I can see how you might have interpreted my comments as saying that benefits have been "the cause" of savings going down. That may not be so. Or it may. I don't know. But that isn't what I meant to say.
Only that when benefits replace savings, you have a problem.
But aside from any effect they may -- or may not -- have on savings, government benefits simply do not -- cannot, in fact -- have a positive effect on the economy. Every $1 dollar of government benefits costs at least $2 of taxpayer money. And most taxes are paid by the middle class.
"How do you know that the reason the savings rate has gone down since the '70s is benefits?"
I didn't claim one caused the other. Only that benefits have largely replaced savings."Crowding out" doesn't necessarily mean one causes the other. It just means that one has been replacing the other. Completely leaving aside any speculation about what the cause is, the effect is still a bad thing.
"And why would you take the word of someone who has been so wrong about everything else?"
Greenspan didn't create the statistics, he just mentioned them. But since you brought it up, yes, part of my point was: why is Greenspan just now learning these things? He was chair of the f*ing Fed!
"And savings rate is higher today than it was in the mid-2000s."
"So, it's not because of benefits, is it? Maybe benefits are just taking up some of the slack in people's lives as monetary policy erodes their savings and ability to save."
I didn't claim it was "because of" benefits. But the fact is, benefits are way up, and savings are way down.
"And don't forget, look at who has benefited from these policies. Not the "savers", that's for sure."
"They may only be "negative effects" if the purpose of an economy is to produce the greatest profits for the 1%."
Not so. As Greenspan pointed out, government "benefits" have replaced savings for much of America. That is an astoundingly bad thing.
The true wealth of a nation, in a broad sense, can be measured by its production capacity + savings. Today, our savings are shot and production capacity has been one of the lowest points since pre-WWII. You can thank government monetary policy (inflation) for much of the savings loss, and traitor corporations that have shipped much of the production overseas for a lot of the dismantling of our own production capacities.
You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
Semantics. It's arguably so but I would say that in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word "watched", it isn't. It's the difference between sending your tax records to the IRS, and actually being audited.
In order to be "watched", you'd have to have already drawn their attention.
Your enemy is not a member of a public employees union, or any kind of union, and does not receive food stamps or unemployment or social security or disability or Obamacare.
Well, as even Greenspan acknowledged, they are A problem. The negative effects government benefits have had on the economy are nothing short of horrific. But they are not THE problem, by any stretch of the imagination. On the rest of that we are agreed.
(In truth I have some issues with public employee unions, too... I have seen what they have done to our local government and economy first-hand, and I have done quite a bit of reading on the Wisconsin debacle. But that's a discussion for another day.)
"They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished."
I think this is accomplished already. They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
Having said that: I still despise the current situation and it does need to change.
Part of the problem is that publicly-funded science hasn't necessarily been public-access anymore.
What good is it to be an activist when your research shows something bad, when the journal you published it in copyrighted and paywalled it, and the public has no ready access?
Obviously, some research should be classified. But that's such a minuscule percentage that it is hardly worth considering. Other than that tiny amount, publicly funded research should be public. Period.
I don't know if it's a "bigger issue". It's certainly part of the issue.
ISPs want to charge big content providers (like AWS and Netflix) for using more bandwidth.
But everybody has seemed to keep forgetting that bandwidth is already paid for by the end-users. This is just a way for the big ISPs to double-dip. That very definitely should be prevented.
And please, nobody give me guff about how people pay for "average data rates" and how Netflix saturates the infrastructure.
U.S. customers already pay among the highest rates for some of the slowest service in the Western world. All because of the ISP oligopoly. U.S. cable companies have made record profits almost every year, and haven't been re-investing those profits in infrastructure in proportion.
Make them Common Carriers under Title II, and end the insanity.
Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink.
Well, I wouldn't say that. For example, P2P was throttled because of its bandwidth consumption... and was rescued by the "user community", even though there was no large corporate interest behind it. But your point is taken: this could represent a huge barrier-to-entry for startups.
Folks, there is a simple solution to all this: pressure the government to classify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, as they should have in the very beginning. (Corporate lobbying prevented it.)
Make them common carriers, and a huge set of problems essentially goes away overnight. Net Neutrality is built-in. Snooping (including government and corporate snooping) is prohibited. Etc. It may not be perfect, but it's just a vastly better world, all around.
"Governments can try to force people to take an exchange rate within their boarders."
That's not the issue here. The point is that it's a logical contradiction.
Let's say X is a constant, and is always equal to 5. It is not logically (or physically) possible to say "From now on, Y will be equal to X. But we're going to change the value of Y as we see fit."
It just doesn't work. It's not possible.
While am not a fan of Keynesian economics, I would like to point out that his theories are not understood by almost anyone "advocating" it.
Well, here we agree.
I am going to say the main problem with Keynes was that he though the government wanted to act sanely.
I'm tossing this in because I think you might find it amusing. I stumbled across this on the last page of the Nov. 4 2013 issue of TIME. It is a recent interview of Greenspan, apparently motivated by the imminent release of his new book.
Q: So how do you propose we measure something as irrational as fear?
"I prefer to call it nonrational. You measure it indirectly by looking at spreads of interest rates, both by credit rating and by the maturity of the bond. Today, 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds yield more than 5-year notes by the greatest margin in history. Long-lived assets are very heavily discounted. It should be a normal recovery. But it is not, because of the high degree of uncertainty."
[If I were giving the interview, I'd ask how we could be anything but uncertain with Obama at the helm.]
Q: Knowing what you know now, what you have done differently during your time as chairman of the Fed?
"It's not the type of asset -- subprime mortgages or stocks -- it's whether it's leveraged. I always knew debt was important. If I could go back and recalibrate my psyche and fully understand how toxic debt really is, that would have been very helpful."
[As government goes vastly further into debt than ever before... But more to the point: how could he really not know that over-leveraging is bad? He honestly thought over-leveraging some assets was okay, but not others? Sheesh. And this guy was Fed chair.]
Q: Is your book suggesting that the way out of the economic malaise is to cut social benefits?
"... Part of the way out is to slow down benefits. Very much to my surprise, benefits are crowding out savings of the society; the data are very clear in this regard."
[Very much to his surprise? What? Who did not know this? Some of his comments are really quite amazing to me. In my opinion, this illustrates just how ridiculously out-of-touch D.C. has been for a long time. Too long.]
Q: Your write that one thing that would have prevented the crisis was expanding the capital banks had to hold in reserve. Do you have a figure in mind?
"Yeah -- whatever you think of, it's higher. The critical issue is contagion. You can have a financial system with banks making all kinds of horrible loans, but if they're well capitalized, all of the losses go to the shareholders."
Well. Welcome to Microeconomics 101, Mr. Greenspan. I only wish it had not taken 26 years for you to catch up with just about everybody else who passed their sophomore year in college.
But here is one I can get behind:
Q: So you change your opposition to banking regulation?
"Of course. I was wrong. You have to regulate the system. My concern about regulation is that it's more vindictive than curative."
Well, yes. But while wget could be part of a full-featured crawler, it just doesn't have the functionality to do it all, by itself.
For example: while you can download a whole directory with wget, you have to know that directory exists in the first place. wget does not help you with that part.
"The Fed pays for coins in that (1) they don't get free money handed to them and (2) they can't accrue interest on coins in circulation. "
Well, that's kind of like saying that Wal-Mart "pays" for Kroger. It's not really true. They're simply unrelated.
"My point, that I recalled from memory slightly incorrectly, apparently, is that coinage is a tiny, incidental business. That all involved want to limit. Paper money, on the other hand, is what national debt dreams are made of."
We definitely agree on this. But I would throw in that certain interests want to limit coinage because it interferes with their inflationary goals. It may be a relatively "incidental business" but it throws a wrench into the works of fiat money.
Or it would, anyway, if the coins were real money in themselves (gold, silver, etc.) like they used to be.
"Of course you're right, but if you think that Keynes says that "inflation is good" then you haven't read him very closely."
It isn't that. But Keynes was an interventionist, and government intervention deliberately keeps inflation well into positive figures. So it's "Keynesian" only in an indirect sense. Interventionism was obviously a pre-Keynes idea but he adopted it as part of his gospel.
It wasn't until after the creation of the Fed, and significant government intervention, that inflation started to rise. About that chart: from 1665 to 1913, inflation was essentially flat except for little blips around wartime when the government borrowed money to finance the wars (the labeled boxes). But it always went back to normal afterward. Until 1913 that is. The dashed lines mark 1913 (creation of the Fed and direct government-Fed intervention), 1934 (internal U.S. gold standard abandoned) and 1971 (Nixon tosses out the Bretton-Woods system, which was effectively a gold-standard-by-proxy).
The point (backed by evidence) being: inflationary monetary policy benefits government and investment bankers. However, it also provably eats away at productivity and savings, which are measures of "true" wealth in an economy.
"The problem is not just the Fed, but who the Fed believes they serve (hint: it's not the people)."
Agreed. But you won't change that, because of who the Fed is. The chair might be appointed by the president, but the Fed itself consists of private investment banks, partly owned by foreign interests. It has never been their genuine intent to "serve the people". Louis McFadden was chair of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1929 to1931. This is what he said about the great market crash of '29:
"The Great Depression was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. International bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair, so that they might emerge the rulers of us all."
If anybody should have known, it would have been him. By the way: after this pronouncement to Congress, McFadden was shot at (according to witnesses) on at least two different occasions. A few years later he died of poisoning after attending a banquet.
"Yes, that changed, and brought the greatest economic expansion and shared prosperity in all of human history."
No, it didn't, if you are talking about the changes since 1913. Most economists today believe that historically, government intervention has been a drag on the economy, not a benefit. Even "mainstream" economists, not just Austrians, have come to accept this, at least for the period of 1920s-1930s. As for the economy after that: you certainly cannot credit the mainstream (largely Keynesian or "neo-classical") economists who advised government. They pretty consistently got things wrong. Often 180 degrees wrong.
Don't make the "correlation=causation" mistake. It is as likely, or perhaps even more likely, that the government could afford to intervene more, as the economy expanded. Not the other way around.
"If you want a global economy (and I don't, by the way), then you need central banking."
I don't either, but I still disagree. You don't "need" central banking. But central banking certainly makes it easier to force a "global economy" on people, whether they want it or not.
"If you want a "lazy-fare" "free market" supply-side capitalist economy, then you need the post-Greenspan Fed."
"Supply-Side" is a discredited Keynesian economic principle espoused by Art Laffer. Many people may not realize this, but Laffer is a dyed-in-the-woo
"Bitcoin is already divisible so there are more Bitcoins than dollars. Mining will cause more to generate far into the future so what are you talking about?"
Just no.
First, saying "Bitcoin is already divisible so there are more Bitcoins than dollars" is like saying "Dollars can be divided into pennies so there are more dollars than Deutschmarks." It doesn't make any sense.
Bitcoins are divisible in the same sense dollars are: you can divide them into fractions (like quarters, dimes, pennies). That is all. The only difference is that Bitcoins can be divided more easily into smaller parts than dollars. It goes far beyond 100ths.
As for mining: the way Bitcoins were divised, there will forever only be so many Bitcoins. Mining gets harder over time, in the sense that fewer Bitcoins will be mined for the same amount of effort, until it gets (quite literally) to zero. And that limit is not as far off as you seem to think. "... cause more to generate far into the future" is just incorrect.
"Even if we could stop inflationary policies, I'm not sure most of us would want to, since it would mean a protracted worldwide economic downturn."
If I may say: I think you've been listening to too many Keynesian economists. The idea that inflation is good is just so much snake oil. The people it benefits are government, banks, and Wall Street. It harms just about everyone else.
HEALTHY markets are zero or negative inflation. Take computer-related equipment: every year, you get more bang for the buck (even when you consider they're inflated bucks). That's called deflation.
For nearly 300 years, inflation was essentially zero in North America, and we had a healthy economy (arguably the healthiest in the world). That changed when the government started meddling. It is ridiculously easy to demonstrate this.
I don't share your stance, which seems overly pessimistic to me. We need to end the Fed, and re-instate a hard money standard. Just those two things would fix many of our ills.
(Re, the Fed: why should we pay interest on every dollar printed? That's just one of the ills it introduced.)
Bitcoin makes that impossible, so the end result will be that those governments will either not use such a limited currency, or will use it up until the point they want to print more where they will then either abandon the cryptocurrency or declare that some other currency must have some exchange rate with the Bitcoins and print more of those.
This, except for that very last part. It isn't possible to tie a non-inflationary currency via a fixed exchange rate to another currency, then inflate that other currency. That is a contradiction. You can do one, or the other, but not both.
Most of the time, the governments in these hyper-inflationary states are printing more money in order to spend more money or to save their own asses, at the peoples' expense. (Just as, to a lesser degree, the U.S. government has.) So they would simply not allow the non-inflationary currency, or abandon it when they saw it didn't suit their purposes.
It's far past time we kicked these adherents of failed and discredited Keynesian theory out of government economics. Sadly, Janet Yellen, new Fed chief, is a staunch Keynesian and a fan of the "new" Phillips Curve, which was demonstrated pretty thoroughly to be wrong about 20 years ago.
We already have stagflation under Obama: high inflation (government inflation figures are just plain B.S.) and high unemployment. If Yellen has her way, we could have high inflation, high unemployment, AND high interest rates.
"Slightly more powerful than wget to me is a wrapper around wget. Perl and Bash scripts are way beyond the average users. To politicians scripts can be used to claim "voodoo" or "saintly" depending on who writes the scripts. The NSAs scripts are obviously saintly, while anybody else is probably voodoo."
Even funnier is the assertion that such "web crawling" would be easy to detect. As someone who has done remote automation and data scraping for a living, I can tell you that it doesn't look any different than any other web traffic.
About the only way to detect it is to do traffic analysis, to see if the same IP address is hitting nodes a lot, or hitting many nodes in a short period of time, and especially if they are rapid-fire.
But the latter is easy to get around. I won't say just how here, because even if it's not hard to figure out it's still something of a trade secret.
"How many of us are running programs similar to NOSCRIPT mostly because of hostile code and inattentive webmasters unwittingly distributing malicious code wrapped in advertisements?"
Generally speaking, NoScript is blacklisting, not whitelisting. Although you can whitelist programs in NoScript to prevent them from being blacklisted.:)
Newer versions of OS X use whitelisting by default, for unsigned executables.
"First, not all science is useful to the public, and in fact some science has the potential to harm it greatly, if it were furnished to the wrong people."
Okay. Granted. But that is the very rare exception. Nuclear bombs and genetic sequences of superbugs are probably not suitable for public consumption. But that is such a minuscule percentage that my generalization is still valid... while accepting those few exceptions. Yes I was wrong to state it as an absolute, but in general it's still true.
"Second, climatology is not reproducible."
Climate does not have to be reproducible. Climate is not science. But "climate science" does indeed have to be reproducible. If you take a batch of raw data, and come up with results that others can't reproduce using responsible methods, then it isn't science.
"By demanding reproducible results as a matter of law, Schweikert is making it impossible for the EPA to cite climate models to support regulations aimed at curbing emissions."
Bullshit. The SCIENCE is still reproducible. Or it isn't science. Repeat: the climate does not have to be reproducible, but the science does have to be reproducible from the original data. Claims of irreproducibility due to exceptional circumstances are a red-flag hallmark of NOT SCIENCE.
Slashdot Mirror
To clarify what I was trying to say:
I can see how you might have interpreted my comments as saying that benefits have been "the cause" of savings going down. That may not be so. Or it may. I don't know. But that isn't what I meant to say.
Only that when benefits replace savings, you have a problem.
But aside from any effect they may -- or may not -- have on savings, government benefits simply do not -- cannot, in fact -- have a positive effect on the economy. Every $1 dollar of government benefits costs at least $2 of taxpayer money. And most taxes are paid by the middle class.
Do you expect Federal employees to work for free?
"How do you know that the reason the savings rate has gone down since the '70s is benefits?"
I didn't claim one caused the other. Only that benefits have largely replaced savings."Crowding out" doesn't necessarily mean one causes the other. It just means that one has been replacing the other. Completely leaving aside any speculation about what the cause is, the effect is still a bad thing.
"And why would you take the word of someone who has been so wrong about everything else?"
Greenspan didn't create the statistics, he just mentioned them. But since you brought it up, yes, part of my point was: why is Greenspan just now learning these things? He was chair of the f*ing Fed!
"And savings rate is higher today than it was in the mid-2000s."
But look at it over a longer time frame.
"So, it's not because of benefits, is it? Maybe benefits are just taking up some of the slack in people's lives as monetary policy erodes their savings and ability to save."
I didn't claim it was "because of" benefits. But the fact is, benefits are way up, and savings are way down.
"And don't forget, look at who has benefited from these policies. Not the "savers", that's for sure."
I'm not disputing that. It was part of my point.
is there a significant difference?
Yes. The difference is in actually having the government's attention.
I did not say that anything about it was good. Just that they're not the same things.
"They may only be "negative effects" if the purpose of an economy is to produce the greatest profits for the 1%."
Not so. As Greenspan pointed out, government "benefits" have replaced savings for much of America. That is an astoundingly bad thing.
The true wealth of a nation, in a broad sense, can be measured by its production capacity + savings. Today, our savings are shot and production capacity has been one of the lowest points since pre-WWII. You can thank government monetary policy (inflation) for much of the savings loss, and traitor corporations that have shipped much of the production overseas for a lot of the dismantling of our own production capacities.
That's finally reversing, but it has been slow.
You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
Semantics. It's arguably so but I would say that in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word "watched", it isn't. It's the difference between sending your tax records to the IRS, and actually being audited.
In order to be "watched", you'd have to have already drawn their attention.
Your enemy is not a member of a public employees union, or any kind of union, and does not receive food stamps or unemployment or social security or disability or Obamacare.
Well, as even Greenspan acknowledged, they are A problem. The negative effects government benefits have had on the economy are nothing short of horrific. But they are not THE problem, by any stretch of the imagination. On the rest of that we are agreed.
(In truth I have some issues with public employee unions, too... I have seen what they have done to our local government and economy first-hand, and I have done quite a bit of reading on the Wisconsin debacle. But that's a discussion for another day.)
"They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished."
I think this is accomplished already. They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
Having said that: I still despise the current situation and it does need to change.
Part of the problem is that publicly-funded science hasn't necessarily been public-access anymore.
What good is it to be an activist when your research shows something bad, when the journal you published it in copyrighted and paywalled it, and the public has no ready access?
Obviously, some research should be classified. But that's such a minuscule percentage that it is hardly worth considering. Other than that tiny amount, publicly funded research should be public. Period.
I don't know if it's a "bigger issue". It's certainly part of the issue.
ISPs want to charge big content providers (like AWS and Netflix) for using more bandwidth.
But everybody has seemed to keep forgetting that bandwidth is already paid for by the end-users. This is just a way for the big ISPs to double-dip. That very definitely should be prevented.
And please, nobody give me guff about how people pay for "average data rates" and how Netflix saturates the infrastructure. U.S. customers already pay among the highest rates for some of the slowest service in the Western world. All because of the ISP oligopoly. U.S. cable companies have made record profits almost every year, and haven't been re-investing those profits in infrastructure in proportion.
Make them Common Carriers under Title II, and end the insanity.
Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink.
Well, I wouldn't say that. For example, P2P was throttled because of its bandwidth consumption... and was rescued by the "user community", even though there was no large corporate interest behind it. But your point is taken: this could represent a huge barrier-to-entry for startups.
Folks, there is a simple solution to all this: pressure the government to classify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, as they should have in the very beginning. (Corporate lobbying prevented it.)
Make them common carriers, and a huge set of problems essentially goes away overnight. Net Neutrality is built-in. Snooping (including government and corporate snooping) is prohibited. Etc. It may not be perfect, but it's just a vastly better world, all around.
To clarify my example, as related to GP's comment:
Since X is relatively constant, you can either tie the value of Y to X (an exchange rate), or inflate the value of Y. But not both.
"Governments can try to force people to take an exchange rate within their boarders."
That's not the issue here. The point is that it's a logical contradiction.
Let's say X is a constant, and is always equal to 5. It is not logically (or physically) possible to say "From now on, Y will be equal to X. But we're going to change the value of Y as we see fit."
It just doesn't work. It's not possible.
While am not a fan of Keynesian economics, I would like to point out that his theories are not understood by almost anyone "advocating" it.
Well, here we agree.
I am going to say the main problem with Keynes was that he though the government wanted to act sanely.
No doubt.
Q: So how do you propose we measure something as irrational as fear?
"I prefer to call it nonrational. You measure it indirectly by looking at spreads of interest rates, both by credit rating and by the maturity of the bond. Today, 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds yield more than 5-year notes by the greatest margin in history. Long-lived assets are very heavily discounted. It should be a normal recovery. But it is not, because of the high degree of uncertainty."
[If I were giving the interview, I'd ask how we could be anything but uncertain with Obama at the helm.]
Q: Knowing what you know now, what you have done differently during your time as chairman of the Fed?
"It's not the type of asset -- subprime mortgages or stocks -- it's whether it's leveraged. I always knew debt was important. If I could go back and recalibrate my psyche and fully understand how toxic debt really is, that would have been very helpful."
[As government goes vastly further into debt than ever before... But more to the point: how could he really not know that over-leveraging is bad? He honestly thought over-leveraging some assets was okay, but not others? Sheesh. And this guy was Fed chair.]
Q: Is your book suggesting that the way out of the economic malaise is to cut social benefits?
"... Part of the way out is to slow down benefits. Very much to my surprise, benefits are crowding out savings of the society; the data are very clear in this regard."
[Very much to his surprise? What? Who did not know this? Some of his comments are really quite amazing to me. In my opinion, this illustrates just how ridiculously out-of-touch D.C. has been for a long time. Too long.]
Q: Your write that one thing that would have prevented the crisis was expanding the capital banks had to hold in reserve. Do you have a figure in mind?
"Yeah -- whatever you think of, it's higher. The critical issue is contagion. You can have a financial system with banks making all kinds of horrible loans, but if they're well capitalized, all of the losses go to the shareholders."
Well. Welcome to Microeconomics 101, Mr. Greenspan. I only wish it had not taken 26 years for you to catch up with just about everybody else who passed their sophomore year in college.
But here is one I can get behind:
Q: So you change your opposition to banking regulation?
"Of course. I was wrong. You have to regulate the system. My concern about regulation is that it's more vindictive than curative."
I am pretty sure he was making a pun. Not a typo.
"Actually there are options in wget for that."
Well, yes. But while wget could be part of a full-featured crawler, it just doesn't have the functionality to do it all, by itself.
For example: while you can download a whole directory with wget, you have to know that directory exists in the first place. wget does not help you with that part.
"The Fed pays for coins in that (1) they don't get free money handed to them and (2) they can't accrue interest on coins in circulation. "
Well, that's kind of like saying that Wal-Mart "pays" for Kroger. It's not really true. They're simply unrelated.
"My point, that I recalled from memory slightly incorrectly, apparently, is that coinage is a tiny, incidental business. That all involved want to limit. Paper money, on the other hand, is what national debt dreams are made of."
We definitely agree on this. But I would throw in that certain interests want to limit coinage because it interferes with their inflationary goals. It may be a relatively "incidental business" but it throws a wrench into the works of fiat money.
Or it would, anyway, if the coins were real money in themselves (gold, silver, etc.) like they used to be.
"Of course you're right, but if you think that Keynes says that "inflation is good" then you haven't read him very closely."
It isn't that. But Keynes was an interventionist, and government intervention deliberately keeps inflation well into positive figures. So it's "Keynesian" only in an indirect sense. Interventionism was obviously a pre-Keynes idea but he adopted it as part of his gospel.
"And then the Europeans came."
Haha. No. I was referring to historical inflation rates in America, colonial times to present.
It wasn't until after the creation of the Fed, and significant government intervention, that inflation started to rise. About that chart: from 1665 to 1913, inflation was essentially flat except for little blips around wartime when the government borrowed money to finance the wars (the labeled boxes). But it always went back to normal afterward. Until 1913 that is. The dashed lines mark 1913 (creation of the Fed and direct government-Fed intervention), 1934 (internal U.S. gold standard abandoned) and 1971 (Nixon tosses out the Bretton-Woods system, which was effectively a gold-standard-by-proxy).
The point (backed by evidence) being: inflationary monetary policy benefits government and investment bankers. However, it also provably eats away at productivity and savings, which are measures of "true" wealth in an economy.
"The problem is not just the Fed, but who the Fed believes they serve (hint: it's not the people)."
Agreed. But you won't change that, because of who the Fed is. The chair might be appointed by the president, but the Fed itself consists of private investment banks, partly owned by foreign interests. It has never been their genuine intent to "serve the people". Louis McFadden was chair of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1929 to1931. This is what he said about the great market crash of '29:
"The Great Depression was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. International bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair, so that they might emerge the rulers of us all."
If anybody should have known, it would have been him. By the way: after this pronouncement to Congress, McFadden was shot at (according to witnesses) on at least two different occasions. A few years later he died of poisoning after attending a banquet.
"Yes, that changed, and brought the greatest economic expansion and shared prosperity in all of human history."
No, it didn't, if you are talking about the changes since 1913. Most economists today believe that historically, government intervention has been a drag on the economy, not a benefit. Even "mainstream" economists, not just Austrians, have come to accept this, at least for the period of 1920s-1930s. As for the economy after that: you certainly cannot credit the mainstream (largely Keynesian or "neo-classical") economists who advised government. They pretty consistently got things wrong. Often 180 degrees wrong.
Don't make the "correlation=causation" mistake. It is as likely, or perhaps even more likely, that the government could afford to intervene more, as the economy expanded. Not the other way around.
"If you want a global economy (and I don't, by the way), then you need central banking."
I don't either, but I still disagree. You don't "need" central banking. But central banking certainly makes it easier to force a "global economy" on people, whether they want it or not.
"If you want a "lazy-fare" "free market" supply-side capitalist economy, then you need the post-Greenspan Fed."
"Supply-Side" is a discredited Keynesian economic principle espoused by Art Laffer. Many people may not realize this, but Laffer is a dyed-in-the-woo
" The Fed *pays* for the minting of coins, whereas the Fed, a private corporation, gets to print their own paper money, that they promptly loan out."
The Fed doesn't mint coins. The U.S. government does. Look it up.
"Bitcoin is already divisible so there are more Bitcoins than dollars. Mining will cause more to generate far into the future so what are you talking about?"
Just no.
First, saying "Bitcoin is already divisible so there are more Bitcoins than dollars" is like saying "Dollars can be divided into pennies so there are more dollars than Deutschmarks." It doesn't make any sense.
Bitcoins are divisible in the same sense dollars are: you can divide them into fractions (like quarters, dimes, pennies). That is all. The only difference is that Bitcoins can be divided more easily into smaller parts than dollars. It goes far beyond 100ths.
As for mining: the way Bitcoins were divised, there will forever only be so many Bitcoins. Mining gets harder over time, in the sense that fewer Bitcoins will be mined for the same amount of effort, until it gets (quite literally) to zero. And that limit is not as far off as you seem to think. "... cause more to generate far into the future" is just incorrect.
"Even if we could stop inflationary policies, I'm not sure most of us would want to, since it would mean a protracted worldwide economic downturn."
If I may say: I think you've been listening to too many Keynesian economists. The idea that inflation is good is just so much snake oil. The people it benefits are government, banks, and Wall Street. It harms just about everyone else.
HEALTHY markets are zero or negative inflation. Take computer-related equipment: every year, you get more bang for the buck (even when you consider they're inflated bucks). That's called deflation.
For nearly 300 years, inflation was essentially zero in North America, and we had a healthy economy (arguably the healthiest in the world). That changed when the government started meddling. It is ridiculously easy to demonstrate this.
I don't share your stance, which seems overly pessimistic to me. We need to end the Fed, and re-instate a hard money standard. Just those two things would fix many of our ills.
(Re, the Fed: why should we pay interest on every dollar printed? That's just one of the ills it introduced.)
Bitcoin makes that impossible, so the end result will be that those governments will either not use such a limited currency, or will use it up until the point they want to print more where they will then either abandon the cryptocurrency or declare that some other currency must have some exchange rate with the Bitcoins and print more of those.
This, except for that very last part. It isn't possible to tie a non-inflationary currency via a fixed exchange rate to another currency, then inflate that other currency. That is a contradiction. You can do one, or the other, but not both.
Most of the time, the governments in these hyper-inflationary states are printing more money in order to spend more money or to save their own asses, at the peoples' expense. (Just as, to a lesser degree, the U.S. government has.) So they would simply not allow the non-inflationary currency, or abandon it when they saw it didn't suit their purposes.
It's far past time we kicked these adherents of failed and discredited Keynesian theory out of government economics. Sadly, Janet Yellen, new Fed chief, is a staunch Keynesian and a fan of the "new" Phillips Curve, which was demonstrated pretty thoroughly to be wrong about 20 years ago.
We already have stagflation under Obama: high inflation (government inflation figures are just plain B.S.) and high unemployment. If Yellen has her way, we could have high inflation, high unemployment, AND high interest rates.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"Slightly more powerful than wget to me is a wrapper around wget. Perl and Bash scripts are way beyond the average users. To politicians scripts can be used to claim "voodoo" or "saintly" depending on who writes the scripts. The NSAs scripts are obviously saintly, while anybody else is probably voodoo."
Even funnier is the assertion that such "web crawling" would be easy to detect. As someone who has done remote automation and data scraping for a living, I can tell you that it doesn't look any different than any other web traffic.
About the only way to detect it is to do traffic analysis, to see if the same IP address is hitting nodes a lot, or hitting many nodes in a short period of time, and especially if they are rapid-fire.
But the latter is easy to get around. I won't say just how here, because even if it's not hard to figure out it's still something of a trade secret.
"How many of us are running programs similar to NOSCRIPT mostly because of hostile code and inattentive webmasters unwittingly distributing malicious code wrapped in advertisements?"
Generally speaking, NoScript is blacklisting, not whitelisting. Although you can whitelist programs in NoScript to prevent them from being blacklisted. :)
Newer versions of OS X use whitelisting by default, for unsigned executables.
"Yes because clearly political ideology is exactly as unchangeable as one's race or country of origins.
Talk about bait and switch."
Wow again. Talk about WHOOSH.
My comment had nothing to do with choice. It had to do with somebody stereotyping others. Do you know what a stereotype is? Here are some examples:
"All democrats are idiots."
"All Slashdot contributors are geniuses."
Orientals have buck teeth and wear glasses.
All Republicans like licorice.
All black people have large penises. (Even the women!)
Harman-Kardon
"No. You are wrong on both counts. "
No, I am not.
"First, not all science is useful to the public, and in fact some science has the potential to harm it greatly, if it were furnished to the wrong people."
Okay. Granted. But that is the very rare exception. Nuclear bombs and genetic sequences of superbugs are probably not suitable for public consumption. But that is such a minuscule percentage that my generalization is still valid... while accepting those few exceptions. Yes I was wrong to state it as an absolute, but in general it's still true.
"Second, climatology is not reproducible."
Climate does not have to be reproducible. Climate is not science. But "climate science" does indeed have to be reproducible. If you take a batch of raw data, and come up with results that others can't reproduce using responsible methods, then it isn't science.
"By demanding reproducible results as a matter of law, Schweikert is making it impossible for the EPA to cite climate models to support regulations aimed at curbing emissions."
Bullshit. The SCIENCE is still reproducible. Or it isn't science. Repeat: the climate does not have to be reproducible, but the science does have to be reproducible from the original data. Claims of irreproducibility due to exceptional circumstances are a red-flag hallmark of NOT SCIENCE.