Actually, the root cause is that the availability of artificially cheap money (read: credit) by the Federal Reserve misprices risk: this has resulted inâ"at leastâ"the tech bubble in the late 90's and the housing bubble in the 00's.
Since no one in power recognizes or at least wants to admit that the Fed is the cause of these problems, expect a new bubble to appear soon.
Read it again: that's exactly what I said. Let me rephrase with your words:
"E.g., if you have 2% growth and 1.5% increase in gold supply, you'll have 0.5% deflation. (In other words, at the end of the year, a unit of gold can purchase 0.5% more "stuff" than at the beginning.)"
Continue my thought experiment, then, into the future so far that each atom of gold is worth, say, a galaxy class starship. But what if I want to exchange my pocket change for gold? I guess I just get a quark or two shaved off of a gold bar?
LOL... indeed, this is a problem I have considered, but that's a looooong way off.:-)
There's another reason not to worry about it: even taking into account population growth and a vast increase in the amount of gold and silver mined over the past 700 years, the "value" of gold and silver in terms of what a particular amount buys has remained relatively stable over that period.
For example, see the following graph, paying particular attention to the nominal price/gallon of gasoline:
Until the 70's, gasoline was stable between $0.25 and $0.35/gallon. When Nixon withdrew from the Bretton Woods accord in 1971, closing the gold exchange window, oil suddenly became more expensive and never looked back.
Here's a graph of some measure of consumer prices. I have no idea how accurate this is, but I'm most interested in its demonstration of how stable prices were for a long time, until the final gold backing for the dollar was removed:
Anyway, there's a lifetime of reading out there about money. The best way to start IMO is to read Murray Rothbard's "What Has Government Done to our Money?", available for free.
the rate of deflation with gold as the money supply is limited to the rate at which gold can be mined (slow)
Brain fart. This should be "the rate at which wealth is created". This, historically-speaking, averages about 2% per year, which means a 1.5% annual increase in the gold supply would lead to 0.5% deflation on average every year.
To simplify things, let's create a little thought experiment and take it to the extreme. What happens when there is no more gold left to pile up in Fort Knox? Does the economy stop growing at that instant? No. People continue to innovate and create value out of nothing using only their minds and bodies. What do we do then? Switch to another precious metal of which we have more? Switch to commodities?
Of course not: each bit of gold/silver simply buys more stuff.
Now that I've explained the obvious, a good followup question is: is this a bad thing? I don't think so, but I also think gradual deflation is better than massive inflation: the rate of deflation with gold as the money supply is limited to the rate at which gold can be mined (slow), while the rate of inflation with paper currency is limited only by the rate at which some douchebag at the Treasury can create bits in a computer system (fast and potentially disruptive).
In reality, the rate of growth in the gold supply has mirrored the rate of growth in global wealth pretty well: about 1.5% per year. As the price of gold rises, you can expect more supplies to come online as it becomes economically viable to dig them out of the ground.
The key difference between the two, of course, is that gold/silver can't be arbitrarily created, while the US Treasury has an exclusive license to counterfeit the dollar, which it does with abandon. That is the reason why a commodity money is superior to paper currency.
How many times have I heard the sentiment "if only we had the right people in charge, all of this insanity would end" expressed?
When will it become clear to the thinking members of western civilization that the system itselfâ"not just those holding officeâ"is broken? That government is so powerful, its reach nearly unlimited, that the system has become mercantilist, and therefore attracts to office precisely those who will trade your freedoms for their gain?
I'll tell you where it is: with the people who care about their rights being taken away by corrupt politicians.
And what can we do about it? The answer is contained in the second amendment, which was reaffirmed yesterday by (only) five of the gang of nine. The founders made a lot of mistakes, but they were absolutely right when they codified that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a prerequisite to maintaining a free state.
VC6 was not iso compliant. No wonder. the ISO standard wasn't ratified at that time. But g++ 2.95 scored equally bad, or worse. I'd love to know how you "scored" them, but VC6 didn't even support partial specialization of templates. As someone who had to port several thousand lines of complex C++ from gcc-2.95 to VC6, this was the single biggest headache I had to deal with. VC7 got closer, but was still missing a bunch of things that even gcc-2.95 had.
There are plenty of examples of this occurring in the real world in unregulated "non-essential" markets.. though they tend to be ignored by most free market fanatics. Well, let's hear about some.
I'm going to reorder slightly for better effect.
I don't know about you, but I prefer an organization that lets me vote to select its leadership. Despite the fact that your vote is functionally meaningless? Let me assure you that no election you ever participate in will ever be decided by one vote.
Because if the government doesn't regulate, someone else (powerful wealthy corporations, for example) will take advantage of the power vacuum to gain power over people by economic means. I prefer an organization that cannot legally imprison me or shoot me when I decide not to patronize it anymore.
The other main reasons are that pure unrestrained capitalism doesn't The Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve printing too much money in the 20's and then ratcheting the money supply down too quickly in order to rein in the irrational exuberance. (Sound familiar?) This resulted in massive deflation. The root of the problem is the Fed itself, whose notes are granted legal tender status by government fiat. Therefore, government 1, capitalism 0.
always Same problem: Fed prints too much money, deflation starts, cascading collapse. Problem would be solved by using hard currency and/or eliminating fractional reserve banking. Government 2, capitalism 0.
work Government doesn't solve tragedy of the commons: in fact, it creates it by making property "publicly owned" in the first place. Government 3, capitalism 0.
well Name me an example of an abusive natural monopoly. All of the abusive monopolies that I can think of---the Bell System pre-1984, natural gas delivery companies, cable companies (tempered somewhat by satellite)---have artificial monopolies in each locality by government fiat. Government 4, capitalism 0.
Furthermore, government regulation results in higher prices for everything from electrical work (through artificially limiting licenses) to milk (by setting a floor on the price) to automobiles (by requiring cars to meet standards for passenger protection regardless of the buyer's preferences).
and also without government services like education and health care, it would be far more difficult for the poor to improve their economic status. Perhaps you should research how the war on poverty has resulted only in an increase in poverty. Government 5, capitalism 0. In general, whenever the government declares war on a social ill---whether drugs or poverty or terrorism---you should expect the target problem only to get worse.
In the future, grow a pair and don't post anonymously.
I wasn't referring to the vagaries of one imperfect document; I was talking about the natural limitations of government, which are best expressed by John Stuart Mill's harm principle:
That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
The gist is that government's power should be solely directed to preventing one person from harming another; everything else government does goes beyond the bounds of why governments were originally formed, which was to provide collective protection. My statement about the Feds usurping the States' powers refers to federalism, a doctrine intended (in vain, evidently) to prevent the federal government from becoming the national government it is today.
Now you (and certainly I) can argue that government isn't necessary even for collective protection, but it doesn't make sense for me to argue about the reasonable things government does when I can't even convince people we should stop the unreasonable things it does.
"Why do we have to give a crap what the grizzled old fossil, the newly-minted career politician, or the shrieking banshee have to say about technology?"
The President of the US (as well as the Congress) should have zero effect on it. He or she has one main duty: to defend the borders of the US from foreign invasion. Everything else this government does is simply meddling in the private consensual affairs of citizens or usurping the powers of local governments to set policies best suited to local culture and tradition.
That said, practically speaking, if you vote your goal should be either (a) to elect the candidate who will do the least damage to your civil liberties, on the premise that the system is salvageable; or (b) to elect the candidate who will do the most damage, on the premise that the citizen-led equivalent of a reboot (aka a "revolution") is the only way to fix the system.
Until enough people figure out that trying to ram their own preferences down the throats of people living thousands of miles away is a bad idea, we will continue to be presented with nothing but bad choices.
Again, please come back when you are able to post a coherent argument. Insulting me and ridiculing logical consequents without attacking a specific precedent or inference rule does not qualify as one. So far, you have only made a single unfounded assertion---that anarchy is impossible---based on a few unrelated precedents---anarchy has never been tried; anarchy always looks like Somalia; anarchy is the ideology only of pimple-faced teenagers---and provided no way to reason from one to the other. The bottom line is that you believe anarchy is impossible, but you cannot prove it. That's fine as a belief, but it is not an argument, and simply asserting the same statements over and over again is not going to make them any more true.
Thank you for demonstrating my point that you are unable to form a coherent argument. Your appeal to emotion amuses me. Come back and argue when you are able to.
I'm sorry you are unable to recognize the fallacy of your argument. Let me spell it out: it's a form of false dilemma in which you imply that the choice is between anarchy and disorder/injustice on the one hand, and government and order/justice on the other hand. Anarchy is nothing more than "lack of coercive government," and says nothing about the state of order or justice.
As this relates specifically to your comparison with Somalia, I'd point out that Somalia was hardly a model society when they had a nominal government. From that example, a rational person concludes that the primary determinants of the magnitude of civil society are history and culture, not the nominal presence or lack of a government.
If the US federal government up-and-disappeared tomorrow, it seems without question that the US would not devolve into a Somalia-like system of warlords asserting local totalitarian control: 500 years of Western liberalism would simply not allow that.
secondly, "anarcho-capitalism" is basically, somalia. sound superior? Thank you for edu-mu-cating me. I didn't realize that the only difference between Somalia and the Western world was their lack of a government. (Please note the sarcasm.)
You cannot be an anarcho-capitalist and be in support of "intellectual property" at the same time. IP requires enforced scarcity, which implies coercion against peaceful exercise of your rights (in this case, copying something at your own expense, by definition a non-violent act) by a third-party, i.e. government. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
You're basically right. The core of mercantilism---that government and corporations collude for mutual benefit---is still operational. Just substitute "debt" (and some combination of inflation/taxation) for gold and silver and "negative" for positive (balance of trade) and you have the dual of mercantilism where debt is the asset. I prefer to use the term "mercantilism" because it concentrates on the collusion between corporations and government, while "fascism" is a loaded term that is basically meaningless today: most people use "fascist" to describe any system they don't like.
I do, however, describe most of the US presidential candidates (and indeed most national politicians these days) as nationalists-socialists. Whether someone wants to make a Nazi connection or not is their business: the term "nationalist-socialist" applies literally, and my use of such a wordy phrase is intended to make people think about exactly how and why those terms apply.
as more countries move towards some form of capitalism You mean mercantilism, right? Because the US hasn't been capitalist in a long, long time. Free market capitalism doesn't have these problems.
Blame the system---democracy---which by its very nature attracts people with no scruples who proceed to plunder the commonwealth for personal gain, leaving it strictly in worse shape when they leave office.
The important question in my mind is: why are people at all surprised that this happens? The system is structured to work in precisely that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the root cause is that the availability of artificially cheap money (read: credit) by the Federal Reserve misprices risk: this has resulted inâ"at leastâ"the tech bubble in the late 90's and the housing bubble in the 00's.
Since no one in power recognizes or at least wants to admit that the Fed is the cause of these problems, expect a new bubble to appear soon.
You have to be brave to be able to face what he did the way he did it. I think I would rather be run over by a train without a moment's notice.
Read it again: that's exactly what I said. Let me rephrase with your words:
"E.g., if you have 2% growth and 1.5% increase in gold supply, you'll have 0.5% deflation. (In other words, at the end of the year, a unit of gold can purchase 0.5% more "stuff" than at the beginning.)"
LOL... indeed, this is a problem I have considered, but that's a looooong way off. :-)
There's another reason not to worry about it: even taking into account population growth and a vast increase in the amount of gold and silver mined over the past 700 years, the "value" of gold and silver in terms of what a particular amount buys has remained relatively stable over that period.
For example, see the following graph, paying particular attention to the nominal price/gallon of gasoline:
http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflation_adjusted_gasoline_price.jpg
Until the 70's, gasoline was stable between $0.25 and $0.35/gallon. When Nixon withdrew from the Bretton Woods accord in 1971, closing the gold exchange window, oil suddenly became more expensive and never looked back.
Here's a graph of some measure of consumer prices. I have no idea how accurate this is, but I'm most interested in its demonstration of how stable prices were for a long time, until the final gold backing for the dollar was removed:
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/hodges/2006/images/0106_1.gif
Anyway, there's a lifetime of reading out there about money. The best way to start IMO is to read Murray Rothbard's "What Has Government Done to our Money?", available for free.
Man, I wish Slashdot allowed editing:
Brain fart. This should be "the rate at which wealth is created". This, historically-speaking, averages about 2% per year, which means a 1.5% annual increase in the gold supply would lead to 0.5% deflation on average every year.
Back to our regular programming.
Of course not: each bit of gold/silver simply buys more stuff.
Now that I've explained the obvious, a good followup question is: is this a bad thing? I don't think so, but I also think gradual deflation is better than massive inflation: the rate of deflation with gold as the money supply is limited to the rate at which gold can be mined (slow), while the rate of inflation with paper currency is limited only by the rate at which some douchebag at the Treasury can create bits in a computer system (fast and potentially disruptive).
In reality, the rate of growth in the gold supply has mirrored the rate of growth in global wealth pretty well: about 1.5% per year. As the price of gold rises, you can expect more supplies to come online as it becomes economically viable to dig them out of the ground.
The key difference between the two, of course, is that gold/silver can't be arbitrarily created, while the US Treasury has an exclusive license to counterfeit the dollar, which it does with abandon. That is the reason why a commodity money is superior to paper currency.
How many times have I heard the sentiment "if only we had the right people in charge, all of this insanity would end" expressed?
When will it become clear to the thinking members of western civilization that the system itselfâ"not just those holding officeâ"is broken? That government is so powerful, its reach nearly unlimited, that the system has become mercantilist, and therefore attracts to office precisely those who will trade your freedoms for their gain?
I'll tell you where it is: with the people who care about their rights being taken away by corrupt politicians.
And what can we do about it? The answer is contained in the second amendment, which was reaffirmed yesterday by (only) five of the gang of nine. The founders made a lot of mistakes, but they were absolutely right when they codified that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a prerequisite to maintaining a free state.
But g++ 2.95 scored equally bad, or worse. I'd love to know how you "scored" them, but VC6 didn't even support partial specialization of templates. As someone who had to port several thousand lines of complex C++ from gcc-2.95 to VC6, this was the single biggest headache I had to deal with. VC7 got closer, but was still missing a bunch of things that even gcc-2.95 had.
Furthermore, government regulation results in higher prices for everything from electrical work (through artificially limiting licenses) to milk (by setting a floor on the price) to automobiles (by requiring cars to meet standards for passenger protection regardless of the buyer's preferences). and also without government services like education and health care, it would be far more difficult for the poor to improve their economic status. Perhaps you should research how the war on poverty has resulted only in an increase in poverty. Government 5, capitalism 0. In general, whenever the government declares war on a social ill---whether drugs or poverty or terrorism---you should expect the target problem only to get worse.
In the future, grow a pair and don't post anonymously.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle
The gist is that government's power should be solely directed to preventing one person from harming another; everything else government does goes beyond the bounds of why governments were originally formed, which was to provide collective protection. My statement about the Feds usurping the States' powers refers to federalism, a doctrine intended (in vain, evidently) to prevent the federal government from becoming the national government it is today.
Now you (and certainly I) can argue that government isn't necessary even for collective protection, but it doesn't make sense for me to argue about the reasonable things government does when I can't even convince people we should stop the unreasonable things it does.
The right question is:
"Why do we have to give a crap what the grizzled old fossil, the newly-minted career politician, or the shrieking banshee have to say about technology?"
The President of the US (as well as the Congress) should have zero effect on it. He or she has one main duty: to defend the borders of the US from foreign invasion. Everything else this government does is simply meddling in the private consensual affairs of citizens or usurping the powers of local governments to set policies best suited to local culture and tradition.
That said, practically speaking, if you vote your goal should be either (a) to elect the candidate who will do the least damage to your civil liberties, on the premise that the system is salvageable; or (b) to elect the candidate who will do the most damage, on the premise that the citizen-led equivalent of a reboot (aka a "revolution") is the only way to fix the system.
Until enough people figure out that trying to ram their own preferences down the throats of people living thousands of miles away is a bad idea, we will continue to be presented with nothing but bad choices.
In other words:
"Hahaha. You're a dumbass. (snicker)"
Great work. You truly belong in the pantheon with Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Smith.
Again, please come back when you are able to post a coherent argument. Insulting me and ridiculing logical consequents without attacking a specific precedent or inference rule does not qualify as one. So far, you have only made a single unfounded assertion---that anarchy is impossible---based on a few unrelated precedents---anarchy has never been tried; anarchy always looks like Somalia; anarchy is the ideology only of pimple-faced teenagers---and provided no way to reason from one to the other. The bottom line is that you believe anarchy is impossible, but you cannot prove it. That's fine as a belief, but it is not an argument, and simply asserting the same statements over and over again is not going to make them any more true.
Thank you for demonstrating my point that you are unable to form a coherent argument. Your appeal to emotion amuses me. Come back and argue when you are able to.
I'm sorry you are unable to recognize the fallacy of your argument. Let me spell it out: it's a form of false dilemma in which you imply that the choice is between anarchy and disorder/injustice on the one hand, and government and order/justice on the other hand. Anarchy is nothing more than "lack of coercive government," and says nothing about the state of order or justice.
As this relates specifically to your comparison with Somalia, I'd point out that Somalia was hardly a model society when they had a nominal government. From that example, a rational person concludes that the primary determinants of the magnitude of civil society are history and culture, not the nominal presence or lack of a government.
If the US federal government up-and-disappeared tomorrow, it seems without question that the US would not devolve into a Somalia-like system of warlords asserting local totalitarian control: 500 years of Western liberalism would simply not allow that.
You cannot be an anarcho-capitalist and be in support of "intellectual property" at the same time. IP requires enforced scarcity, which implies coercion against peaceful exercise of your rights (in this case, copying something at your own expense, by definition a non-violent act) by a third-party, i.e. government. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
You're basically right. The core of mercantilism---that government and corporations collude for mutual benefit---is still operational. Just substitute "debt" (and some combination of inflation/taxation) for gold and silver and "negative" for positive (balance of trade) and you have the dual of mercantilism where debt is the asset. I prefer to use the term "mercantilism" because it concentrates on the collusion between corporations and government, while "fascism" is a loaded term that is basically meaningless today: most people use "fascist" to describe any system they don't like.
I do, however, describe most of the US presidential candidates (and indeed most national politicians these days) as nationalists-socialists. Whether someone wants to make a Nazi connection or not is their business: the term "nationalist-socialist" applies literally, and my use of such a wordy phrase is intended to make people think about exactly how and why those terms apply.
as more countries move towards some form of capitalism
You mean mercantilism, right? Because the US hasn't been capitalist in a long, long time. Free market capitalism doesn't have these problems.
Or you could have a sensible health care system where the rich can have giant breasts and the poor don't die from common and curable things.
When you can figure out how to do that without holding a gun to my head to force me to pay for it, I'll back you 100%.
Blame the system---democracy---which by its very nature attracts people with no scruples who proceed to plunder the commonwealth for personal gain, leaving it strictly in worse shape when they leave office.
The important question in my mind is: why are people at all surprised that this happens? The system is structured to work in precisely that way.