government is not interfering. In absence of government interference, any bubbles are quickly busted and the resources are reabsorbed by the economy, fixing the problem quickly - the companies go bust, people get fired, money gets freed, new companies form, people get hired, new products are created. This is good stuff, this is dynamic stability, not this artificial staleness that you want economy to be.

Read my sig. Economics, like relativety, was all figured out around the begginning of the 20th century, only unlike relativety, with economics the truth has been surpressed.

- nobody needs to suppress garbage. Real economics that is actually suppressed is Austrian economics, and it's suppressed for a reason - governments hate reduction of their power, and that's the logical outcome of following actual sound money.

Here is a little something on monopoly power created by the government. - at least this is an interesting read.

The reason they aren't upset is that the telecom monopolies are and were always caused by explicit government policy.

Read The Myth of Natural Monopoly by Thomas J. DiLorenzo http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_3.pdf

The record of Congress in the telecom industry is so poor. Why would anyone even give two thoughts about what these politicians say?

No more *FREE* medicine for him I think is what you mean. In which case you should stop charging him that portion of taxes. Which will be to his direct benefit, because he can then go get a cheaper rate for medical services by paying cash, and not have to pay for some bureaucrats salary in addition to the medicine he needs.

Socialized medicine is like trying to fill up the shallow end of the pool by taking water from the deep end with a leaky bucket.

But of course, the fascist medical system we have now isn't good either: http://mises.org/daily/4276

Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s.

This post graphs real wages as increasing, based on "US Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics", and also provides some other interesting graphics. Now, that posting is from an extremely pro-free-enterprise web site, and that citation is still not clear enough for me to spot check it in a few minutes, but you have not cited your source at all. So, it is enough to make me ask you to cite your source so other slashdot readers and I can try to distinguish one way or the other between data and urban myth.

Thanks in advance.

There's a good argument that it took off despite the English patent system. Broad patents act as a disincentive to coming up with ways to improve existing designs; you can't sell them because of the patent, and the company that can has no reason to license any patent you might file because there's no competition. In particular, many possible applications of the steam engine were impossible until Watt's patent expired because his engines weren't small or efficient enough, and his patent prevented manufacture of ones that were.

Easy. Abolish patent law and copyright law. (PDF here)

Historically, those two concepts have probably been the biggest impediments to the advancement of human civilization.

In other words, the lack of existance of a well known, successful anarchy doesn't preclude one from ever existing. And anarchy isn't my goal per se, my goal is more liberty.

Lets provide an example for him shall we?

"The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland — an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And, in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes (such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes), preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a "primitive" society: it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.

For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: "There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice . . . . There was no trace of State-administered justice."9

How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All "freemen" who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their "kings." An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, "the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension."10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland."

[...]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

File under 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.

http://mises.org/money.asp

Why did most of the world switch from monarchy to democracy? This was a major shift in the history of government. Weren't the old monarchs and strongmen all opposed to democracy? The majority demanded it. This time where public opinion turns against democracy. People withdrew their consent to the rulers of Egypt and Tunisia and their strength crumbled instantly. There is absolutely no reason to assume that a similar major shift could never happen again.

Did you read that link I posted from Daivd Friedman? Here is another one for you.

http://mises.org/daily/1855

Having some components of capitalism is very different from actually having capitalism. Microsoft is a direct result of not having capitalism when it comes to so-called intellectual property. To help see why it is fundamentally incompatible, read this.

http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

Someone is WRONG on the Internet.

You don't get it. Bitcoin will not encourage credit, it will encourage saving on the other hand. It's like some people only see one side of the coin, pun intended.

Look at this, this might shatter once and for all your idea that inflation is good:
http://mises.org/daily/4623

Vodka is right of course, but in the super intelligent socialist infested collectivist fest that is Slashdot, where the majority of users believe that wealth is a privilege, that there is such a thing as a 'right to internet access' or a right to $good_that_is_not_a_right, that there is no such thing as property rights, and that democracy is 'fair', you are simply banging your head against the wall.

for all those that are open minded, who concede that they could be brainwashed but who wish not to be brainwashed, you need look no further than the following resources to convince you:

The Kingdom of Moltz
http://www.constitution.org/tax/us-ic/schiff/moltz.pdf

How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesnt, by Irwin Schiff
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an-Economy-Grows-and-Why-It-Doesnt

For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard:
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

Thomas Woods, 'Where do rights come from?'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Lb8YitPs8

Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlit:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/money.asp

The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp

And finally,

The Fallacy Detective
http://www.fallacydetective.com/products/item/the-fallacy-detective/

because faulty reasoning is behind most of the ideas that prop up economic illiteracy and the belief in government created 'rights'.

After having consumed these works, it will be impossible for anyone to think that... well, anything fallacious to do with Economics or rights. The question is, do you have the stomach to throw away bad ideas that have been ingrained into you, possibly for decades, that are the core of your personal philosophy?

Vodka is right of course, but in the super intelligent socialist infested collectivist fest that is Slashdot, where the majority of users believe that wealth is a privilege, that there is such a thing as a 'right to internet access' or a right to $good_that_is_not_a_right, that there is no such thing as property rights, and that democracy is 'fair', you are simply banging your head against the wall.

for all those that are open minded, who concede that they could be brainwashed but who wish not to be brainwashed, you need look no further than the following resources to convince you:

The Kingdom of Moltz
http://www.constitution.org/tax/us-ic/schiff/moltz.pdf

How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesnt, by Irwin Schiff
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an-Economy-Grows-and-Why-It-Doesnt

For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard:
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

Thomas Woods, 'Where do rights come from?'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Lb8YitPs8

Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlit:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/money.asp

The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp

And finally,

The Fallacy Detective
http://www.fallacydetective.com/products/item/the-fallacy-detective/

because faulty reasoning is behind most of the ideas that prop up economic illiteracy and the belief in government created 'rights'.

After having consumed these works, it will be impossible for anyone to think that... well, anything fallacious to do with Economics or rights. The question is, do you have the stomach to throw away bad ideas that have been ingrained into you, possibly for decades, that are the core of your personal philosophy?

Vodka is right of course, but in the super intelligent socialist infested collectivist fest that is Slashdot, where the majority of users believe that wealth is a privilege, that there is such a thing as a 'right to internet access' or a right to $good_that_is_not_a_right, that there is no such thing as property rights, and that democracy is 'fair', you are simply banging your head against the wall.

for all those that are open minded, who concede that they could be brainwashed but who wish not to be brainwashed, you need look no further than the following resources to convince you:

The Kingdom of Moltz
http://www.constitution.org/tax/us-ic/schiff/moltz.pdf

How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesnt, by Irwin Schiff
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an-Economy-Grows-and-Why-It-Doesnt

For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard:
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

Thomas Woods, 'Where do rights come from?'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Lb8YitPs8

Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlit:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/money.asp

The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp

And finally,

The Fallacy Detective
http://www.fallacydetective.com/products/item/the-fallacy-detective/

because faulty reasoning is behind most of the ideas that prop up economic illiteracy and the belief in government created 'rights'.

After having consumed these works, it will be impossible for anyone to think that... well, anything fallacious to do with Economics or rights. The question is, do you have the stomach to throw away bad ideas that have been ingrained into you, possibly for decades, that are the core of your personal philosophy?