I think the medical system is due for a massive overhaul to make it work better and cheaper but I don't see that happening with the corporate system we have now and I also doubt that the kind of universal health care system we can get in this country would get us there either but it would still be better than what we have now.
what you have in the US is absolutely the worst possible combination of bad traits of free market and single payer systems. Economics 101 says that every time the consumer is not the same person as the payer and the payment goes through the 3rd party, prices will shoot through the roof. Consumers paying directly put the strongest downward pressure on prices. In the current model the direct consumers have no bargaining power as they don't see the prices, don't get to negotiate them (=you can't really vote with your wallet so no competition) and have no incentive whatsoever to control costs as the magical tooth fairy pays all the bills (=unnecessary procedures and prices pulled out of the ass).
You can thank the US govt for the whole employer provided healthcare mess. They froze wages during WW2, so employers got around the restrictions by offering perks like HC to attract top talent. That sounded like a good idea so the tax code was made to reinforce that model (employer based insurance is paid with pre tax dollars, employee has to pay with post tax dollars). Fast forward few decades and there is almost no market for individual insurance, everything is tailored for bulk insurance via employers. Laws forbidding interstate competition doesn't help either, nor do limits on capacity of medical schools.
For profit health insurance could work (it worked just fine few decades ago), but you'd have to have a real insurance for really expensive stuff, while boring maintenance goes out of pocket. No way few aspirins would take you back $50 if you were told that price in your face and had to pull your wallet out to pay it.
i don't see anything about the rat race in his post. The deal is simple - if it's your choice to be more social and grind less at work, accept the consequences (eg lower standard of living, low disposable income) like an adult. The choice is fine, but the oversized sense of entitlement would be wrong, as it would have to be funded by people who might hate work just much as you if not more, but don't skip the hard parts of life, who have the fruits of their labor taken from them.
paper is not all roses, it takes a lot of water and many nasty chemicals to produce. The problem is that many of such regulations are a feel-good bullshit which takes only a single, most visible factor into consideration, disregarding more subtle ones and the whole range of unintended consequences. Where are the studies comparing total footprint of plastic vs paper?
no disagreement here, i was just describing the general mechanism. Legislation explicitly has shielded lenders from the risk at the expense of borrowers and the budget (guarantees plus difficulty to default), which in turn has driven much more money into the market than what would be available otherwise = origins of the huge student loans industry. Universities simply set the prices to omnomnom all that additional money flowing, everybody but the borrower benefits.
maybe not directly, but the govt has indeed created a huge industry around the students loans, without the guarantees nobody in his right mind would loan thousands of dollars to teens. Baseline price is decided by the cash on hand people have, but the moment you give everybody an access to the subsidy of X, the price will jump by X - and that's what happened. If people who have next to no money on their own are willing to borrow 100k to study gender issues, that's how much the universities will charge.
You are free to trade gold whenever or for whatever you want.
well, not really and that's the main source of ideas of competing currencies. Two words: capital gains. Anything not government mandated is a second class citizen, because you have to pay taxes when you gain nominal dollars due to inflation (despite not gaining an ounce of real world purchasing power)
For some reason, most people think trading with gold as being to cumbersome to even bother.
In case of full blown gold backed currency, the only difference would be the existence of some kind of anchor, everyday money handling can be the same with both backed and fiat currencies. People in the past used paper certificates that were claims on a defined amount of gold, also there is no reason why cashless transactions can't be made in the same manner they are done now. Does it matter if bits in computer represent fiat dollars or ounces of gold?
nobody said the prices have to stay the same, the purchasing power of currencies would be determined by the market. Either way it's about choice, if you think that gold or bitcoin are better than dollars despite their drawbacks, you would be free to use them without penalties.
Gold is too valuable to waste it on money.
we already do that, gold mostly sits in vaults of central banks around the world and its other major use is jewelry, which is more or less equivalent to wearing banknotes (proxy for wealth/status).
his official stance was competing currencies so you can park your purchasing power in any currency, even privately issued, and not have a government imposed penalty on that. Rationale is that monopoly breeds exploitation. You think the Fed prints too much and the inflation is massaged down? Give a vote of no confidence and opt out of dollar. It's a free market principle extended to include money as well. Obviously gold backed currency would be an obvious choice for many, given the long successful history of precious metals as money.
and the problem is where exactly? it's called 'having a plan B'
His constituents paid taxes that were being spent and he made sure some of it goes back, in case the voting goes the other way. And earmarked spending is better than the standard "we'll blow money on whatever and nobody will know where" because taxpayer can track it. don't spend > spend but earmark > spend
Everybody laughed at his hardcore idealism yet he's criticized for pragmatism as well.
Did i say the WS hacks are innocent? No. But i put only half of blame on them, the other half, more crucial, goes to the govt. Without govt trying to bribe voters with post-dotcom-bust boom, there would be no problem in the first place. Let's face it - everybody loved the bubble. It takes two to tango and buttnaked peons loved no-down mortgages and flip-house-to-get-rich very much, voters loved growing GDP and wages, banksters and investors loved fat profits, the govt loved high tax revenue. Everybody looked the other way as long as possible, math be damned.
Proper incentive structure trumps wishful thinking, end of story. Good parent (govt) shouldn't enable bad behavior of his children (WS criminals)
- it created a playground (F&F added much depth to subprime market) - it supplied children with toys and tools (liquidity, ratings requirements) - it didn't oversee the offsping (the SEC watching porn instead of doing their job) Oh look, it's a total mess, how can that be?!? Looks like a multilayered parenting failure to me.
Yes government has the power to do a lot of bad stuff.
However that doesn't mean they were the prime actors here. Not at all.
yes they were. They pretty much - created, legitimized and added a shitload of depth to the subprime market - if govt takes part, there are assumed guarantees = perception of safety, govt enforced ratings rules didn't help either. Without it the market would stink to your average investor - provided liquidity to blow the bubble to epic proportions - no fucking way in hell there would be so much money flowing into subprime if the rates were not rock bottom - failed to oversee the mess - what are these fucking morons at the SEC getting paid for? and wouldn't that mean that even the best regulation is doomed to fail as the people are the weakest link?
I didn't say the Wall Street criminals are innocent, but without the govt there would be no subprime+cdo/cds mess in the first place. Would Wall Street criminals do something else? Probably. That doesn't change the fact the govt created environment for WS hacks to thrive in and enabled the bad behavior. Who's the parent here and who's the child?
Unregulated derivatives are at the root of this crash. What is scary to me is that nobody is seriously considering regulating OTC derivatives. It means we are wide open to future episodes because the root causes are still in place.
i see 40:1 leverage as a much bigger issue, tiny bumps get amplified to a fucking Mount Everest sized problems, no shit the economy is increasingly fragile.
Egan-Jones is a small ratings agency that is paid by the buyers. It's famous for harsh ratings and coincidentally got hit by the 18month ban on govt bond ratings few weeks ago.
Egan-Jones (small rating agency that is paid not by sellers but by buyers) which is famous for its harsh ratings recently got hit by the SEC with 18 month ban on govt ratings because of formalities.
are you high? he says it like it is. Govt has the power to corrupt incentive structure in a way that spits in the face of common economic sense like no other entity, govt has the power to provide players with leverage by pushing interest rates down which amplifies the magnitude of malinvestments, govt has the power to force people to invest in 'safe papers' (retirement funds mandated to sit on AAA papers), govt has the power to decide who defines what AAA is in the first place, and govt can provide market with a seemingly bottomless sink for toxic sludge (F&F). No amount of afterthought regulation will save you if the incentive structure is broken by govt edict. Exploiting it is *rational*: produce as much sludge as you can, resell it right off the bat to rake in govt guaranteed money or your competitor will and you will go out of business.
Come up with regulation that is aligned with reality then we'll talk. If you pile up untold riches in one place to lure the greedy and put a sign 'don't touch it or else' you really think nobody will bother? If the risk/reward ratio is fat enough, plenty of people will and that's exactly what happened.
Glass Stegall Act doesn't matter. The rest of the world doesn't have it and it's the investment banks that went down, not mixed businesses. One could argue that diversification helped them avoid trouble.
as if Economies are in a fixed sphere with a fixed about of water that given enough release of pressure we level out and stabilize
fixed no, but if you don't see for example outsourcing as a process of leveling out on a global scale then i don't know what to tell you. Trade is arbitrage and arbitrage is taking advantage of inequalities not unlike a watermill taking advantage of water flowing downwards or a lightbulb glowing because the electric current wants to level out the difference of electric potential The overwhelming majority of global economists is occupied with redefining the units of currency (apparently hoping that people won't notice that money and actual purchasing power are not the same thing) and reducing complex problems to simple scalars like aggregate demand way too much.
Except that in the case of the bailouts almost all of our money has been returned with interest.
it's been returned with interest by some financials because the govt, or should i say the Federal Reserve, has provided the money. Borrow from the Fed virtually free money, park it in treasury bonds and skim the difference risk free. Any retard would be able to make money having access to the unlimited sub-1% credit line at the Fed.
Austrians believe that the interest rate is pretty much the master knob and calling it the centrally planned economy is fully justified. Nothing else is anywhere near matching profound influence of the IR on economy as it coordinates activity across the whole economic time-space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI#t=29m25
so? Mood and perception play as big (if not bigger) role as fundamentals do. It's hard to nail recessions perfectly because as soon as the guys at the central smell approaching contraction they try to immediately paper it over, even with the coordinated help of their colleagues from other countries, so on the surface everything is peachy. Most of the time they manage to push the problem away, at least for some time.
Austrian economics mostly says that people should stop playing with shit they don't understand in the first place (hayekian 'pretense of knowledge'), so they don't have to fix results of their own mistakes, potentially making even more mistakes in the process. Interest rates are a price signal, you can't just lower them for political gains or whatever and not expect the economy to implode few years down the road when malinvestment levels are simply too high to contain. Is the structural defficiency of the global economy fixed? No, not in the slightest. All i see is balooning sovereign debts and balance sheets of central banks, a recovery concentrated in stock markets. In other words the can got kicked down the road once again.
soccer is predictable? 1 lucky shot + otherwise shitty effectiveness on both sides = you win. It's not like an all-star team lost a game ever because the opposing team scored a single goal with their only shot on goal and managed to stave off the steamroller by the skin of their teeth.
Soccer on average has much fewer scoring events and that means the flukes have statistically greater chance to skew the outcome of the game. Assuming touchdown = goal, football is like a soccer with tons of 5:3 results (hockey?), while the soccer itself is more like 2:1.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the medical system is due for a massive overhaul to make it work better and cheaper but I don't see that happening with the corporate system we have now and I also doubt that the kind of universal health care system we can get in this country would get us there either but it would still be better than what we have now.
what you have in the US is absolutely the worst possible combination of bad traits of free market and single payer systems.
Economics 101 says that every time the consumer is not the same person as the payer and the payment goes through the 3rd party, prices will shoot through the roof. Consumers paying directly put the strongest downward pressure on prices. In the current model the direct consumers have no bargaining power as they don't see the prices, don't get to negotiate them (=you can't really vote with your wallet so no competition) and have no incentive whatsoever to control costs as the magical tooth fairy pays all the bills (=unnecessary procedures and prices pulled out of the ass).
You can thank the US govt for the whole employer provided healthcare mess. They froze wages during WW2, so employers got around the restrictions by offering perks like HC to attract top talent. That sounded like a good idea so the tax code was made to reinforce that model (employer based insurance is paid with pre tax dollars, employee has to pay with post tax dollars). Fast forward few decades and there is almost no market for individual insurance, everything is tailored for bulk insurance via employers. Laws forbidding interstate competition doesn't help either, nor do limits on capacity of medical schools.
For profit health insurance could work (it worked just fine few decades ago), but you'd have to have a real insurance for really expensive stuff, while boring maintenance goes out of pocket. No way few aspirins would take you back $50 if you were told that price in your face and had to pull your wallet out to pay it.
i don't see anything about the rat race in his post. The deal is simple - if it's your choice to be more social and grind less at work, accept the consequences (eg lower standard of living, low disposable income) like an adult. The choice is fine, but the oversized sense of entitlement would be wrong, as it would have to be funded by people who might hate work just much as you if not more, but don't skip the hard parts of life, who have the fruits of their labor taken from them.
paper is not all roses, it takes a lot of water and many nasty chemicals to produce.
The problem is that many of such regulations are a feel-good bullshit which takes only a single, most visible factor into consideration, disregarding more subtle ones and the whole range of unintended consequences. Where are the studies comparing total footprint of plastic vs paper?
no disagreement here, i was just describing the general mechanism. Legislation explicitly has shielded lenders from the risk at the expense of borrowers and the budget (guarantees plus difficulty to default), which in turn has driven much more money into the market than what would be available otherwise = origins of the huge student loans industry. Universities simply set the prices to omnomnom all that additional money flowing, everybody but the borrower benefits.
maybe not directly, but the govt has indeed created a huge industry around the students loans, without the guarantees nobody in his right mind would loan thousands of dollars to teens. Baseline price is decided by the cash on hand people have, but the moment you give everybody an access to the subsidy of X, the price will jump by X - and that's what happened. If people who have next to no money on their own are willing to borrow 100k to study gender issues, that's how much the universities will charge.
You are free to trade gold whenever or for whatever you want.
well, not really and that's the main source of ideas of competing currencies. Two words: capital gains. Anything not government mandated is a second class citizen, because you have to pay taxes when you gain nominal dollars due to inflation (despite not gaining an ounce of real world purchasing power)
For some reason, most people think trading with gold as being to cumbersome to even bother.
In case of full blown gold backed currency, the only difference would be the existence of some kind of anchor, everyday money handling can be the same with both backed and fiat currencies. People in the past used paper certificates that were claims on a defined amount of gold, also there is no reason why cashless transactions can't be made in the same manner they are done now. Does it matter if bits in computer represent fiat dollars or ounces of gold?
At current gold prices...
nobody said the prices have to stay the same, the purchasing power of currencies would be determined by the market.
Either way it's about choice, if you think that gold or bitcoin are better than dollars despite their drawbacks, you would be free to use them without penalties.
Gold is too valuable to waste it on money.
we already do that, gold mostly sits in vaults of central banks around the world and its other major use is jewelry, which is more or less equivalent to wearing banknotes (proxy for wealth/status).
afaik domain disputes are resolved at WIPO
aren't domain disputes solved at WIPO? Where else should he go?
his official stance was competing currencies so you can park your purchasing power in any currency, even privately issued, and not have a government imposed penalty on that. Rationale is that monopoly breeds exploitation. You think the Fed prints too much and the inflation is massaged down? Give a vote of no confidence and opt out of dollar. It's a free market principle extended to include money as well.
Obviously gold backed currency would be an obvious choice for many, given the long successful history of precious metals as money.
and the problem is where exactly? it's called 'having a plan B'
His constituents paid taxes that were being spent and he made sure some of it goes back, in case the voting goes the other way. And earmarked spending is better than the standard "we'll blow money on whatever and nobody will know where" because taxpayer can track it.
don't spend > spend but earmark > spend
Everybody laughed at his hardcore idealism yet he's criticized for pragmatism as well.
Did i say the WS hacks are innocent? No. But i put only half of blame on them, the other half, more crucial, goes to the govt. Without govt trying to bribe voters with post-dotcom-bust boom, there would be no problem in the first place. Let's face it - everybody loved the bubble. It takes two to tango and buttnaked peons loved no-down mortgages and flip-house-to-get-rich very much, voters loved growing GDP and wages, banksters and investors loved fat profits, the govt loved high tax revenue. Everybody looked the other way as long as possible, math be damned.
Proper incentive structure trumps wishful thinking, end of story.
Good parent (govt) shouldn't enable bad behavior of his children (WS criminals)
- it created a playground (F&F added much depth to subprime market)
- it supplied children with toys and tools (liquidity, ratings requirements)
- it didn't oversee the offsping (the SEC watching porn instead of doing their job)
Oh look, it's a total mess, how can that be?!? Looks like a multilayered parenting failure to me.
Yes government has the power to do a lot of bad stuff.
However that doesn't mean they were the prime actors here. Not at all.
yes they were. They pretty much
- created, legitimized and added a shitload of depth to the subprime market - if govt takes part, there are assumed guarantees = perception of safety, govt enforced ratings rules didn't help either. Without it the market would stink to your average investor
- provided liquidity to blow the bubble to epic proportions - no fucking way in hell there would be so much money flowing into subprime if the rates were not rock bottom
- failed to oversee the mess - what are these fucking morons at the SEC getting paid for? and wouldn't that mean that even the best regulation is doomed to fail as the people are the weakest link?
I didn't say the Wall Street criminals are innocent, but without the govt there would be no subprime+cdo/cds mess in the first place. Would Wall Street criminals do something else? Probably. That doesn't change the fact the govt created environment for WS hacks to thrive in and enabled the bad behavior. Who's the parent here and who's the child?
Unregulated derivatives are at the root of this crash. What is scary to me is that nobody is seriously considering regulating OTC derivatives. It means we are wide open to future episodes because the root causes are still in place.
i see 40:1 leverage as a much bigger issue, tiny bumps get amplified to a fucking Mount Everest sized problems, no shit the economy is increasingly fragile.
Egan-Jones is a small ratings agency that is paid by the buyers. It's famous for harsh ratings and coincidentally got hit by the 18month ban on govt bond ratings few weeks ago.
Egan-Jones, a small competitor to the big three, recently got hit with a 18month ban on govt ratings.
Egan-Jones (small rating agency that is paid not by sellers but by buyers) which is famous for its harsh ratings recently got hit by the SEC with 18 month ban on govt ratings because of formalities.
are you high? he says it like it is.
Govt has the power to corrupt incentive structure in a way that spits in the face of common economic sense like no other entity, govt has the power to provide players with leverage by pushing interest rates down which amplifies the magnitude of malinvestments, govt has the power to force people to invest in 'safe papers' (retirement funds mandated to sit on AAA papers), govt has the power to decide who defines what AAA is in the first place, and govt can provide market with a seemingly bottomless sink for toxic sludge (F&F).
No amount of afterthought regulation will save you if the incentive structure is broken by govt edict. Exploiting it is *rational*: produce as much sludge as you can, resell it right off the bat to rake in govt guaranteed money or your competitor will and you will go out of business.
Come up with regulation that is aligned with reality then we'll talk. If you pile up untold riches in one place to lure the greedy and put a sign 'don't touch it or else' you really think nobody will bother? If the risk/reward ratio is fat enough, plenty of people will and that's exactly what happened.
Glass Stegall Act doesn't matter. The rest of the world doesn't have it and it's the investment banks that went down, not mixed businesses. One could argue that diversification helped them avoid trouble.
as if Economies are in a fixed sphere with a fixed about of water that given enough release of pressure we level out and stabilize
fixed no, but if you don't see for example outsourcing as a process of leveling out on a global scale then i don't know what to tell you. Trade is arbitrage and arbitrage is taking advantage of inequalities not unlike a watermill taking advantage of water flowing downwards or a lightbulb glowing because the electric current wants to level out the difference of electric potential
The overwhelming majority of global economists is occupied with redefining the units of currency (apparently hoping that people won't notice that money and actual purchasing power are not the same thing) and reducing complex problems to simple scalars like aggregate demand way too much.
Except that in the case of the bailouts almost all of our money has been returned with interest.
it's been returned with interest by some financials because the govt, or should i say the Federal Reserve, has provided the money.
Borrow from the Fed virtually free money, park it in treasury bonds and skim the difference risk free. Any retard would be able to make money having access to the unlimited sub-1% credit line at the Fed.
Austrians believe that the interest rate is pretty much the master knob and calling it the centrally planned economy is fully justified. Nothing else is anywhere near matching profound influence of the IR on economy as it coordinates activity across the whole economic time-space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI#t=29m25
so? Mood and perception play as big (if not bigger) role as fundamentals do.
It's hard to nail recessions perfectly because as soon as the guys at the central smell approaching contraction they try to immediately paper it over, even with the coordinated help of their colleagues from other countries, so on the surface everything is peachy. Most of the time they manage to push the problem away, at least for some time.
Austrian economics mostly says that people should stop playing with shit they don't understand in the first place (hayekian 'pretense of knowledge'), so they don't have to fix results of their own mistakes, potentially making even more mistakes in the process.
Interest rates are a price signal, you can't just lower them for political gains or whatever and not expect the economy to implode few years down the road when malinvestment levels are simply too high to contain. Is the structural defficiency of the global economy fixed? No, not in the slightest. All i see is balooning sovereign debts and balance sheets of central banks, a recovery concentrated in stock markets. In other words the can got kicked down the road once again.
soccer is predictable? 1 lucky shot + otherwise shitty effectiveness on both sides = you win. It's not like an all-star team lost a game ever because the opposing team scored a single goal with their only shot on goal and managed to stave off the steamroller by the skin of their teeth.
Soccer on average has much fewer scoring events and that means the flukes have statistically greater chance to skew the outcome of the game. Assuming touchdown = goal, football is like a soccer with tons of 5:3 results (hockey?), while the soccer itself is more like 2:1.
how is that different from volleyball or handball?