Inflation itself has been the means of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
You don't seem to be accounting for debt. Deflation increases the real value of debts owed. Most debt is owed by the poor. All net debtors are by definition poor. Inflation helps debtors pay there debts. The current distribution of assets and liabilities in the USA makes deflation a much greater hardship than inflation for the poor and a significant benefit to the wealthiest.
In the US we've had insufferably low interest rates on the types of accounts that the poor can afford to have, whereas we've had insufferably low taxes on capital gains for the rich. Leading to a perverse situation where the banks are taking the money from the poor and paying it out as dividends and capital gains to the rich.
Are the poor unable to get accounts at a credit union or bank mutually owned by depositors? Capital gains taxes and monetary policy are independent decisions and one should not judge the appropriateness and efficacy of monetary policy goals and tactics based on tax policies alone.
The math is interesting and useful. I find his tangential and circular style of story telling is tedious for a discussion like this. His classification of small families and densely populated areas is value based and increasingly opposed to prevailing opinion among the world's population. War, murder and disease are not strictly decisions that we can make using population control. His classification of immigration is just odd.
The overall issue is real. However, it seems to be trending toward self correction via smaller families and densely populated areas. We don't know what the capacity of earth (or the Universe) is for human life, but we know there is one. Current trends indicate a plateau in the population so we may never need to test the limits.
Money printing is the logical outcome of politicians having that power
It's a good thing that they are not given that power directly. The USA's current system has been the best so far, including comparison to an unregulated market system that was much more volatile and a strict gold standard that depressed employment and economic growth at the most inopportune time. However, there is a solid, but controversial case to make monetary system more automated. Although, I think recent monetary policy could have done better to prevent the severity of credit collapse and subsequent economic decline, much of out current economic climate is not monetary in nature but regulatory. More progressivity in the tax system on the top 1% of wealth might have been beneficial too.
I have shown it plenty of times on this forum alone.
You have merely shown an ability to spew facts and use faulty logic to come to extreme and, at times, contradictory conclusions that you are promoting as absolute solutions. To quote the AC that put it succinctly:
What you have shown over and over and over and over, plenty of times, is that you understand very little of the things you 'refute'. You have done nothing but spew classic paleolithic goldbugger braindamage.
I am going to stick with my ideas, which kept my purchasing power over the years from these monsters.
There is a difference between normative economics and investing. Congratulations on your claimed success of the latter.
which is good, no government institution should be influencing money supply
Without a logical argument to support this statement, it is merely a religious conviction.
as I said, all these economists, pushing the government agenda are charlatans, shamans and witch doctors.
You have not shown any evidence to discredit the well developed ideas of the economists you dismiss. You have shown many logical inconsistencies in your reasoning. I'm going to side with the people who publish well researched logically consistent models that are admittedly limited, incomplete but adaptive to new information and useful in public policy considerations over your confused, conflated statements of intellectual authority in the subject of economics.
There is so much wrong here that I'm not sure I'd ever have the time to go through it all with you. So, I'll just keep my response to the topic of the Federal Reserve Bank leaving the gold standard. Aside from distorting the market for gold, pining the value of federal reserve notes to a weight of gold limited the Federal Reserve Bank's ability to influence the money supply. As Scott Sumner has demonstrated, not addressing a shortage in the money supply contributed greatly to the Great Depression.
Is increased usage of commodities by the Chinese population artificial? If the current "artificial" aggregate demand in the USA leaves us with woefully depressed employment since 2009, why should we favor decreasing USA aggregate demand further?
If Thomas Friedman and I were shipwrecked on a island and he was lecturing me on how we were running out of food faster than we can gather it. He better not be consuming 10 times as much food as I am, or I will find a solution that he may not like.
The question isn't, "is there a maximum sustainable size of the human population on earth?", it's, " what is the maximum sustainable size of the human population on earth?", and "how does that compare to the current population?". You also are assuming steady and positive growth rates. History tells us that these assumptions don't always hold.
Is it worth it to sacrifice the number of humans with knowledge of basic procedures in exchange for a better performing system overall? I realize that it is ideal to have both. We should strive for that. But what if it is apparent that they are mutually exclusive? I think that the passenger air travel industry is much safer over all as a result of automation. Medical practice has potential for the same type of improvement.
There's no need to subscribe to natural law theory to support the liberalization or eliminating of intellectual property laws. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating intellectual property. They argue through empirical study that eliminating intellectual property laws would actually improve innovation and creation.
At this point, that extra gas goes out of a little overflow hole, and typically runs down and onto the ground
I'm quite skeptical of your claim. How is it legal to make a car that intentionally leaks gas, especially in a non-obvious way? Also, how is it that I've seen gas spill out of the port (is that the right word?) used to insert the nozzle? Is the overflow hole an insufficient size for its intent?
I read the explanation page of the author and then reread the page posted to imgur.com. I have to say that it is a piss poor attempt to make the original publication sound reasonable after having been called out for trying teaching absolute non-sense to 4th graders. The explanation page is thoughtful. If only as much thought went into the publication of the supposed textbook on basic science.
You talk as if this corruption of government by wealth either didn't exist in every government ever to a greater or lesser degree and extent,
This is not my intent. I agree with you that corruption of government by wealth has always been a problem.
or that some magic new form of governing will be found where it can't or won't happen.
I'm view is not that extreme. I think Government has a place in supporting the disenfranchised and has the potential to make societies better. It is possible for a government to be resistant, not immune, to corruption.
The problem is not wealthy interests nor strictly government. It's human nature.
Agreed.
The simple truth is that the more power and wealth retained by individual citizens and not their government, the more free they'll be and the longer they're likely to stay that way.
Here is where I think you overlook a related but different risk of a concentration of wealth. Even with a minimal government a concentration of wealth can be problematic. It can be as big a problem as a large corrupt government. It seems that the USA has a compounded problem of a high a concentration of wealth willing to use their wealth to control others and a large corrupt government. I'm not sure of the answer to how to take steps to improve the situation. Larry Lessig's idea of a more effective public funding option for national political campaigns seems like a step in the right direction. Striping the Federal government down to not much more than a military seems impractical and not at all self evident to definitely be an improvement for its constituency.
I think your characterization of "Capitalism is good and Government is bad" is a false dichotomy. It is a naive representation of reality. Capitalism is not good or bad. But it can be applied in good or bad ways when measured against different values. The same is true of Government. My earlier point is that in the recent past a concentration of wealth has been accrued in the USA (and globally) and a significant portion of it is being used to increase the concentration. This is bad sociologically, psychologically, economically, and ethically for the USA and the world. There is a good case that Government policies can make things better. I doubt that they will be applied for the same reason why the concentration of wealth has accelerated recently.
wealth only becomes a problem when that wealth is controlled by government.
What if the wealth controls, or as we see now, heavily influences government? Is only the government to blame for this corruption? Are the wealthier unwilling participants?
Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty, created more wealth for them, and increased people's standard of living to the highest levels ever known, and for a longer period, than any other economic system. Ever.
This happened with the assistance of government. I'll even go as far as to say that a well functioning and efficient capitalist economic system can not exist without a well functioning and efficient government. They are dependent on each other.
This view seems to discount the effective lobbying Wal-Mart has employed on local Governments on an international scale. On the collective, it is as worth it to corrupt many small governments as it is to corrupt a larger one for the wealthy interests. Small and weak government or cooperation among a population limits the potential to counter the influence of a concentration of wealth.
Maybe much of what you define as "corruption" is actually local populations and their governments making a conscious decision to make themselves attractive in order to compete for the presence of a Walmart in their community in order to benefit from economic investment, tax-base growth, and employment.
I haven't defined corruption in terms of Wal-Mart's lobbying. I was only using that as an example of how your premise of distributed government power being too wide spread to be worth a company's efforts to influence them all. In some cases, I think banking and insurance are good examples, the corruption of one region can harm a much larger area.
I'm sure that a number of Wal-Mart locations were placed as a result of corrupt practices. There may even be practices of Wal-Mart that subvert attempts at local competition or a community that would like to remove a Wal-mart store after it was built. There are simply too many Wal-Mart stores for this not to be the case. However, I don't know if they are the exception or the rule.
There is value in large government that needs to be measured against the value of small government with less bureaucracy.
Government only needs to be large enough to accomplish those duties, and only those duties, mandated by the US Constitution. You want it to do more? Fine. Pass a Constitutional Amendment.
You are getting into legal argument about what the constitution allows for. I won't entertain that as it is irrelevant to the advantages and disadvantages of different sizes and forms of government. I will say that Governments should be as large or small as it's constituents find useful. There are trade offs for each choice. The choice is difficult to evaluate and deserves a rational, objective evaluation that doesn't whitewash the nuances out of discussion.
This view seems to discount the effective lobbying Wal-Mart has employed on local Governments on an international scale. On the collective, it is as worth it to corrupt many small governments as it is to corrupt a larger one for the wealthy interests. Small and weak government or cooperation among a population limits the potential to counter the influence of a concentration of wealth. There is value in large government that needs to be measured against the value of small government with less bureaucracy.
The rich vs poor class warfare is simply a propaganda tool
Having more wealth is a threat (and in some cases a direct impediment) to others' freedom. To the extent that it is a threat and not an active impediment there is no real problem. However, when to a significant extent wealth is used as an impediment for the purpose of gaining a larger portion of existing and future wealth (even when total wealth is growing), there is a real problem. There is evidence that this is the case now. Thus "class warfare" not propaganda but a reality thrust upon the less wealthy by the wealthier.
There seems to be some circularity to your argument. One might call it begging the question. You are arguing that smaller government is less corrupt because a money won't be effective in corrupting a small non-corrupt Government. You've presumed a non-corrupt government and defined it as being smaller. Then you concluded that smaller governments are less corrupt and non-corruptible. You never actually explain how to limit corruption in government, let alone overall corruption in society or why your suggestion might reduce corruption.
Freedom has had nothing to do with how America is governed for a while now.
I know for a fact that people have been saying things much like that for more than 200 years, such attitudes would seem to be a part of human nature. Even though more of us are living longer, happier, peaceful lives than ever before in the history of the world (percentage and total numbers)... As it's part of our safety instinct, people will always listen for trouble.
Most are expressing genuine concern, but some do so simply for the audience, mass media has allowed such people to earn a living at it.
I think that real issue is how to filter the signal of real concern from the noise of those simply trying to increase their incomes. In the case of Pieroxy's comment there is a lot of valuable signal. There is a perverse incentive political economy that woks against the intention that democratic republics are designed to serve. Namely, a concentration of wealth can skew the decisions that politicians make in its favor. At times dramatically and to the point of large economic consequence as we've seen recently with Enron, Tyco, Goldman Sacs and Magnitar to name a few.
It's like how MBAs in the 1990s made sure they were seen reading Tzu's The Art Of War.
I think that dates back to the 70's and 80's when Japan was seen as USA largest emerging economic competitor and all things Asian seemed exotic and trendy.
Retail car dealers would raise prices of popular models when they are in limited supply. So something trendy like a prius might fall into that priciest wine vs the cheapest category that deviates from your expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
Well articulated. Thank you for a sane commentary on the USD and inflation.
Inflation itself has been the means of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
You don't seem to be accounting for debt. Deflation increases the real value of debts owed. Most debt is owed by the poor. All net debtors are by definition poor. Inflation helps debtors pay there debts. The current distribution of assets and liabilities in the USA makes deflation a much greater hardship than inflation for the poor and a significant benefit to the wealthiest.
In the US we've had insufferably low interest rates on the types of accounts that the poor can afford to have, whereas we've had insufferably low taxes on capital gains for the rich. Leading to a perverse situation where the banks are taking the money from the poor and paying it out as dividends and capital gains to the rich.
Are the poor unable to get accounts at a credit union or bank mutually owned by depositors? Capital gains taxes and monetary policy are independent decisions and one should not judge the appropriateness and efficacy of monetary policy goals and tactics based on tax policies alone.
The math is interesting and useful. I find his tangential and circular style of story telling is tedious for a discussion like this. His classification of small families and densely populated areas is value based and increasingly opposed to prevailing opinion among the world's population. War, murder and disease are not strictly decisions that we can make using population control. His classification of immigration is just odd.
The overall issue is real. However, it seems to be trending toward self correction via smaller families and densely populated areas. We don't know what the capacity of earth (or the Universe) is for human life, but we know there is one. Current trends indicate a plateau in the population so we may never need to test the limits.
Money printing is the logical outcome of politicians having that power
It's a good thing that they are not given that power directly. The USA's current system has been the best so far, including comparison to an unregulated market system that was much more volatile and a strict gold standard that depressed employment and economic growth at the most inopportune time. However, there is a solid, but controversial case to make monetary system more automated. Although, I think recent monetary policy could have done better to prevent the severity of credit collapse and subsequent economic decline, much of out current economic climate is not monetary in nature but regulatory. More progressivity in the tax system on the top 1% of wealth might have been beneficial too.
I have shown it plenty of times on this forum alone.
You have merely shown an ability to spew facts and use faulty logic to come to extreme and, at times, contradictory conclusions that you are promoting as absolute solutions. To quote the AC that put it succinctly:
What you have shown over and over and over and over, plenty of times, is that you understand very little of the things you 'refute'. You have done nothing but spew classic paleolithic goldbugger braindamage.
I am going to stick with my ideas, which kept my purchasing power over the years from these monsters.
There is a difference between normative economics and investing. Congratulations on your claimed success of the latter.
which is good, no government institution should be influencing money supply
Without a logical argument to support this statement, it is merely a religious conviction.
as I said, all these economists, pushing the government agenda are charlatans, shamans and witch doctors.
You have not shown any evidence to discredit the well developed ideas of the economists you dismiss. You have shown many logical inconsistencies in your reasoning. I'm going to side with the people who publish well researched logically consistent models that are admittedly limited, incomplete but adaptive to new information and useful in public policy considerations over your confused, conflated statements of intellectual authority in the subject of economics.
There is so much wrong here that I'm not sure I'd ever have the time to go through it all with you. So, I'll just keep my response to the topic of the Federal Reserve Bank leaving the gold standard. Aside from distorting the market for gold, pining the value of federal reserve notes to a weight of gold limited the Federal Reserve Bank's ability to influence the money supply. As Scott Sumner has demonstrated, not addressing a shortage in the money supply contributed greatly to the Great Depression.
For more on Scott Sumner's research and thoughts see:
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/
https://faculty.bentley.edu/details.asp?uname=ssumner
The Federal Reserve system and the subsequent decoupling of gold from the Dollar were both improvements.
Prices today are pushed up by artificial demand
Is increased usage of commodities by the Chinese population artificial? If the current "artificial" aggregate demand in the USA leaves us with woefully depressed employment since 2009, why should we favor decreasing USA aggregate demand further?
If Thomas Friedman and I were shipwrecked on a island and he was lecturing me on how we were running out of food faster than we can gather it. He better not be consuming 10 times as much food as I am, or I will find a solution that he may not like.
...but according to some business journalists, economics is useless because it can't tell you how to run a business profitably.
The question isn't, "is there a maximum sustainable size of the human population on earth?", it's, " what is the maximum sustainable size of the human population on earth?", and "how does that compare to the current population?". You also are assuming steady and positive growth rates. History tells us that these assumptions don't always hold.
Is it worth it to sacrifice the number of humans with knowledge of basic procedures in exchange for a better performing system overall? I realize that it is ideal to have both. We should strive for that. But what if it is apparent that they are mutually exclusive? I think that the passenger air travel industry is much safer over all as a result of automation. Medical practice has potential for the same type of improvement.
There's no need to subscribe to natural law theory to support the liberalization or eliminating of intellectual property laws. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating intellectual property. They argue through empirical study that eliminating intellectual property laws would actually improve innovation and creation.
At this point, that extra gas goes out of a little overflow hole, and typically runs down and onto the ground
I'm quite skeptical of your claim. How is it legal to make a car that intentionally leaks gas, especially in a non-obvious way? Also, how is it that I've seen gas spill out of the port (is that the right word?) used to insert the nozzle? Is the overflow hole an insufficient size for its intent?
I read the explanation page of the author and then reread the page posted to imgur.com. I have to say that it is a piss poor attempt to make the original publication sound reasonable after having been called out for trying teaching absolute non-sense to 4th graders. The explanation page is thoughtful. If only as much thought went into the publication of the supposed textbook on basic science.
That was published in a real book?
You talk as if this corruption of government by wealth either didn't exist in every government ever to a greater or lesser degree and extent,
This is not my intent. I agree with you that corruption of government by wealth has always been a problem.
or that some magic new form of governing will be found where it can't or won't happen.
I'm view is not that extreme. I think Government has a place in supporting the disenfranchised and has the potential to make societies better. It is possible for a government to be resistant, not immune, to corruption.
The problem is not wealthy interests nor strictly government. It's human nature.
Agreed.
The simple truth is that the more power and wealth retained by individual citizens and not their government, the more free they'll be and the longer they're likely to stay that way.
Here is where I think you overlook a related but different risk of a concentration of wealth. Even with a minimal government a concentration of wealth can be problematic. It can be as big a problem as a large corrupt government. It seems that the USA has a compounded problem of a high a concentration of wealth willing to use their wealth to control others and a large corrupt government. I'm not sure of the answer to how to take steps to improve the situation. Larry Lessig's idea of a more effective public funding option for national political campaigns seems like a step in the right direction. Striping the Federal government down to not much more than a military seems impractical and not at all self evident to definitely be an improvement for its constituency.
I think your characterization of "Capitalism is good and Government is bad" is a false dichotomy. It is a naive representation of reality. Capitalism is not good or bad. But it can be applied in good or bad ways when measured against different values. The same is true of Government. My earlier point is that in the recent past a concentration of wealth has been accrued in the USA (and globally) and a significant portion of it is being used to increase the concentration. This is bad sociologically, psychologically, economically, and ethically for the USA and the world. There is a good case that Government policies can make things better. I doubt that they will be applied for the same reason why the concentration of wealth has accelerated recently.
wealth only becomes a problem when that wealth is controlled by government.
What if the wealth controls, or as we see now, heavily influences government? Is only the government to blame for this corruption? Are the wealthier unwilling participants?
Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty, created more wealth for them, and increased people's standard of living to the highest levels ever known, and for a longer period, than any other economic system. Ever.
This happened with the assistance of government. I'll even go as far as to say that a well functioning and efficient capitalist economic system can not exist without a well functioning and efficient government. They are dependent on each other.
This view seems to discount the effective lobbying Wal-Mart has employed on local Governments on an international scale. On the collective, it is as worth it to corrupt many small governments as it is to corrupt a larger one for the wealthy interests. Small and weak government or cooperation among a population limits the potential to counter the influence of a concentration of wealth.
Maybe much of what you define as "corruption" is actually local populations and their governments making a conscious decision to make themselves attractive in order to compete for the presence of a Walmart in their community in order to benefit from economic investment, tax-base growth, and employment.
I haven't defined corruption in terms of Wal-Mart's lobbying. I was only using that as an example of how your premise of distributed government power being too wide spread to be worth a company's efforts to influence them all. In some cases, I think banking and insurance are good examples, the corruption of one region can harm a much larger area.
I'm sure that a number of Wal-Mart locations were placed as a result of corrupt practices. There may even be practices of Wal-Mart that subvert attempts at local competition or a community that would like to remove a Wal-mart store after it was built. There are simply too many Wal-Mart stores for this not to be the case. However, I don't know if they are the exception or the rule.
There is value in large government that needs to be measured against the value of small government with less bureaucracy.
Government only needs to be large enough to accomplish those duties, and only those duties, mandated by the US Constitution. You want it to do more? Fine. Pass a Constitutional Amendment.
You are getting into legal argument about what the constitution allows for. I won't entertain that as it is irrelevant to the advantages and disadvantages of different sizes and forms of government. I will say that Governments should be as large or small as it's constituents find useful. There are trade offs for each choice. The choice is difficult to evaluate and deserves a rational, objective evaluation that doesn't whitewash the nuances out of discussion.
This view seems to discount the effective lobbying Wal-Mart has employed on local Governments on an international scale. On the collective, it is as worth it to corrupt many small governments as it is to corrupt a larger one for the wealthy interests. Small and weak government or cooperation among a population limits the potential to counter the influence of a concentration of wealth. There is value in large government that needs to be measured against the value of small government with less bureaucracy.
The rich vs poor class warfare is simply a propaganda tool
Having more wealth is a threat (and in some cases a direct impediment) to others' freedom. To the extent that it is a threat and not an active impediment there is no real problem. However, when to a significant extent wealth is used as an impediment for the purpose of gaining a larger portion of existing and future wealth (even when total wealth is growing), there is a real problem. There is evidence that this is the case now. Thus "class warfare" not propaganda but a reality thrust upon the less wealthy by the wealthier.
There seems to be some circularity to your argument. One might call it begging the question. You are arguing that smaller government is less corrupt because a money won't be effective in corrupting a small non-corrupt Government. You've presumed a non-corrupt government and defined it as being smaller. Then you concluded that smaller governments are less corrupt and non-corruptible. You never actually explain how to limit corruption in government, let alone overall corruption in society or why your suggestion might reduce corruption.
Freedom has had nothing to do with how America is governed for a while now.
I know for a fact that people have been saying things much like that for more than 200 years, such attitudes would seem to be a part of human nature. Even though more of us are living longer, happier, peaceful lives than ever before in the history of the world (percentage and total numbers)...
As it's part of our safety instinct, people will always listen for trouble.
Most are expressing genuine concern, but some do so simply for the audience, mass media has allowed such people to earn a living at it.
I think that real issue is how to filter the signal of real concern from the noise of those simply trying to increase their incomes. In the case of Pieroxy's comment there is a lot of valuable signal. There is a perverse incentive political economy that woks against the intention that democratic republics are designed to serve. Namely, a concentration of wealth can skew the decisions that politicians make in its favor. At times dramatically and to the point of large economic consequence as we've seen recently with Enron, Tyco, Goldman Sacs and Magnitar to name a few.
It's like how MBAs in the 1990s made sure they were seen reading Tzu's The Art Of War.
I think that dates back to the 70's and 80's when Japan was seen as USA largest emerging economic competitor and all things Asian seemed exotic and trendy.
Retail car dealers would raise prices of popular models when they are in limited supply. So something trendy like a prius might fall into that priciest wine vs the cheapest category that deviates from your expectations.