It will be years before a true, complete assessment of the effectiveness of the stimulus packages will become available, but a history of success is why the entire frickin' world, including China, agreed to implement a form of Keynesian economics to avoid a global depression.
The only success that Keynesianism has ever enjoyed has been in selling their propaganda to governments and government sycophants. Keynsianism turned the crash of 1929 into a depression that lasted until 1946. The record on this is plain, whether you choose to believe it or not.
Compare the great depression to the depression of 1920: watch and learn
Keynes is the Lysenko of economics.
I would also like to point out that the presence of fiat currency allowed us to avert the global financial collapse we were on the brink of in September and October of last
You propose fiat money as a cure for its own effects. Trying to re-inflate the bubble only increases the magnitude of the problem. The collapse is the correction.
We had a fixed gold standard for 34 years, from 1880 to 1914, and we still had massive recessions leading to nationwide panic.
Before the Fed, we had a collection of smaller banks doing the same thing that the Fed does, with predictable results. By binding them all together under one central bank, these cycles of inflation and bust weren't eliminated, they were only magnified. You can pretend otherwise, but the first great depression belies your position.
If not the Federal Reserve then who do you want in charge of monetary policy?
Ah, you finally got to the real question. The answer is, I don't want anyone "in charge of monetary policy". The constitution gives the congress the power to mint coins, not to force us to use a fiat currency.
The history of the federal reserve demonstrates that a group of bankers and academics is no better at picking the right interest rate than the soviet planners were at setting industrial output quotas and prices.
Interest rates should be a function of the market forces of supply and demand, just like any other product or service, so that we have a feedback mechanism to signal the availability or scarcity of savings. Just issuing more currency ad infinitum for the benefit of the banks breaks that information flow, and the result is misallocation of resources into unsustainable ventures. The fed makes the bubbles, and when those bubbles break, people get hurt.
The Fed's only remedy for the problems they've caused through their inflation is more inflation. That doesn't solve anything, it only delays and magnifies the pain.
The federal reserve was created primarily to address bank panics,
You mean, it was created to shelter banks from being called to account for writing checks they couldn't cash. Thanks, you proved my point.
The Federal Reserve has actually done a good job of mitigating the peaks and troughs of a purely capitalistic market.
Except for the biggest financial disaster of them all, the great depression that resulted from their inflation in the 1920s.
They didn't mitigate anything. They continued the same shenanigans that banks had been doing on a smaller scale all along, but by vastly increasing the scale of the fraud, they made it possible for an inflationary bubble to be built up over decades instead of years, so that the inevitable collapse becomes catastrophic.
Recession is defined as negative GDP growth, or lack of improvement in production, not lack of spending.
Peter Schiff has frequently made the point that the recession isn't the problem, it's the cure. It's that time in which we must liquidate bad investments, cut back on consumption, and reconsider what we should be spending our money on in the future. All that the Keynesians have to offer is another dose of the fiat-money narcotic.
. The reason the Fed was created in the first place was the consolidation of the market due to technical developments of the industrial age led to a series of recessions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
No, the Fed was created because Morgan and Rockefeller wanted to corner the market on currency, just as their predecessors had done with the previous incarnations of the Bank of the United States. The entire purpose of the Fed has always been to transfer wealth to bankers by inflating the currency. Any other ostensible purpose of the Federal Reserve is nothing but propaganda.
The chief claim that Fed proponents make, that the Fed's purpose is to "stabilize" the currency is trivially disproven by noting that the dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power since the Fed was incorporated.
Just look at what happened to the deficit under the deregulatory regimes of Reagen, Bush I and Bush II.
They all increased the deficit, and that is of course a Bad Thing. Do you also object to Obama's acceleration of that policy?
The problem did not start eight years ago. We are seeing the collapse of the latest of a series of bubbles that the Fed has been creating since its inception in 1913.
The defense budget takes the biggest chunk of the USA's budget. Even with all that money, they still get utter crap peddled to them by "system integrators".
Milton Friedman explained this very well when he pointed out that your incentive to get your money's worth is lowest when you're spending someone else's money for someone else.
I'm pretty sure that Safari and iTunes aren't going to be the last Apple software products that ship on Windows. If Apple offered iWork on Windows right now, Keynote alone would be worth a hundred million bucks or so a quarter in new revenues.
Come to think of it, the textbook counterexample to your argument is airline deregulation. Back when the civil aeronautics board handed out the routes and set the prices, we had a handful of major airlines, and flying was a luxury. Since we rolled back the regulations in 1978, competition proliferated and prices plummeted.
. Let any market run free, and it will rapidly tend towards oligopoly.
You have that exactly backwards. The more regulated any line of business is, the more it tends to concentrate into fewer and larger organizations. Government is far and away the most prevalent means for excluding new competitors from a market.
We think the government, or rather the people in the government, are to serve us in friendly terms, not some enemy we must fight against.
That's probably because your government has never committed the kinds of crimes against your own people that ours has. I live in a state where, within living memory, people have been rounded up and imprisoned because of their race, just to give one example.
If you were willing to pay a similar proportion of your income for a dryer today, you can still get a similarly high quality dryer right now. Miehle makes excellent washers and dryers.
It depends on whether there's a profit it in or not.
You're starting to get the idea.
am I going to sell the product and destroy the profitability of my company, ..and then you go right off into the weeds again. This hollywood scenario of a better product being suppressed is nonsense. There is no 300 MPG carburetor.
The argument that the market leads to efficiency is exactly wrong.
This means that if each individual panel can be made for no more than $6912.00, then the Solar Roadwayâ can be built for the same cost as current asphalt roads.
Sounds to me like they're comparing the full cost of the asphalt road (which includes clearing and grading the land, plus the underlayment, etc.) to the cost of the panels. Preparing the ground for the solar panels would have to cost the same if not more than preparing the ground for blacktop.
The question should be, how well does treated glass withstand winter damage?
I'd like to know what kind of glass can be chilled to typical great-plains winter temperatures and not get brittle as hell. If you have to heat the roads not just to keep them clear of snow, but also to keep the panels from shattering, the idea looks even less plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen many cases of women behaving like complete idiots when in the presence of a complete lout.
-jcr
This study seems like a barely concealed reason to bring attractive women into the lab
Taking them along to meet with the grant committee would probably explain the funding.
-jcr
It will be years before a true, complete assessment of the effectiveness of the stimulus packages will become available, but a history of success is why the entire frickin' world, including China, agreed to implement a form of Keynesian economics to avoid a global depression.
The only success that Keynesianism has ever enjoyed has been in selling their propaganda to governments and government sycophants. Keynsianism turned the crash of 1929 into a depression that lasted until 1946. The record on this is plain, whether you choose to believe it or not.
Compare the great depression to the depression of 1920: watch and learn
Keynes is the Lysenko of economics.
I would also like to point out that the presence of fiat currency allowed us to avert the global financial collapse we were on the brink of in September and October of last
You propose fiat money as a cure for its own effects. Trying to re-inflate the bubble only increases the magnitude of the problem. The collapse is the correction.
-jcr
We had a fixed gold standard for 34 years, from 1880 to 1914, and we still had massive recessions leading to nationwide panic.
Before the Fed, we had a collection of smaller banks doing the same thing that the Fed does, with predictable results. By binding them all together under one central bank, these cycles of inflation and bust weren't eliminated, they were only magnified. You can pretend otherwise, but the first great depression belies your position.
-jcr
If not the Federal Reserve then who do you want in charge of monetary policy?
Ah, you finally got to the real question. The answer is, I don't want anyone "in charge of monetary policy". The constitution gives the congress the power to mint coins, not to force us to use a fiat currency.
The history of the federal reserve demonstrates that a group of bankers and academics is no better at picking the right interest rate than the soviet planners were at setting industrial output quotas and prices.
Interest rates should be a function of the market forces of supply and demand, just like any other product or service, so that we have a feedback mechanism to signal the availability or scarcity of savings. Just issuing more currency ad infinitum for the benefit of the banks breaks that information flow, and the result is misallocation of resources into unsustainable ventures. The fed makes the bubbles, and when those bubbles break, people get hurt.
The Fed's only remedy for the problems they've caused through their inflation is more inflation. That doesn't solve anything, it only delays and magnifies the pain.
-jcr
The federal reserve was created primarily to address bank panics,
You mean, it was created to shelter banks from being called to account for writing checks they couldn't cash. Thanks, you proved my point.
The Federal Reserve has actually done a good job of mitigating the peaks and troughs of a purely capitalistic market.
Except for the biggest financial disaster of them all, the great depression that resulted from their inflation in the 1920s.
They didn't mitigate anything. They continued the same shenanigans that banks had been doing on a smaller scale all along, but by vastly increasing the scale of the fraud, they made it possible for an inflationary bubble to be built up over decades instead of years, so that the inevitable collapse becomes catastrophic.
-jcr
Recession is defined as negative GDP growth, or lack of improvement in production, not lack of spending.
Peter Schiff has frequently made the point that the recession isn't the problem, it's the cure. It's that time in which we must liquidate bad investments, cut back on consumption, and reconsider what we should be spending our money on in the future. All that the Keynesians have to offer is another dose of the fiat-money narcotic.
-jcr
What EXACTLY has Obama changed or plans to change?
Oh, he's changed rhetoric all over the place! Changes in policies, not so much.
-jcr
. The reason the Fed was created in the first place was the consolidation of the market due to technical developments of the industrial age led to a series of recessions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
No, the Fed was created because Morgan and Rockefeller wanted to corner the market on currency, just as their predecessors had done with the previous incarnations of the Bank of the United States. The entire purpose of the Fed has always been to transfer wealth to bankers by inflating the currency. Any other ostensible purpose of the Federal Reserve is nothing but propaganda.
The chief claim that Fed proponents make, that the Fed's purpose is to "stabilize" the currency is trivially disproven by noting that the dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power since the Fed was incorporated.
Just look at what happened to the deficit under the deregulatory regimes of Reagen, Bush I and Bush II.
They all increased the deficit, and that is of course a Bad Thing. Do you also object to Obama's acceleration of that policy?
-jcr
America went through 8 years of voodoo economics
The problem did not start eight years ago. We are seeing the collapse of the latest of a series of bubbles that the Fed has been creating since its inception in 1913.
-jcr
The defense budget takes the biggest chunk of the USA's budget. Even with all that money, they still get utter crap peddled to them by "system integrators".
Milton Friedman explained this very well when he pointed out that your incentive to get your money's worth is lowest when you're spending someone else's money for someone else.
-jcr
I'm pretty sure that Safari and iTunes aren't going to be the last Apple software products that ship on Windows. If Apple offered iWork on Windows right now, Keynote alone would be worth a hundred million bucks or so a quarter in new revenues.
-jcr
comma followed by capital letter - something extremely rare
That's rare? It happens anytime a proper name follows a comma.
-jcr
No, Ricdic's actions amounted to what seems more by the day to that of a Madoff, rather than a Bernanke.
The difference between Madoff and Bernanke are merely a matter of scale.
-jcr
they nearly all went bankrupt.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If a business can't compete, then it should go bankrupt and lose its customers to those who do a better job.
-jcr
Come to think of it, the textbook counterexample to your argument is airline deregulation. Back when the civil aeronautics board handed out the routes and set the prices, we had a handful of major airlines, and flying was a luxury. Since we rolled back the regulations in 1978, competition proliferated and prices plummeted.
-jcr
. Let any market run free, and it will rapidly tend towards oligopoly.
You have that exactly backwards. The more regulated any line of business is, the more it tends to concentrate into fewer and larger organizations. Government is far and away the most prevalent means for excluding new competitors from a market.
-jcr
We think the government, or rather the people in the government, are to serve us in friendly terms, not some enemy we must fight against.
That's probably because your government has never committed the kinds of crimes against your own people that ours has. I live in a state where, within living memory, people have been rounded up and imprisoned because of their race, just to give one example.
-jcr
If you were willing to pay a similar proportion of your income for a dryer today, you can still get a similarly high quality dryer right now. Miehle makes excellent washers and dryers.
-jcr
People make the trade-off between quality and price all the time. TFA seems pretty pointless to me.
-jcr
We clearly need a virtual federal reserve and a bernanke-borg.
What for? This "ricdic" guy already did their job.
-jcr
It depends on whether there's a profit it in or not.
You're starting to get the idea.
am I going to sell the product and destroy the profitability of my company, ..and then you go right off into the weeds again. This hollywood scenario of a better product being suppressed is nonsense. There is no 300 MPG carburetor.
The argument that the market leads to efficiency is exactly wrong.
Except in practice.
-jcr
This means that if each individual panel can be made for no more than $6912.00, then the Solar Roadwayâ can be built for the same cost as current asphalt roads.
Sounds to me like they're comparing the full cost of the asphalt road (which includes clearing and grading the land, plus the underlayment, etc.) to the cost of the panels. Preparing the ground for the solar panels would have to cost the same if not more than preparing the ground for blacktop.
-jcr
The question should be, how well does treated glass withstand winter damage?
I'd like to know what kind of glass can be chilled to typical great-plains winter temperatures and not get brittle as hell. If you have to heat the roads not just to keep them clear of snow, but also to keep the panels from shattering, the idea looks even less plausible.
-jcr
Because unless a public outfit pays for it, the knowledge gained will be lost for anyone else to benefit from it.
Because patent holders never offer what they've patented for sale to the public, right?
-jcr