"The current crisis was caused by the the CRA!" Oh wait, minorities comprised a fraction of subprime loans in default.
What have minorities got to do with this? Increased fed demand for loans to the riskiest demographics led directly to massive defaults. The implicit guarantee of government-backed funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led directly to these loans being packaged in securities for trade. The loan defaults destroyed the value of these securities, destroying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and everyone else who relied on their implicit government-backing in the process. It's as simple as that. The problem at both ends - the borrower, and the securities trader - were caused by government manipulation of the economy.
I do agree that more transparency would be better, but that transparency is best provided by private organizations (think VeriSign for private transactions). Only competing private transparency groups can minimize risk of corruption. Ask the SEC and Bernard Madoff about that - his niece is a lawyer for his firm, and she's married to an SEC investigator, who has ignored complaints about Madoff since 1999. Corruption. This is what happens when you mix money and power. Transparency must be voluntarily demanded by the buyer from the seller, and vice versa, and voluntarily provided by each. Only then will we have true transparency and oversight. Until then, the most you're going to get is the false sense of security.
Never mind the fact that the Fed chairman was a good friend to Ayn Rand, a self-described libertarian.
What a joke! It would take you 10 seconds to realize that a man given the power to sway the whole economy with a snap of his fingers (e.g. Greenspan) is the antithesis of anything Rand proclaimed. He may have been friends with her in the 60s, but he decided long ago to diverge from her and follow the path of social and political power.
and has since admitted that his philosophy was flawed
Of course his philosophy is flawed. Any supporter of Rand will tell you that. His philosophy - like that of many politicians - is the polar opposite of Rand's.
Just face facts: the unregulated free market is not perfect or optimal.
Optimal for reaching what goals? What are your goals? Until you've defined what goals you're promoting, you're making an empty statement. If the goal is freedom and promotion of individual rights, only the free market will suffice. If the goal is government control of the economy to fund your agenda (e.g. universal healthcare, social security), then of course the free market will succeed. But, then, your goals are ill-conceived and will likewise fail.
Increased regulation causing the State budget shortfalls? How is making decisions on tax rates regulation?
How is increasing taxes on certain transactions not regulation?
You might also want to read up on a certain Mr. Madoff, who took full advantage of a regulatory vacuum.
You mean the Bernard Madoff whose niece is a lawyer for his firm, and is married to an SEC investigator who has ignored complaints from private groups since 1999? The solution is not increased regulation, because increased government control violates individual rights and leads to increased opportunity for corruption (e.g. Madoff). The solution is competing private companies that demand transparency in exchange for their "seal of approval". You trust internet transactions that are checked by VeriSign, right? Would you be as trusting if, instead, it said "approved by the SEC"?
So the state is collapsing under its government's regulations, and the government's plan to solve the problem is to regulate further, driving more markets out of the region? Brilliant! Eventually they'll learn, or be forced to learn, that you can't have your cake and eat it too. They will have to downsize the state government and withdraw the regulations hindering the market, or they will see their economy disappear. One or the other will be the inevitable outcome.
You believe that your right to own some piece of property exists in some meaningful sense even if no government mandate enforces it and nobody around you agrees that you own the property in question? That's an interesting opinion. What if the guy next to you had exactly the same belief about the same piece of property?
You're confusing the right to property as a concept with a specific instance of ownership. People have a right to property, and the courts/police/military help protect and uphold that right. In times of dispute such as you mention, the courts should decide whose property is whose based on the evidence.
Do you have any evidence that that would be the case, or is this just another appeal to emotion?
Nope, I'm no utilitarian.
And yet you argue as one. You argue only on ends alone (saving everyone), and let others decide the means. Besides the evidence of your original reply, I submit your most recent reply. For example: "And if not enough is given to charity?"
Of course, in real life we don't have perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of any of our decisions, but most of us have enough intelligence to make a sufficiently reasonable stab at it to get on with life.
I think you completely misunderstood me. We're talking past eachother now. I said you argue for ends (saving everyone) regardless of means (violating rights). I said that destroys all ethics because ethics results from free will - your freedom to choose between actions X and Y - and so you have to be able to answer the question "what should I do?", but that's a question of means, not ends. Only with perfect foreknowledge could you work backwards from ends to means and thus answer the question "what should I do?"
You can find examples of this broken ethical system in any situation in which someone is punished for the results of their actions rather than the actions themselves. When people act according to their best judgment, with no intention of harming anyone else, but their actions inadvertently harm someone, they should not be punished if its reasonable that they could not have predicted those results (thus acting in their "best judgment").
Ok, there goes my charitable giving.
Maybe for you, but do you believe it's not possible to derive personal happiness from charity?
But you never addressed my point about the consequences of your policy
Again, you consider the ends over the means.
Resources get stretched to the limit leading to severe shortages, high crime and a poor standard of life for everyone.
Again you're talking in the abstract. You will have to provide specific examples so that they can be investigated to determine if the situations you describe are the result of the causes you claim, and not other causes.
Where do these "rights" come from?
Check out Locke's Second Treatise of Government for his explanation. I'll provide my own summary: Man has rights as a rational being, capable of making decisions. Only man can ask, "what is the right action here?", and only man can then come up with what he believes is the right action, and then follow through on that action. If man chooses to live, he must use his reasoning mind to decide what are the right actions to further his life. So if you choose to live, it is right for you to use your mind to reach rational conclusions. The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals. Likewise it is irrational for you to force someone else to further your goals, because they cannot think rationally and you would be creating a situation that promotes force against yourself.
If we could rely on people to do what's right in the real world, we wouldn't need government in the first place.
Who is opposed to government? I never said that. The government is necessary to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry, through military, police, and the courts. Unfortunately it has become more common for the government to violate rights than uphold them. The government should be scaled back to its proper role.
Anybody who reaches old age childless, or whose children die (for example, killed on active service in the armed forces) is clearly a waster who has contributed nothing to society and deserves to be thrown on the scrapheap.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
Unless there's a flaw in your argument, of course...
Nope, no flaw. The flaw is in your moral code. You believe the ends can justify the means, and as a result you've discarded all possibility of an ethical foundation, for how can you answer the question, "what should I do?" in any situation without the foreknowledge that your choice of action will have the correct results. History is filled with the unintended consequences of people willing to discard all principles to fulfill goals at whatever means necessary.
The cure to your problem is to stop trying to save everyone, stop putting everyone else's interests above your own self-interest, and stop sacrificing everyone else's self-interests to what's convenient to you - in this case, promoting legislation that quickly accumulates money to fulfill your ill-conceived goal (saving everyone), rather than promoting the voluntary donation of money to charities that will support the elderly. The former is more convenient for you but violates individual rights, while the latter takes more work but violates no rights.
People have to be supported when they retire with work from other people
If you believe that, then you should donate your money to relevant charities for supporting the elderly. What you should not do is force everyone to pay for your opinion through government mandate. A more reasonable solution is for everyone to support their own parents with the increased money they'll have from not dumping their money into the social security black hole.
Then how do you define value? In order to have value, doesn't something have to be valued by someone? Value presupposes an entity capable of choosing alternatives - ie, free will.
I dunno, it gives the monetary authority a lot of levers to control the money supply, and in particular to incentivize borrowing in situations where borrowing makes complete sense but people are herding away from it in fear, like at the current moment.
What you call "incentive" I call "unjustifiable use of force". I can hold a gun to your head and "incentivize" you to give your money away (to me), but that doesn't make it right, even if I'm the one who printed the money in the first place. It is your property, and I am forcing you to make irrational decisions with your property, to further my goals. If you believe borrowing makes complete sense in a certain situation, you should obviously persuade as many people as you can to borrow. You should not, however, persuade the government to force people to borrow on threat of property loss.
leverage is a good thing [for the government] to have available
Why?
you're not entitled to complain about government intrusion into the economy while you keep a your assets in paper with the government's name printed all over it.
Of course I am. I am free to say whatever I want.
It's hypocritical in the extreme.
A choice forced upon you is not a rational choice.
As to the justification of taxes, I live in a country that only discriminates on income
Now. That was not the case in the past, and it is not necessarily the case in the future. It is still discrimination.
it's my personal opinion that the only reason a person has wealth at all is because of the order, safety and security a government provides
People have rights, regardless of the existence of a government to protect those rights. Back in the realm of context, a person has wealth because he produced something of value to others, and those other people traded goods or services for that product.
Men wrote them down
They exist regardless of whether men write them down. Man has rights as a rational being, capable of making decisions. Only man can ask, "what is the right action here?", and only man can then come up with what he believes is the right action, and then follow through on that action. If man chooses to live, he must use his reasoning mind to decide what are the right actions to further his life. So if you choose to live, it is right for you to use your mind to reach rational conclusions. The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals.
Without government, there are no rights
You may want to break out that Constitution again. It does not grant rights. It says man has inalienable rights - rights that exist regardless of the existence of the Constitution - and puts limitations on the government. Unfortunately four our rights, the founders did not limit the government completely to the role of supporting rights, most likely because they had no other examples to go by. Taxation has been the norm throughout history.
Exactly, but no one ultimately wants dollars, they want things dollars can buy.
Nobody ultimately wants cows, pigs, or other such animals. They want the processed results that those goods permit you to produce and trade for other goods. Cows are a means to the end of milk. Money is the means to the end of other goods. There is no requirement that "property" can only be something that you ultimately want, or want "in the end". Property is regularly the means to other more ultimate ends.
the US$, can be properly regarded as a "repository of value" in the sense that a possession can, since it's value with regard to goods and services can fluctuate.
I agree. That is why a fiat currency is a horrible idea. It is a means to cause things of value to vanish in an instant (thus violating the rights of every victim in the process).
I don't regard inflation as a "hidden tax," simply because I don't think you have property rights to the "value" of a dollar, I just think you have property rights to the dollar, full stop, whatever it's exchange rate might be.
So long as the government enforces a monopoly on their currency, I'm fine with people considering it as such, although it'd be better to understand where exactly the fault lies. No other currency has a chance of getting started in the US with the fed's monopoly firmly and forcibly maintained.
The only proper role of a government is to uphold and protect individual rights. Any other attempt to provide services of any kind can only result in economic manipulation and unjustifiable monopolies.
if you keep your wealth in dollars, you essentially are extending a welcome mat to the government into your wallet, for storing "value" in their paper and subjecting yourself to their decisions w/r/t its value.
Even if that were the case, it does not grant them the right to take in taxes however much they want from whoever they want, based on income, gender, race, or whatever other discrimination the government chooses.
There's also the problem that any ninja can come along and cut the cord, and suddenly you have a $500M paperweight wrapping around the earth tearing a path of destruction.
Also regarding currency - if money has no value, then why do people exchange objects of value for it? Can't it be said that the value of a dollar is the number of hats, apples, cars, etc that people will agree to exchange for it? That is the whole definition of "value" - how much people want something, and what they're willing to exchange for it.
Thus, if I ask you to give me all that "fictional" money in your bank account, and you seem unwilling to do it, I should not be surprised - your money has value to you and to people who will trade with you for it.
I primarily don't believe that a holding in government-issued currency constitutes "property" in the same sense as a house, or capital.
You're claiming that the government has found a loophole in property rights. You'll need some more explanation than "I don't believe that" to back up your claim.
"Dollars" are just a service provided by the government
That has been the case since the government granted itself total control over the currency, and then detached it from any finite standard. Before then that was not the case. What right does the government have to grant itself that control? (be careful not to appeal to authority/tradition here)
But without it, chaos
You'll have to provide some explanation for this.
a metal that is merely rare
Rarity is not the issue. It just makes it easier to measure. The issue is finiteness. The amount of gold (or any other heavy element) is for the most part finite. You can dig and find some more gold, but you'll have to do work to make that happen, and even so you're not bound to affect the value of gold that much. With government fiat, they can spam the economy with as much or as little currency as they want, and suddenly your bank account only exists if the federal government decides it is so.
So, yeah, I think taxation is justified because I live in a free, first-world nation state where my house or food cannot be stolen by armed thugs
And you do not think people would be willing to donate money to the police, courts, and military if they had more of their own money to work with, in this country where so much goes to charity?
If you think the principle is profoundly unfair, you may leave it
Or I could persuade public opinion to shift in my favor to get politicians elected who will uphold individual rights - my purpose here.
I suspect, my good fellow, that there is no evidence of any kind, than any person could produce, that would justify the taking of a right by your lights.
As individual rights are a fundamental principle, that is for the most part correct, however emergency situations may have cause for rights violations (such as disease quarantine).
If they use this stimulus to build the LACTMA Expo Line to pass by my house, it will save me more in gasoline than the total tax probably ever would, ten times over.
Throughout your entire post, all you're saying is that the ends can justify the means, which means we have no basis for an ethical system. How can you ask "what should I do" if you're not 100% sure that the outcome will go as planned? Do you really want to live in a society where you'll be punished for doing what you believed was the right move, if your action inadvertently leads to something worse? This sort of punishment happens all over the world and is a result of the faulty belief that only the ends matter - the belief you are trumpeting in your post.
History is full of examples where a country turned to austerity and all of the metric we measure an economy by went down. I give you history, Hazllitt gives you homilies.
Your second link didn't work, but the first one points to the results of a manipulated economy, in which the government induces a bubble, is suddenly popped. What is your point? The bubble would not have existed in the first place without government intervention. Your assumptions are that the bubble could have been sustained without further government intervention.
This is not science, this is gnosticism. This is religion.
There is no theory in science? Enough with the drama please.
economic decisions have to be evidence-based and if you think action A will cost money, you have to be able to say how much and why.
I agree that they should be evidence-based, but in economics it's difficult to be sure that the evidence is in support of theory X or opposing theory Y. There is no shortage of people claiming to have evidence supporting their theories, and there is no shortage of fanboys such as yourself accepting those claims at face value.
For me, the underlying concern is individual rights. So long as the government intervenes in the economy, rights are violated. No matter how commonplace rights violations become, they still occur nonetheless. Krugman and like-minded economists have not shown the cause for concern that justifies rights violations. It's just assumed that something must be done, and that the only solution involves the government.
If taxation lowers productivity, show me the chart, with real numbers of real people making real transactions.
Of course no such chart could ever be produced. It would be like asking me to draw you a picture of "consciousness" using nothing but neurons. This is part of the appeal of your heroes' arguments. They assume that things will work themselves out in the end so long as something is done immediately. What is not seen, what cannot be charted, is the economic growth that *did not happen* because of increased taxation. They would have us continually struggling to survive a recession, and pay it back during prosperity, with the implicit assumption that the end result is a better economy. But they have nothing to compare to. Meanwhile, Hazlitt's argument makes sense in theory. Krugman wants you to panic. Hazlitt says there's nothing to worry about.
Like the HUGE barrier to entry of having to lay fiber in the whole city and a competitor that'll sell below profit in that city while you're alive, just to squeeze you out of the market?
For them to sell requires buyers. If they are providing poor service, people are not as likely to accept their cheaper service. As for the huge barrier, it is chump change to large companies that already provide similar services in other areas. If we're talking about a small company, obviously they would only be servicing a small community, probably a local community, making it all the easier for them to afford it, and easier to convince members of the community to switch to their services.
If you go back to economics 101, you learn why the free market is optimal at serving society. You also learn that it's under some very big assumptions: all transaction costs are zero, and everybody knows everything.
And then in economics 102 you learn why the conclusions of 101 were incomplete and thus wrong.
Actually my street was paid for by the private developers of my neighborhood, who passed the cost on to the lot buyers, who passed it on to me and the other residents. Then they donated the street to the city.
Unless your street is made of 6-foot-thick stainless steel, it must be maintained. Who pays for that maintenance?
The rest of your reply is just babble.
You've characterized my reply as such, but have not shown your characterization to be accurate.
What about 7, 8, 12 different water mains being pulled in?
A minute ago it was too costly to invest in these projects. Now it's so cheap that a dozen different companies can afford to lay competing services. Which is it?
Obviously privatization is the right answer as it is the only means that avoid individual rights violations.
Slashdot Mirror
"The current crisis was caused by the the CRA!" Oh wait, minorities comprised a fraction of subprime loans in default.
What have minorities got to do with this? Increased fed demand for loans to the riskiest demographics led directly to massive defaults. The implicit guarantee of government-backed funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led directly to these loans being packaged in securities for trade. The loan defaults destroyed the value of these securities, destroying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and everyone else who relied on their implicit government-backing in the process. It's as simple as that. The problem at both ends - the borrower, and the securities trader - were caused by government manipulation of the economy.
I do agree that more transparency would be better, but that transparency is best provided by private organizations (think VeriSign for private transactions). Only competing private transparency groups can minimize risk of corruption. Ask the SEC and Bernard Madoff about that - his niece is a lawyer for his firm, and she's married to an SEC investigator, who has ignored complaints about Madoff since 1999. Corruption. This is what happens when you mix money and power. Transparency must be voluntarily demanded by the buyer from the seller, and vice versa, and voluntarily provided by each. Only then will we have true transparency and oversight. Until then, the most you're going to get is the false sense of security.
Never mind the fact that the Fed chairman was a good friend to Ayn Rand, a self-described libertarian.
What a joke! It would take you 10 seconds to realize that a man given the power to sway the whole economy with a snap of his fingers (e.g. Greenspan) is the antithesis of anything Rand proclaimed. He may have been friends with her in the 60s, but he decided long ago to diverge from her and follow the path of social and political power.
and has since admitted that his philosophy was flawed
Of course his philosophy is flawed. Any supporter of Rand will tell you that. His philosophy - like that of many politicians - is the polar opposite of Rand's.
Just face facts: the unregulated free market is not perfect or optimal.
Optimal for reaching what goals? What are your goals? Until you've defined what goals you're promoting, you're making an empty statement. If the goal is freedom and promotion of individual rights, only the free market will suffice. If the goal is government control of the economy to fund your agenda (e.g. universal healthcare, social security), then of course the free market will succeed. But, then, your goals are ill-conceived and will likewise fail.
Increased regulation causing the State budget shortfalls? How is making decisions on tax rates regulation?
How is increasing taxes on certain transactions not regulation?
You might also want to read up on a certain Mr. Madoff, who took full advantage of a regulatory vacuum.
You mean the Bernard Madoff whose niece is a lawyer for his firm, and is married to an SEC investigator who has ignored complaints from private groups since 1999? The solution is not increased regulation, because increased government control violates individual rights and leads to increased opportunity for corruption (e.g. Madoff). The solution is competing private companies that demand transparency in exchange for their "seal of approval". You trust internet transactions that are checked by VeriSign, right? Would you be as trusting if, instead, it said "approved by the SEC"?
So the state is collapsing under its government's regulations, and the government's plan to solve the problem is to regulate further, driving more markets out of the region? Brilliant! Eventually they'll learn, or be forced to learn, that you can't have your cake and eat it too. They will have to downsize the state government and withdraw the regulations hindering the market, or they will see their economy disappear. One or the other will be the inevitable outcome.
You believe that your right to own some piece of property exists in some meaningful sense even if no government mandate enforces it and nobody around you agrees that you own the property in question? That's an interesting opinion. What if the guy next to you had exactly the same belief about the same piece of property?
You're confusing the right to property as a concept with a specific instance of ownership. People have a right to property, and the courts/police/military help protect and uphold that right. In times of dispute such as you mention, the courts should decide whose property is whose based on the evidence.
And if not enough is given to charity?
Do you have any evidence that that would be the case, or is this just another appeal to emotion?
Nope, I'm no utilitarian.
And yet you argue as one. You argue only on ends alone (saving everyone), and let others decide the means. Besides the evidence of your original reply, I submit your most recent reply. For example: "And if not enough is given to charity?"
Of course, in real life we don't have perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of any of our decisions, but most of us have enough intelligence to make a sufficiently reasonable stab at it to get on with life.
I think you completely misunderstood me. We're talking past eachother now. I said you argue for ends (saving everyone) regardless of means (violating rights). I said that destroys all ethics because ethics results from free will - your freedom to choose between actions X and Y - and so you have to be able to answer the question "what should I do?", but that's a question of means, not ends. Only with perfect foreknowledge could you work backwards from ends to means and thus answer the question "what should I do?"
You can find examples of this broken ethical system in any situation in which someone is punished for the results of their actions rather than the actions themselves. When people act according to their best judgment, with no intention of harming anyone else, but their actions inadvertently harm someone, they should not be punished if its reasonable that they could not have predicted those results (thus acting in their "best judgment").
Ok, there goes my charitable giving.
Maybe for you, but do you believe it's not possible to derive personal happiness from charity?
But you never addressed my point about the consequences of your policy
Again, you consider the ends over the means.
Resources get stretched to the limit leading to severe shortages, high crime and a poor standard of life for everyone.
Again you're talking in the abstract. You will have to provide specific examples so that they can be investigated to determine if the situations you describe are the result of the causes you claim, and not other causes.
Where do these "rights" come from?
Check out Locke's Second Treatise of Government for his explanation. I'll provide my own summary: Man has rights as a rational being, capable of making decisions. Only man can ask, "what is the right action here?", and only man can then come up with what he believes is the right action, and then follow through on that action. If man chooses to live, he must use his reasoning mind to decide what are the right actions to further his life. So if you choose to live, it is right for you to use your mind to reach rational conclusions. The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals. Likewise it is irrational for you to force someone else to further your goals, because they cannot think rationally and you would be creating a situation that promotes force against yourself.
Yes, well, we used to do it that way. Some of those pesky elderly poor were starving to death in the streets.
Who, what, where, when? If you're trying to make an argument you will need to provide more than conjecture.
Do you support a government mandate forcing everyone to agree with your opinion that you own property?
No government mandate is necessary. However a government is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights such as the right to property.
If you say you think government shouldn't ever force people to ascribe to social contracts, I don't believe you.
Is that it or were you going to explain how/why you don't agree?
If we could rely on people to do what's right in the real world, we wouldn't need government in the first place.
Who is opposed to government? I never said that. The government is necessary to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry, through military, police, and the courts. Unfortunately it has become more common for the government to violate rights than uphold them. The government should be scaled back to its proper role.
Anybody who reaches old age childless, or whose children die (for example, killed on active service in the armed forces) is clearly a waster who has contributed nothing to society and deserves to be thrown on the scrapheap.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
Unless there's a flaw in your argument, of course...
Nope, no flaw. The flaw is in your moral code. You believe the ends can justify the means, and as a result you've discarded all possibility of an ethical foundation, for how can you answer the question, "what should I do?" in any situation without the foreknowledge that your choice of action will have the correct results. History is filled with the unintended consequences of people willing to discard all principles to fulfill goals at whatever means necessary.
The cure to your problem is to stop trying to save everyone, stop putting everyone else's interests above your own self-interest, and stop sacrificing everyone else's self-interests to what's convenient to you - in this case, promoting legislation that quickly accumulates money to fulfill your ill-conceived goal (saving everyone), rather than promoting the voluntary donation of money to charities that will support the elderly. The former is more convenient for you but violates individual rights, while the latter takes more work but violates no rights.
People have to be supported when they retire with work from other people
If you believe that, then you should donate your money to relevant charities for supporting the elderly. What you should not do is force everyone to pay for your opinion through government mandate. A more reasonable solution is for everyone to support their own parents with the increased money they'll have from not dumping their money into the social security black hole.
My whole post was sarcastic. Apparently nobody (not even the mods) got the joke.
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Slashvertisement, anyone?
Turn off the SciFi Channel
I never watch it... except for the Twilight Zone marathons. :)
Not by my definition, but I see your point.
Then how do you define value? In order to have value, doesn't something have to be valued by someone? Value presupposes an entity capable of choosing alternatives - ie, free will.
I dunno, it gives the monetary authority a lot of levers to control the money supply, and in particular to incentivize borrowing in situations where borrowing makes complete sense but people are herding away from it in fear, like at the current moment.
What you call "incentive" I call "unjustifiable use of force". I can hold a gun to your head and "incentivize" you to give your money away (to me), but that doesn't make it right, even if I'm the one who printed the money in the first place. It is your property, and I am forcing you to make irrational decisions with your property, to further my goals. If you believe borrowing makes complete sense in a certain situation, you should obviously persuade as many people as you can to borrow. You should not, however, persuade the government to force people to borrow on threat of property loss.
leverage is a good thing [for the government] to have available
Why?
you're not entitled to complain about government intrusion into the economy while you keep a your assets in paper with the government's name printed all over it.
Of course I am. I am free to say whatever I want.
It's hypocritical in the extreme.
A choice forced upon you is not a rational choice.
As to the justification of taxes, I live in a country that only discriminates on income
Now. That was not the case in the past, and it is not necessarily the case in the future. It is still discrimination.
it's my personal opinion that the only reason a person has wealth at all is because of the order, safety and security a government provides
People have rights, regardless of the existence of a government to protect those rights. Back in the realm of context, a person has wealth because he produced something of value to others, and those other people traded goods or services for that product.
Men wrote them down
They exist regardless of whether men write them down. Man has rights as a rational being, capable of making decisions. Only man can ask, "what is the right action here?", and only man can then come up with what he believes is the right action, and then follow through on that action. If man chooses to live, he must use his reasoning mind to decide what are the right actions to further his life. So if you choose to live, it is right for you to use your mind to reach rational conclusions. The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals.
Without government, there are no rights
You may want to break out that Constitution again. It does not grant rights. It says man has inalienable rights - rights that exist regardless of the existence of the Constitution - and puts limitations on the government. Unfortunately four our rights, the founders did not limit the government completely to the role of supporting rights, most likely because they had no other examples to go by. Taxation has been the norm throughout history.
People perceive currency has value
Then it does have value! No?
Exactly, but no one ultimately wants dollars, they want things dollars can buy.
Nobody ultimately wants cows, pigs, or other such animals. They want the processed results that those goods permit you to produce and trade for other goods. Cows are a means to the end of milk. Money is the means to the end of other goods. There is no requirement that "property" can only be something that you ultimately want, or want "in the end". Property is regularly the means to other more ultimate ends.
the US$, can be properly regarded as a "repository of value" in the sense that a possession can, since it's value with regard to goods and services can fluctuate.
I agree. That is why a fiat currency is a horrible idea. It is a means to cause things of value to vanish in an instant (thus violating the rights of every victim in the process).
I don't regard inflation as a "hidden tax," simply because I don't think you have property rights to the "value" of a dollar, I just think you have property rights to the dollar, full stop, whatever it's exchange rate might be.
So long as the government enforces a monopoly on their currency, I'm fine with people considering it as such, although it'd be better to understand where exactly the fault lies. No other currency has a chance of getting started in the US with the fed's monopoly firmly and forcibly maintained.
The only proper role of a government is to uphold and protect individual rights. Any other attempt to provide services of any kind can only result in economic manipulation and unjustifiable monopolies.
if you keep your wealth in dollars, you essentially are extending a welcome mat to the government into your wallet, for storing "value" in their paper and subjecting yourself to their decisions w/r/t its value.
Even if that were the case, it does not grant them the right to take in taxes however much they want from whoever they want, based on income, gender, race, or whatever other discrimination the government chooses.
I see you've read the Red Mars trilogy
Never heard of it.
There's also the problem that any ninja can come along and cut the cord, and suddenly you have a $500M paperweight wrapping around the earth tearing a path of destruction.
Also regarding currency - if money has no value, then why do people exchange objects of value for it? Can't it be said that the value of a dollar is the number of hats, apples, cars, etc that people will agree to exchange for it? That is the whole definition of "value" - how much people want something, and what they're willing to exchange for it.
Thus, if I ask you to give me all that "fictional" money in your bank account, and you seem unwilling to do it, I should not be surprised - your money has value to you and to people who will trade with you for it.
I primarily don't believe that a holding in government-issued currency constitutes "property" in the same sense as a house, or capital.
You're claiming that the government has found a loophole in property rights. You'll need some more explanation than "I don't believe that" to back up your claim.
"Dollars" are just a service provided by the government
That has been the case since the government granted itself total control over the currency, and then detached it from any finite standard. Before then that was not the case. What right does the government have to grant itself that control? (be careful not to appeal to authority/tradition here)
But without it, chaos
You'll have to provide some explanation for this.
a metal that is merely rare
Rarity is not the issue. It just makes it easier to measure. The issue is finiteness. The amount of gold (or any other heavy element) is for the most part finite. You can dig and find some more gold, but you'll have to do work to make that happen, and even so you're not bound to affect the value of gold that much. With government fiat, they can spam the economy with as much or as little currency as they want, and suddenly your bank account only exists if the federal government decides it is so.
So, yeah, I think taxation is justified because I live in a free, first-world nation state where my house or food cannot be stolen by armed thugs
And you do not think people would be willing to donate money to the police, courts, and military if they had more of their own money to work with, in this country where so much goes to charity?
If you think the principle is profoundly unfair, you may leave it
Or I could persuade public opinion to shift in my favor to get politicians elected who will uphold individual rights - my purpose here.
I suspect, my good fellow, that there is no evidence of any kind, than any person could produce, that would justify the taking of a right by your lights.
As individual rights are a fundamental principle, that is for the most part correct, however emergency situations may have cause for rights violations (such as disease quarantine).
If they use this stimulus to build the LACTMA Expo Line to pass by my house, it will save me more in gasoline than the total tax probably ever would, ten times over.
Throughout your entire post, all you're saying is that the ends can justify the means, which means we have no basis for an ethical system. How can you ask "what should I do" if you're not 100% sure that the outcome will go as planned? Do you really want to live in a society where you'll be punished for doing what you believed was the right move, if your action inadvertently leads to something worse? This sort of punishment happens all over the world and is a result of the faulty belief that only the ends matter - the belief you are trumpeting in your post.
History is full of examples where a country turned to austerity and all of the metric we measure an economy by went down. I give you history, Hazllitt gives you homilies.
Your second link didn't work, but the first one points to the results of a manipulated economy, in which the government induces a bubble, is suddenly popped. What is your point? The bubble would not have existed in the first place without government intervention. Your assumptions are that the bubble could have been sustained without further government intervention.
This is not science, this is gnosticism. This is religion.
There is no theory in science? Enough with the drama please.
economic decisions have to be evidence-based and if you think action A will cost money, you have to be able to say how much and why.
I agree that they should be evidence-based, but in economics it's difficult to be sure that the evidence is in support of theory X or opposing theory Y. There is no shortage of people claiming to have evidence supporting their theories, and there is no shortage of fanboys such as yourself accepting those claims at face value.
For me, the underlying concern is individual rights. So long as the government intervenes in the economy, rights are violated. No matter how commonplace rights violations become, they still occur nonetheless. Krugman and like-minded economists have not shown the cause for concern that justifies rights violations. It's just assumed that something must be done, and that the only solution involves the government.
If taxation lowers productivity, show me the chart, with real numbers of real people making real transactions.
Of course no such chart could ever be produced. It would be like asking me to draw you a picture of "consciousness" using nothing but neurons. This is part of the appeal of your heroes' arguments. They assume that things will work themselves out in the end so long as something is done immediately. What is not seen, what cannot be charted, is the economic growth that *did not happen* because of increased taxation. They would have us continually struggling to survive a recession, and pay it back during prosperity, with the implicit assumption that the end result is a better economy. But they have nothing to compare to. Meanwhile, Hazlitt's argument makes sense in theory. Krugman wants you to panic. Hazlitt says there's nothing to worry about.
the war would probably make a lot of sense in strictly economic terms.
Ahh, yes, the old fallacy that destruction brings prosperity. As for your questions, see the two links in my original post.
The Krugman/Keynesian argument is that you have deficits when you need to stimulate the economy
Unfortunately their plan for how to stimulate the economy has the exact opposite effect.
Like the HUGE barrier to entry of having to lay fiber in the whole city and a competitor that'll sell below profit in that city while you're alive, just to squeeze you out of the market?
For them to sell requires buyers. If they are providing poor service, people are not as likely to accept their cheaper service. As for the huge barrier, it is chump change to large companies that already provide similar services in other areas. If we're talking about a small company, obviously they would only be servicing a small community, probably a local community, making it all the easier for them to afford it, and easier to convince members of the community to switch to their services.
If you go back to economics 101, you learn why the free market is optimal at serving society. You also learn that it's under some very big assumptions: all transaction costs are zero, and everybody knows everything.
And then in economics 102 you learn why the conclusions of 101 were incomplete and thus wrong.
Actually my street was paid for by the private developers of my neighborhood, who passed the cost on to the lot buyers, who passed it on to me and the other residents. Then they donated the street to the city.
Unless your street is made of 6-foot-thick stainless steel, it must be maintained. Who pays for that maintenance?
The rest of your reply is just babble.
You've characterized my reply as such, but have not shown your characterization to be accurate.
What about 7, 8, 12 different water mains being pulled in?
A minute ago it was too costly to invest in these projects. Now it's so cheap that a dozen different companies can afford to lay competing services. Which is it?
Obviously privatization is the right answer as it is the only means that avoid individual rights violations.