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I agree with your point, but in a battle where words and ideas are the only things at issue, insulting a person's arguments can often be taken as an insult to that person. If you don't believe me, just take a look at an infinite number of forum threads in an infinite number of forums -- they start out well, but devolve into personal attacks and bad content, because people insult (rather than calmly and respectfully refute) each others ideas and words.

It's just my two cents. If I noticed it and was a little put off by it, I thought it might be true for others as well. Take it as you will.

I agree with your point, but in a battle where words and ideas are the only things at issue, insulting a person's arguments can often be taken as an insult to that person. If you don't believe me, just take a look at an infinite number of forum threads in an infinite number of forums -- they start out well, but devolve into personal attacks and bad content, because people insult (rather than calmly and respectfully refute) each others ideas and words.

It's just my two cents. If I noticed it and was a little put off by it, I thought it might be true for others as well. Take it as you will.

Not disagreeing with you, probably should have used softer language. My last post was just to clarify that none of those pejoratives were directed at a person.

If you want to be an unsuccessful company, that's how you market. Marketers refer to that mindset as "the production and sales paradigm" - "if we can make it, and convince people to buy it, it will sell." You are basically arguing that people bought SUV's because they were forced to not because that's what they wanted. If station wagons were so much better for them (i.e satisfied them more), they would have bought them. Your arguing this point despite your clearly shallow knowledge of marketing and my clearly presented definition of marketing straight from a textbook widely used in business schools shows that you are trying to argue for the sake of arguing, even when you clearly are wrong on this point.

No, I'm not arguing that people were forced to buy SUVs. Not even a little bit. I don't even know how you came to that conclusion. I'm saying that people were convinced that the SUV was what they wanted. People did previously buy station wagons. And they bought minivans. They simply bought what the advertising sold them. Eventually, they added their own demands, like ones that didn't blow up or roll over at <20mph. I don't know how old you are, but the SUV basically sold because people bought its tough guy you're too cool for a minivan/station wagon packaging. They've changed a lot even since the mid-late 90s, but slowly and lagging behind other vehicles technologically.

DARPA cannot even be credited with foreseeing the Internet. DARPA created ARPANet in part to maintain communications between defense installations in the event of nuclear war (though ARPANet was not the only such system, check out GWEN, for example). DARPA had no interest in facilitating "e-commerce", e-mail or chat sessions between US military personnel.
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If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on research projects, inevitably, some of the developments will be used as components in valuable consumer products. It's impossible to spend that much money and not produce something of some redeeming value. That ARPANet was retooled and re-used by the public to suit its purposes, ultimately becoming the Web, is not any sort of credit to the government. It's just an unavoidable result of spending billions and billions of taxpayers dollars on all sorts of speculative projects. The real question is whether those billions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere. The answer is certainly yes.

Also note that the military channels most of its military research funds into private contractors, whom the military sees to be more efficient than government operation.

Trimmed your post because the section was pretty long. You acknowledge while at the same time dismiss that DARPA played a role in creating the technology. Interesting that they contributed yet deserve no credit.
Also, it's a bit absurd to say every time government helps create something of value it's blind luck. Of course government channels its money into private companies. That's how it funds technological advance. It is in a unique position because it invests in research and development without rights to the technology nor does it want them. It injects money where the markets won't necessarily. Government injected lots of money into taking computers that moths often sabotaged into punch card room sized, and then smaller, computers. Government injected lots of money into silicon valley as well. Sometimes it helps. Not always or even often, but it's okay once in a while for it not to be the evil that will destroy the earth. It really doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition.

Yes, but you don't own the river that I live off of. Property rights, my friend. Property rights. And no government, doesn't mean no law enforcement.

S*** flows downhill my friend. I pollute my lake, it flows downstream in your section of river. I have rights to my property, I can dump what I want in my lake. Unless you want some rule about what I can put into my lake.
And there you go again. Enforcement has to come from some central authority, unless you mean you hire someone to kick my ass or kill me.

I really can't believe how you continue to ignore the gross government interventions into the market that created malinvestment and all kinds of distortions. Without this government interventions, the economic damage would have been microscopic compared to what happened.

That is patently false. It's amazing that you actually think this, but I can only assume you're not aware of the facts. Read the books I mentioned. What happened is almost entirely driven by two things: the free, unencumbered derivatives market; and ego. I mean, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general, but the hundreds of billions of dollars played around with based on egos involved was still shocking.

Also note that Goldman Sachs originated the most toxic pools of securitized mortgaes, 20%. They knew they were crap, they knew they would fail, made bets with AIG, etc. Then when the securities blew up and AIG couldn't pay, Goldman got the feds to bail out AIG so that AIG could pay Goldman. The whole thing was a fraud and if we had capitalism they would have went bankrupt and been in jail.

Goldman did not commit fraud in originating securitized mortgages, or in knowing they were crap and going to fail. If Goldman committed fraud, and I'm not sure it's been proven since they settled, it was in lying to people about the quality of these instruments and then taking the opposite position on those instruments.
The government stepped in after the fact with the bailout. If they hadn't bailed out the financial system, it's not just Goldman that would've failed. The whole system would've crashed. The scramble after Lehman's demise as described in Too Big To Fail was fascinating.

Never in this thread did I argue that every business has a moral compass and their actions are always untouchable; rather I've argued that prior restraint laws are not how you handle these problems. Laws against fraud is.

Indeed, most businesses perceive their moral imperative to be maximizing profit. That's why as improva says, one of them is going to bring a gun to your toy game. Businesses' goals are usually opposed to society's. They quickly regress to the least they can do to get their product out in the name of efficiency and maximizing profit.

Also note that the existence of the Fed creating easy credit/guarenteed liquidity creates a moral hazard which leads to the creations of a lot of these derivatives, because if it goes bad they can expect a government bailout. That is not capitalism.

The Fed did not create derivatives. And interesting how DARPA's influence counts for nothing yet the Fed causes every excess of wall st's. There was only one moral hazard present when these things took off, and it wasn't easy credit. That moral hazard did impact what derivatives had to be made of. That was the implicit guarantee that fannie and freddie had, but the impact it had was that no one would buy derivatives of fannie and freddie mortgages because they didn't need it so wall st had to create their own.
Fed rates had little to do with the mortgage products wall st directed their mortgage companies to offer. As viable lendees ran out, they had to start making more ridiculous loans to keep providing the raw material. It was theorized that this was okay because bundling de-risked the derivative. That's where ego really drives the thing. These guys knew they were on a runaway trains (that they built) heading for each other right in the middle of a city, but they did it anyway.
Fannie and freddie cooked the books to seem like they were complying with the CRA, but ultimately they too decided to get in on the action based on ego - it was their turf and they'll be the biggest ones on it. They acted not at government's behest, they acted as a private company trying to regain market share.

This statement is 100% false and shows an utter ignorance of monetary theory. Come back when you understand the concept of how a bank differs from other businesses in terms of how its debt works.

I'll have to find a link that can explain it better than I can.

Not really, you said bailouts are part of capitalism. They are the opposite.

No, I had a qualifier you failed to include. If my qualifier is wrong, I'd be happy to hear it.

hahah minimize his impact in the economy? It was his monetary policy which fueld the dot com bubble and the housing bubble. We did not have market determined interest rates. He is in favor of fiat money. You are trying to use a guy who represents something completely opposite of what I'm arguing to prove my arguments wrong. It doesn't make any sense.

Ever hear of the Dutch tulip bubble? It happened hundreds of years before and thousands of miles away from Alan Greenspan. Bubbles are naturally occurring phenomena in trade. They have been illustrated in multiple studies.

Ofcourse there are laws against fraud. That was pretty clear. I said there shouldn't be prior restraint.

A law needs to be decided upon and enforced. Without enforcement, eventually voluntary compliance will be withdrawn by somebody.

wtf are you talking about? If I voluntarily sign a contract, it doesn't mean I can then choose to not comply with it without repercussions.

You are putting words in my mouth, something that Statists always do to totally distort what free market advocates stand for. One of the greatest free market economists wrote a book called The Law. Freedom doesn't mean no laws and no rules.

If you voluntarily sign a contract and there is no presiding authority you can simply voluntarily decide to say the hell with the contract. Non-hierarchical associations by definition have no presiding authority. It is a society that relies upon an individual allowing him or herself to be punished. Which is fine until you try to make that a real person.

Well, you are right in the fact that the Constitution centralized things *more* compared to the articles of confederation, but you're wrong in your interpretation of it's powers. The founders who were anti-centralized government didn't lose the battle completely, and the Constitution leaves more powers to the states and restricts the federal government moreso than you're asserting. You probably rely on the bullshit interpretations of the interstate commerce and general welfare clauses lol.

It says that federal laws supersede state ones when there are conflicting ones. It can't be any clearer than that really where more power rests. Really, it's not the 10th amendment that protects the authority of states. It's the description of the branches of government that do. That Congress is populated by a distribution of statesmen and is a check and balance against the other branches. If the 10th amendment had been an article, and amendments were prohibited, then you might have something.

But your history about the articles of confederation is off again. America was suffering the natural after effects of a long war financed by debt and inflation, and worsened by the continuing circulation of inconvertible paper currency. The postwar depression was a necessary period of hardship during which ppl readjusted to new trade patterns and economic realities, paid debts, and repaired the damage and neglect wrought by war. No government could have legislated or regulated away these facts of life.

Right (on the first part). There was no way to pay off debts or back paper currency without a central government. In fact, paying off war debt is probably the biggest of the driving factors for rewriting the founding document.

America would surely have become a free-trade area and would have worked out fine without a consolidated union. Hamilton in the Federalist Papers all but admitted, and complained, that such would be the case. In addition, the Mercantilist/Corporatist interests personified by Washington and Hamilton were one of the major causes of the overthrow of the articles and the replacement by the Constitution.

I can't see into other universes where the Constitution was not written to say what would've happened if it weren't. I can surmise only that a loose confederation with independent states may at best look like the EU. Assuming the War of 1812 could still be won without a federal army.

Well since we're talking economics, I think it might be helpful if we actually stuck to what economists actually are referring to when they use the word, not your own definition. What's more, your definition is utterly retarded. I've heard a lot of criticism of the free market, but I've never before heard that free markets are bad because people with low IQ's can't start whatever muli-million dollar business they want. Or that free markets are bad because someone with a history degree wouldn't be able to enter the engineering market. Or that free markets are bad because I can't enter the professional basketball player market. It's actually retarded.

It's not my own definition, my name is not Webster.
I never said free markets are bad because there are barriers. You stated that any time there are a couple of companies in an industry, a whole bunch more naturally spring up in utopian wonderfulness to bring consumer happiness back to the market. I stated that it's not easy to enter markets whether there is a regulation or not. And that it's not easy because there are factors that block people's ability (a barrier) to do so. And that therefore you cannot support the assertion that every market will be entered no matter what it takes if only there wasn't a rule somewhere. That's what I said. Not markets=bad.

Fannie and freddie cooked the books to seem like they were complying with the CRA, but ultimately they too decided to get in on the action based on ego - it was their turf and they'll be the biggest ones on it. They acted not at government's behest, they acted as a private company trying to regain market share.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were protected and encouraged by Government. Please watch some of the CSPAN videos documenting this. When some members of Congress put up warnings -- Barney Frank and Friends called it a "lynching" (until after the shit-hit-the-fan).
previous post with videos of FM&FM defiant support by BF and Friends

GSE Government Sponsored Enterprises were protected by the Financial Services Commitee (BarneyF). Selling/buying GOVERNMENT INSURED bundled mortgages WITH government permission. Basically greased the skids for the crisis.

Government works without accountablity and with impunity. The argument in this thread (in favor of govt) demonstrates this. Frankly, today, the US is getting very top-heavy -- which seems extreme to me. Always Govt over Private Sector? It is not working out very well.

I agree that there are current laws that will solve most of the issues -- not more bureaucracy. It is for this reason, companies are fleeing the country. Easier to start a business/factory in China vs USA. Up and running quickly. Fact.

I still cannot believe this argument in favor of a government nanny state.......arrrgh.

No, I'm not arguing that people were forced to buy SUVs. Not even a little bit. I don't even know how you came to that conclusion. I'm saying that people were convinced that the SUV was what they wanted. People did previously buy station wagons. And they bought minivans. They simply bought what the advertising sold them. Eventually, they added their own demands, like ones that didn't blow up or roll over at <20mph. I don't know how old you are, but the SUV basically sold because people bought its tough guy you're too cool for a minivan/station wagon packaging. They've changed a lot even since the mid-late 90s, but slowly and lagging behind other vehicles technologically.

Trimmed your post because the section was pretty long. You acknowledge while at the same time dismiss that DARPA played a role in creating the technology. Interesting that they contributed yet deserve no credit.
Also, it's a bit absurd to say every time government helps create something of value it's blind luck. Of course government channels its money into private companies. That's how it funds technological advance. It is in a unique position because it invests in research and development without rights to the technology nor does it want them. It injects money where the markets won't necessarily. Government injected lots of money into taking computers that moths often sabotaged into punch card room sized, and then smaller, computers. Government injected lots of money into silicon valley as well. Sometimes it helps. Not always or even often, but it's okay once in a while for it not to be the evil that will destroy the earth. It really doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition.

I didn't say that it's because of blind luck, but rather that it's less efficient (i.e. costs more money) than when the market does it, and on average won't satisfy consumer needs as well as the market doing it.

S*** flows downhill my friend. I pollute my lake, it flows downstream in your section of river. I have rights to my property, I can dump what I want in my lake. Unless you want some rule about what I can put into my lake.
And there you go again. Enforcement has to come from some central authority, unless you mean you hire someone to kick my ass or kill me.

This would be handled by property rights. That infringes on my property. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you can shoot garbage out of a rocket into my yard, as long as it's done from your yard.

And groundwater and soil pollution problems are absolutely able to be investigated, and the actual cost of doing so isn't astronomical. Part of the cost problem is our old friend state licensing. Everything from the geologists associated with the investigation, to the drillers used to advance borings and monitoring wells, to the labs used to analyze the samples, have to be licensed to admissible to the state DEPs. In a private-law society, you'd have environmental consulting firms similar to the type we have today, although instead of producing reports for the state DEP, they'd be more like private investigators, hired by property owners to build evidence for a tort case.

That is patently false. It's amazing that you actually think this, but I can only assume you're not aware of the facts. Read the books I mentioned. What happened is almost entirely driven by two things: the free, unencumbered derivatives market; and ego. I mean, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general, but the hundreds of billions of dollars played around with based on egos involved was still shocking.

it was in lying to people about the quality of these instruments and then taking the opposite position on those instruments.

yes, this is the fraud I'm talking about.

The government stepped in after the fact with the bailout. If they hadn't bailed out the financial system, it's not just Goldman that would've failed. The whole system would've crashed. The scramble after Lehman's demise as described in Too Big To Fail was fascinating.

If the book is based off of the HBO movie, then it's grossly distorted and overly bias. It made it look like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Ben Bernanke, and Nancy Pelosi were the good guys lol and the government came in a saved the economy from complete collapse, from something worse than the Great Depression. But the fact of the matter is that if we were on the brink of something that bad, imagine what we're on the brink of now. The government didn't solve these problems, they just postponed the day of reckoning.

And the whole system should have crashed as it is fundamentally flawed. When businesses partake in irresponsible practices, they must suffer the consequences, not get bailouts from the taxpayers. Fwiw the government bail outs propping up this system is making things worst. If things would have crashed we could have had a market correction and we'd be back to growth again by now.

Indeed, most businesses perceive their moral imperative to be maximizing profit. That's why as improva says, one of them is going to bring a gun to your toy game. Businesses' goals are usually opposed to society's. They quickly regress to the least they can do to get their product out in the name of efficiency and maximizing profit.

For the love of God take a marketing class. Business' whose goal is aim to just "get their product out in the name of efficiency" will not succeed. Yes, business' aim to maximize profit (so you got half of that right), but that's done by satisfying consumers better then the competition.

To say that business' goals are opposed to society's is utterly absurd. Assuming the business isn't getting benefits from the government, they are both aligned. Henry Ford acted in his own interest when he revolutionized cars, and he advanced society. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs acted in their interests and they advanced society. The whole paradigm you are operating from is dangerous to the advancement of society.

The Fed did not create derivatives. And interesting how DARPA's influence counts for nothing yet the Fed causes every excess of wall st's. There was only one moral hazard present when these things took off, and it wasn't easy credit. That moral hazard did impact what derivatives had to be made of. That was the implicit guarantee that fannie and freddie had, but the impact it had was that no one would buy derivatives of fannie and freddie mortgages because they didn't need it so wall st had to create their own.
Fed rates had little to do with the mortgage products wall st directed their mortgage companies to offer. As viable lendees ran out, they had to start making more ridiculous loans to keep providing the raw material. It was theorized that this was okay because bundling de-risked the derivative. That's where ego really drives the thing. These guys knew they were on a runaway trains (that they built) heading for each other right in the middle of a city, but they did it anyway.
Fannie and freddie cooked the books to seem like they were complying with the CRA, but ultimately they too decided to get in on the action based on ego - it was their turf and they'll be the biggest ones on it. They acted not at government's behest, they acted as a private company trying to regain market share.

As I noted above, lying about the quality of the instruments you are selling and cooking the books is fraud. Fraud is not legal under capitalism.

Also note that the Fed's monetary policy created the environment that led to the creation of a lot of the derivatives. Regarding, DARPA, my arguments above still stand. Don't see how those arguments about dumping billions of dollars at something will get you something (but no the best and not the most efficiently), how government directed research is inefficient, how other things like ARPANet already existed, and how it wasn't what made the internet what it is, are related to the Fed.

I'll have to find a link that can explain it better than I can.

What has government done with our money explains it in as simple terms as you'll find.

No, I had a qualifier you failed to include. If my qualifier is wrong, I'd be happy to hear it.

Ever hear of the Dutch tulip bubble? It happened hundreds of years before and thousands of miles away from Alan Greenspan. Bubbles are naturally occurring phenomena in trade. They have been illustrated in multiple studies.

lol there's a lot of history behind the Tulip bubble, and without typing out another post as long as my last one, it didn't happen for no reason. Basically, coinage laws served to create more money than what the market demanded. This acute increase in the supply of money served to foster an atmosphere that was ripe for speculation and malinvestment, which manifested itself in the intense trading of tulips. In the modern day, central banks (Greenspan) are the ones who cause acute increases in the supply of money.

It's really pointless for you to keep bringing up Greenspan, when he represents something so ridiculously far away from what I'm arguing for. In fact, throughout his tenure, he was one of the largest targets for criticism from the theorists that I'm representing in this thread.

A law needs to be decided upon and enforced. Without enforcement, eventually voluntary compliance will be withdrawn by somebody.

Not sure what this has to do with my advocacy for no prior restraint. I agree with the above, will just add that enforcement is present in both anarchism and minarchy.

If you voluntarily sign a contract and there is no presiding authority you can simply voluntarily decide to say the hell with the contract. Non-hierarchical associations by definition have no presiding authority. It is a society that relies upon an individual allowing him or herself to be punished. Which is fine until you try to make that a real person.

we're going around in circles. in anarchy and minarchy there is enforcement, it just doesn't come from a monopoly State.

It says that federal laws supersede state ones when there are conflicting ones. It can't be any clearer than that really where more power rests. Really, it's not the 10th amendment that protects the authority of states. It's the description of the branches of government that do. That Congress is populated by a distribution of statesmen and is a check and balance against the other branches. If the 10th amendment had been an article, and amendments were prohibited, then you might have something.

Federal laws can supersede state ones *in certain cases,* i.e. if the authority for that law was expressly granted to the Federal Government. The point was that not a lot of authority was granted to the Federal government. For example, feds going into california and shutting down marijuana dispensaries is unconstitutional, as the federal government has no authority to outlaw drugs.

Right (on the first part). There was no way to pay off debts or back paper currency without a central government. In fact, paying off war debt is probably the biggest of the driving factors for rewriting the founding document.

That's not true. They would have paid them off, my point was that the difficult times (recession) after the war made the people more open to a slightly more centralized system, not that the existing one wouldn't have worked. Similar to how the government intervenes in markets, then when things get fucked up they blame it on capitalism and use that to impose more regulations and expand their power even more. It was pointing the blame somewhere that didn't deserve and using that to fuel your agenda.

I can't see into other universes where the Constitution was not written to say what would've happened if it weren't. I can surmise only that a loose confederation with independent states may at best look like the EU. Assuming the War of 1812 could still be won without a federal army.

it wouldn't have a central bank, so it'd be incredibly different than the EU. Also the fact that the states would be smaller with less people means the state governments would be a lot more localized than European countries that belong to the EU.

Webster.

cute. but there's clearly a difference between a dictionary definition and the meaning the word takes when you are using it in an economic context.

I never said free markets are bad because there are barriers. You stated that any time there are a couple of companies in an industry, a whole bunch more naturally spring up in utopian wonderfulness to bring consumer happiness back to the market. I stated that it's not easy to enter markets whether there is a regulation or not. And that it's not easy because there are factors that block people's ability (a barrier) to do so. And that therefore you cannot support the assertion that every market will be entered no matter what it takes if only there wasn't a rule somewhere. That's what I said. Not markets=bad.

you're just looking at this thing totally wrong, you're looking at this too narrowly. I mean, yeah it might be impossible for 299.95 million of the people in America to start X business, but you don't need 299.95 million of X business to have enough competition to reach a price equilibrium. You usually only need a couple. And if there are no barriers to entry created by the government, you will get enough to achieve perfect competition. I might not have the capital or the brains to enter, but others will.

Also note that any regulation will always have unintended and unforeseen consequences, often leading to scenarios much worse than any negatives that would have occurred had the regulation not been imposed.

this is fairly new


http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Thanks, very good

Also note that any regulation will always have unintended and unforeseen consequences, often leading to scenarios much worse than any negatives that would have occurred had the regulation not been imposed.

This isn't true, historically speaking unregulated financial markets have caused more U.S. economic downturns than regulated financial markets and government intervention only causes "unforseen consequences" when the government secures the risks of investors and allows them to gamble on assets with the tax payer's dime. Unless you work in corporate finance and accountancy you have absolutely no idea how easy it is for corporations to manipulate their balances and artificially inflate the value of their stocks. Take Enron for example, that was caused primarily by corporate lobbyists paying government officials to change accountancy practices to allow future earnigs from long term development contracts to represent immediate profits on Enron's balance sheets, that de-regulation caused the largest collapse of a private business in U.S. history.

All of the "free market" bull shit you learned in college isn't applicable in the actual market place once you take into consideration the risks of greed and corruption filling the market with bogus consumer products, I suggest you read an economics book that doesn't concentrate on "logic and math" and takes human actors into account - "Animal Spirits" is a fairly solid work from Nobel prize winners.

Many executives of the "Enron Scandal" went to prison. Fraud is already a crime.
Arther Anderson, one of the "Big 5" accounting firms, dissappeared (lost their customers).

As far as corps paying off politicians. That goes to the thrust of government being in the pockets of big corporations. That will never change -- regardless of the regulations put in place -- or the economic model put in place.

SOX (Sarbane-Oxley Act) was a result of that fiasco. I have worked quite a bit with SOX compliance. It is a nightmare, and a perfect example of the government going to extremes with regulation. Who pays for the huge cost for every SEC registered company to jump through the SOX requirements? The consumer and smaller companies.
"For example, during 2004 U.S. companies with revenues exceeding $5 billion spent 0.06% of revenue on SOX compliance, while companies with less than $100 million in revenue spent 2.55%."
Keep in mind that these costs are every year.

It would not be surprising to see SOX repealed, as It has been recognized as a huge burden and over-reaction by legislators trying to do the right thing -- via more stringent regulations.

One problem we have, is enforcing laws already on the book -- over new 2,000 page legislation each time something comes up. This is one of the biggest issues of today. Businesses have no idea what to expect with taxes and legislation. The legislative environment is not friendly for any business today.....which makes business planning and investment sketchy.

SOPA seems to be another piece of legislation that is already handled by other laws on the book.

I'm not arguing corporate interests can't manipulate the government into becoming a vehicle of destructive regulation or de-regulation, nor governments can't manipulate corporations into becoming subservient to their internal political interets. However the absence of any government and regulation is far more destructive than not, a proper regulating body and central authority are necessary to assure fair trade and consumer confidence in any market. No unregulated free market exists, has ever existed or will exist because irrational human actors will interfere with basic theory.

This would be handled by property rights. That infringes on my property. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you can shoot garbage out of a rocket into my yard, as long as it's done from your yard.

So your property rights supersede mine?

And groundwater and soil pollution problems are absolutely able to be investigated, and the actual cost of doing so isn't astronomical.

Sure, if you have some sort of rule against pollution. Here's what would happen in practice, were there only voluntary compliance in non-hierarchical society: You would complain. I'd tell you to F off. You might boycott my product. I wouldn't care as long as I could make a profit off of people who don't care about your piece of river. An enforcer is hierarchical and involuntary if there is a rule I must follow so the only enforcer that can exist is one you can afford to hire. So you hire one. I have more money because I keep costs down by using polluting substances, so I hire a bigger enforcer. Mine kills yours.

Part of the cost problem is our old friend state licensing. Everything from the geologists associated with the investigation, to the drillers used to advance borings and monitoring wells, to the labs used to analyze the samples, have to be licensed to admissible to the state DEPs. In a private-law society, you'd have environmental consulting firms similar to the type we have today, although instead of producing reports for the state DEP, they'd be more like private investigators, hired by property owners to build evidence for a tort case.

Again, saying that some regulations are necessary checks =/= all regulations are innately wonderful.
A tort case would need a presider, who would be hierarchical and therefore would not be anarchy.

yes, this is the fraud I'm talking about.

okay. That is not fraud in the actual construction and operation of the derivative market itself. And had there not been government, there would've been no one Goldman Sachs had to settle with for $15bill I think.

If the book is based off of the HBO movie, then it's grossly distorted and overly bias. It made it look like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Ben Bernanke, and Nancy Pelosi were the good guys lol and the government came in a saved the economy from complete collapse, from something worse than the Great Depression. But the fact of the matter is that if we were on the brink of something that bad, imagine what we're on the brink of now. The government didn't solve these problems, they just postponed the day of reckoning.

No other way around. The movie was based on the book. I haven't seen it, but apparently it was quite loosely based on the book because none of those people appear in it except Bernanke, and he's barely in it. It focuses on Lehman's collapse and Paulson's attempts to get people to buy crumbling institutions. Geithner has more presence in the book than any of the people you listed. All The Devils Are Here is a better book anyway. It is basically a listing of what occurred. Too Big To Fail is mostly a story.

And the whole system should have crashed as it is fundamentally flawed. When businesses partake in irresponsible practices, they must suffer the consequences, not get bailouts from the taxpayers. Fwiw the government bail outs propping up this system is making things worst. If things would have crashed we could have had a market correction and we'd be back to growth again by now.

That's great except millions of people would have suffered the consequences, not just the players who acted irresponsibly in a free market. Millions of jobless and homeless people and trillion dollar contractions in money supply would be another barrier to people

For the love of God take a marketing class. Business' whose goal is aim to just "get their product out in the name of efficiency" will not succeed. Yes, business' aim to maximize profit (so you got half of that right), but that's done by satisfying consumers better then the competition.

To say that business' goals are opposed to society's is utterly absurd. Assuming the business isn't getting benefits from the government, they are both aligned. Henry Ford acted in his own interest when he revolutionized cars, and he advanced society. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs acted in their interests and they advanced society. The whole paradigm you are operating from is dangerous to the advancement of society.

For the love of god, look at corporate history. Regulations are usually responses to excesses. Pollution laws exist because people polluted. And if you got rid of them, people would pollute again.
Microsoft makes you buy IE if you want windows. Nobody uses IE because of its suckitude.

As I noted above, lying about the quality of the instruments you are selling and cooking the books is fraud. Fraud is not legal under capitalism.

Capitalism has no laws. It's an economic system. Laws are political entities.

Also note that the Fed's monetary policy created the environment that led to the creation of a lot of the derivatives. Regarding, DARPA, my arguments above still stand. Don't see how those arguments about dumping billions of dollars at something will get you something (but no the best and not the most efficiently), how government directed research is inefficient, how other things like ARPANet already existed, and how it wasn't what made the internet what it is, are related to the Fed.

So now creating the environment that allowed free marketeers to operate a free market is the cause of its failure while paying for the research to invent products that led to the internet is no credit at all? lol.
Lots of things created the environment that led to derivatives. The Exxon Valdez accident led to it too.

What has government done with our money explains it in as simple terms as you'll find.

Nah. I'm trying to find a link that shows how banks use/make money off deposits that would show how 100% reserve requirements would make it not very profitable. Also, while we're on the subject, you do realize that fractional reserve requirements do not prohibit banks from holding more than the fraction if they chose to right? So a bank now could have 100% reserves if it wanted to.
Note that this is not to say I think fractional reserves is fantastic and I want to marry it. I really don't like how our method of creating wealth in this country switched us to a credit economy.

lol there's a lot of history behind the Tulip bubble, and without typing out another post as long as my last one, it didn't happen for no reason. Basically, coinage laws served to create more money than what the market demanded. This acute increase in the supply of money served to foster an atmosphere that was ripe for speculation and malinvestment, which manifested itself in the intense trading of tulips. In the modern day, central banks (Greenspan) are the ones who cause acute increases in the supply of money.

It's really pointless for you to keep bringing up Greenspan, when he represents something so ridiculously far away from what I'm arguing for. In fact, throughout his tenure, he was one of the largest targets for criticism from the theorists that I'm representing in this thread.

I don't 'keep bringing him up'. In any case, bubbles have been proven in studies where people have no rules over how they trade. They are caused by human nature.

Not sure what this has to do with my advocacy for no prior restraint. I agree with the above, will just add that enforcement is present in both anarchism and minarchy.








we're going around in circles. in anarchy and minarchy there is enforcement, it just doesn't come from a monopoly State.

We are going around in circles. Non-hierarchical voluntary associations preclude an enforcer with authority. It only allows for everyone to hire the biggest enforcer they can find. Anarchy requires a voluntary submission to rules. A moral one if you will. In my lake example, in a perfect anarchic model, you would come to me and say, 'hey man you're polluting my river' and I would say, 'my bad I'll stop right now'. But, I'm an asshole. That's why it would never work.

That's not true. They would have paid them off

With what? Where would they get the money?

my point was that the difficult times (recession) after the war made the people more open to a slightly more centralized system, not that the existing one wouldn't have worked.

Maybe so on the former, not so much on the latter. The existing one would have had to have states voluntarily agree to come to each other's defense, which would have led to some states, dependent on England for trade (I'm looking at you, SC) to probably have stayed out of the war of 1812.

you're just looking at this thing totally wrong, you're looking at this too narrowly. I mean, yeah it might be impossible for 299.95 million of the people in America to start X business, but you don't need 299.95 million of X business to have enough competition to reach a price equilibrium. You usually only need a couple. And if there are no barriers to entry created by the government, you will get enough to achieve perfect competition. I might not have the capital or the brains to enter, but others will.

You need more than a couple in some. There are a couple of cell network providers, but they all basically cost the same, have the same 2 year contracts, etc.. ADM and Conagra became giants because it is natural for the ones with the most money to buy up most of the smaller guys and to then be able to control the market through the use of it. And to increase their wealth at a more rapid rate when they start out with more.
I don't see how I'm looking at it wrong, unless by wrong you mean practically. In practice, there are things that stop people from entering markets. These things are not solely regulations.


This would be a different discussion if people weren't people.

This isn't true, historically speaking unregulated financial markets have caused more U.S. economic downturns than regulated financial markets and government intervention only causes "unforseen consequences" when the government secures the risks of investors and allows them to gamble on assets with the tax payer's dime. Unless you work in corporate finance and accountancy you have absolutely no idea how easy it is for corporations to manipulate their balances and artificially inflate the value of their stocks. Take Enron for example, that was caused primarily by corporate lobbyists paying government officials to change accountancy practices to allow future earnigs from long term development contracts to represent immediate profits on Enron's balance sheets, that de-regulation caused the largest collapse of a private business in U.S. history.

lol and the Enron people went to jail. Idk where the hell you got the idea that I think that a free market is utopian and that ppl will never be dishonest or corrupt lol. That was never my point. My point was that government regulations don't help but only hurt, prior retraint is wrong, and government mandates makes things worse. And in case you weren't aware, government regulators are people too who are just as (and usually more) susceptible to corruption.

Also see Sneakers' post.

All of the "free market" bull shit you learned in college isn't applicable in the actual market place once you take into consideration the risks of greed and corruption filling the market with bogus consumer products,

a) greed and corruption is the most rampant in the government. Big Brother isn't going to take care of you sweetie

b) Lol, if a business fills the market with bogus consumer products, they won't sell, and a competitor will fill the market with consumer-satisfying products and make a killing.

I suggest you read an economics book that doesn't concentrate on "logic and math"

a) math's application in a lot of areas of economics is one thing, but disregarding logic is like saying "I suggest you go watch some poker videos where the instructor's reasoning for every play is that he 'felt like doing it'" Fwiw a lot of the Austrians have been very critical of a lot of the mathematics used to in economics, and put a lot of emphasis on "praxeology."

b) Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises



Don't have time to read/respond to steppin razor's post now, will get to it later

So your property rights supersede mine?

you don't have the right to damage my propety, simple as that.

Sure, if you have some sort of rule against pollution. Here's what would happen in practice, were there only voluntary compliance in non-hierarchical society: You would complain. I'd tell you to F off. You might boycott my product. I wouldn't care as long as I could make a profit off of people who don't care about your piece of river. An enforcer is hierarchical and involuntary if there is a rule I must follow so the only enforcer that can exist is one you can afford to hire. So you hire one. I have more money because I keep costs down by using polluting substances, so I hire a bigger enforcer. Mine kills yours.

Do some basic reading from all the mosted noted political philosphers who have advocated anarchism. It's not anywhere near as simple as you are making it out to be. If it was as simple as "non-hierarchial leads to my hit man killing yours," there wouldn't be volumous works written on the subject, and some of the most brilliant minds in the world wouldn't advocate it. Now just because brilliant people advocate it dosn't mean it would work (logical fallacy of appeal to authority?), but it doesn mean that if it wouldn't work, it's a lot more complicated then "I have more money, my tough guy puts a bullet in yours."

I've already said that getting into it in a forum post would mean I'd have to write a 10 page paper.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a good place to start.

No other way around. The movie was based on the book. I haven't seen it, but apparently it was quite loosely based on the book because none of those people appear in it except Bernanke, and he's barely in it. It focuses on Lehman's collapse and Paulson's attempts to get people to buy crumbling institutions. Geithner has more presence in the book than any of the people you listed. All The Devils Are Here is a better book anyway. It is basically a listing of what occurred. Too Big To Fail is mostly a story.

yeah movie based on book was what I meant. fwiw, the authors are journalists, not economists, and they didn't predict/warn about the financial crisis before it happened (they played monday morning QB), while the Austrian economists did. That shows a much greater understanding of what the real cause was on the free market economists part as they were calling the plays on sunday afternoon.

That's great except millions of people would have suffered the consequences, not just the players who acted irresponsibly in a free market. Millions of jobless and homeless people and trillion dollar contractions in money supply would be another barrier to people

You realize the governments actions after have made it worse? There's going to be a lot more jobless and homeless people throughout the entire world in the not too distant future as the dollar will collapse and it is the world's reserve currency. Letting it fail in 08 and restructuring our entire monetary system would have allowed the market correction to occur. What they did and are still doing is like shooting a drug addict up with his stuff because it makes him feel good in the short term, but it makes it much worse in the long term.

For the love of god, look at corporate history. Regulations are usually responses to excesses. Pollution laws exist because people polluted. And if you got rid of them, people would pollute again.
Microsoft makes you buy IE if you want windows. Nobody uses IE because of its suckitude.

really the EPA allows more pollution than what would occur if it was handled correctly with property rights.

For the love of god look at government history. Thousands of years of history shows govnerments fucking everything up.

Capitalism has no laws. It's an economic system. Laws are political entities.

utterly false. in order for capitalism to occur, there has to be laws. there's just no prior restraint and a business owner is a private property owner - he can run his business as he likes, so long as he doesn't committ fraud etc.

So now creating the environment that allowed free marketeers to operate a free market is the cause of its failure while paying for the research to invent products that led to the internet is no credit at all? lol.
Lots of things created the environment that led to derivatives. The Exxon Valdez accident led to it too.

It wasn't a free market! So no, it wasn't "creating the environment that allowed free marketeers to operate," because it wasn't a free market!

Nah. I'm trying to find a link that shows how banks use/make money off deposits that would show how 100% reserve requirements would make it not very profitable. Also, while we're on the subject, you do realize that fractional reserve requirements do not prohibit banks from holding more than the fraction if they chose to right? So a bank now could have 100% reserves if it wanted to.
Note that this is not to say I think fractional reserves is fantastic and I want to marry it. I really don't like how our method of creating wealth in this country switched us to a credit economy.

Lol, why do you think so much money has gravitated to the banks and to wall street, why the income gap is increasing? Because fractional reserve banking does make banking a lot more profitable! But it doesn't mean 100% reserve requirements wouldn't be profitable. If I was given the authority to counterfit money legally, I would be a lot richer obviously, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be able to get rich honestly if I wasn't allowed to counterfit.

I don't 'keep bringing him up'. In any case, bubbles have been proven in studies where people have no rules over how they trade. They are caused by human nature.

I mean, yeah you do. Look at it like this. Imagine a circus comes to town and brings a lot of extra people to the town. People travel in from neighboring cities and even states to see the circus, the circus has a lot of employees, and even some hard core fans travel far to see the circus. In the short term, a local restaurant owner is going to see a huge increase in his business. So say in order to meet this demand, he goes out and hires a bunch more employees and adds an extra room to his restaurant. This is the boom period.

The circus leaves and all the people that came because of the circus leave. Now the restaurant owner doesn't have enough revenue to pay for the investments he made (malinvestments). This is the bust.

This is what happens when you have a central bank inflating. It sends false economic signals to investors, leading to booms and the subsequent bust. Now this isn't to say that investors would never make bad investments without a central bank, but it does mean that the malinvestments wouldn't occur on anywhere near the same scale and nationwide that throws a nation's economy into a recession.

We are going around in circles. Non-hierarchical voluntary associations preclude an enforcer with authority. It only allows for everyone to hire the biggest enforcer they can find. Anarchy requires a voluntary submission to rules. A moral one if you will. In my lake example, in a perfect anarchic model, you would come to me and say, 'hey man you're polluting my river' and I would say, 'my bad I'll stop right now'. But, I'm an asshole. That's why it would never work.

see above where I noted you are over-simplifying it a lot, and that it's pretty silly to say "my money hires bigger enforcer, you die"

With what? Where would they get the money?

when their economy worked its way out of recession after the war time inflationary period?

You need more than a couple in some. There are a couple of cell network providers, but they all basically cost the same, have the same 2 year contracts, etc.. ADM and Conagra became giants because it is natural for the ones with the most money to buy up most of the smaller guys and to then be able to control the market through the use of it. And to increase their wealth at a more rapid rate when they start out with more.

When you have enough competition in a market, the prices for very similar products are all pretty much the same duh. If they weren't, say they were higher, the company with the higher prices but same product would go out of business or be forced to lower prices. On the other side of it, if a company lowered its prices below average costs they would go out of business.

This would be a different discussion if people weren't people.

In case you didn't know, the government is made up of people.

a) greed and corruption is the most rampant in the government. Big Brother isn't going to take care of you sweetie

Not true. Greed and corruption is the most evident in government.

you don't have the right to damage my propety, simple as that.

Even indirectly? That restraints my property rights. I can no longer use my lake as I see fit. And as for my right to damage your property, what can you do about it?

Do some basic reading from all the mosted noted political philosphers who have advocated anarchism. It's not anywhere near as simple as you are making it out to be. If it was as simple as "non-hierarchial leads to my hit man killing yours," there wouldn't be volumous works written on the subject, and some of the most brilliant minds in the world wouldn't advocate it.

Pot calling the kettle IMO.
It is and it isn't that simple. The concept is that simple, the application is complex. Much like economics both is and isn't as simple as supply and demand. Of course I would first do a cost benefit analysis to killing your hitmen, and I might hire guys like me in Battlefield 3, who only succeed in getting their ass kicked. I may not need to hire hitmen, I may just need to dam my lake and your river goes away. Ultimately, when you pare down to the essential, it is that without a system I am required to comply with, the only restraint on me is how far I am willing to take it, and how far can I afford to take it.

As for political philosophers, they inhabit the world of academia. They are able to ensconce themselves in concept without ever needing to apply. They issue forth on anarchy while seeking tenure so they can't be fired. They exert their power on school presidents once they have it. An academic lives in unreality. I would weight the opinion of someone who experienced running a business in a variety of systems more than a philosopher.

yeah movie based on book was what I meant. fwiw, the authors are journalists, not economists, and they didn't predict/warn about the financial crisis before it happened (they played monday morning QB), while the Austrian economists did. That shows a much greater understanding of what the real cause was on the free market economists part as they were calling the plays on sunday afternoon.

Which book? And what does it matter whether they were journalists or not? A journalist collects facts. Are you not interested in facts? Of course an economist would be in a better position to guess outcomes in economic affairs. Journalists are in a better position to record information, develop sources, and report those things in writing. That's why journalists seek out people involved in events and research those events. I seriously doubt an Austrian economist could do that, and I certainly wouldn't hold it against him.

You realize the governments actions after have made it worse? There's going to be a lot more jobless and homeless people throughout the entire world in the not too distant future as the dollar will collapse and it is the world's reserve currency. Letting it fail in 08 and restructuring our entire monetary system would have allowed the market correction to occur. What they did and are still doing is like shooting a drug addict up with his stuff because it makes him feel good in the short term, but it makes it much worse in the long term.

Pure speculation, with unsupportable assertions.

really the EPA allows more pollution than what would occur if it was handled correctly with property rights.

For the love of god look at government history. Thousands of years of history shows govnerments fucking everything up.

ridiculous.

utterly false. in order for capitalism to occur, there has to be laws. there's just no prior restraint and a business owner is a private property owner - he can run his business as he likes, so long as he doesn't committ fraud etc.

According to your second sentence, it's utterly true. Assuming you are correct, that capitalism requires a system of laws, then laws would be a precondition before capitalism could exist. They would not be of capitalism. Man, there's so much in that little etc. Like dump what he chooses to in his own lake.

It wasn't a free market! So no, it wasn't "creating the environment that allowed free marketeers to operate," because it wasn't a free market!

Please provide a regulation to derivatives trading that existed prior to the current administration.

Lol, why do you think so much money has gravitated to the banks and to wall street, why the income gap is increasing? Because fractional reserve banking does make banking a lot more profitable! But it doesn't mean 100% reserve requirements wouldn't be profitable. If I was given the authority to counterfit money legally, I would be a lot richer obviously, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be able to get rich honestly if I wasn't allowed to counterfit.

Watch out, here's comes your petard. If fractional reserve banking is more profitable, why would banks choose the less profitable 100% reserve if there were no restraint on reserve holdings?

I mean, yeah you do. Look at it like this. Imagine a circus comes to town and brings a lot of extra people to the town. People travel in from neighboring cities and even states to see the circus, the circus has a lot of employees, and even some hard core fans travel far to see the circus. In the short term, a local restaurant owner is going to see a huge increase in his business. So say in order to meet this demand, he goes out and hires a bunch more employees and adds an extra room to his restaurant. This is the boom period.

The circus leaves and all the people that came because of the circus leave. Now the restaurant owner doesn't have enough revenue to pay for the investments he made (malinvestments). This is the bust.

This is what happens when you have a central bank inflating. It sends false economic signals to investors, leading to booms and the subsequent bust. Now this isn't to say that investors would never make bad investments without a central bank, but it does mean that the malinvestments wouldn't occur on anywhere near the same scale and nationwide that throws a nation's economy into a recession.

It's a good thing that has nothing to do with why bubbles occur.
"bubbles occur even in highly predictable experimental markets, where uncertainty is eliminated and market participants should be able to calculate the intrinsic value of the assets simply by examining the expected stream of dividends. Nevertheless, bubbles have been observed repeatedly in experimental markets, even with participants such as business students, managers, and professional traders. Experimental bubbles have proven robust to a variety of conditions, including short-selling, margin buying, and insider trading.

While there is no clear agreement on what causes bubbles, there is evidence to suggest that they are not caused by bounded rationality or assumptions about the irrationality of others, as assumed by greater fool theory. It has also been shown that bubbles appear even when market participants are well-capable of pricing assets correctly. Further, it has been shown that bubbles appear even when speculation is not possible or when over-confidence is absent."

I wish I could link the Scientific American (I think) show I saw where they showed several controlled experiments that created bubbles.

see above where I noted you are over-simplifying it a lot, and that it's pretty silly to say "my money hires bigger enforcer, you die"

It's not silly to say that if you can't make me, I'm gonna keep doing it. That's as inevitable as death.

when their economy worked its way out of recession after the war time inflationary period?

Look who's being overly simplistic. Money they borrowed to fight the war was due and they didn't have it. They had two choices. Be able to levy taxes to pay debt, or default. I don't know where you're from, but it's pretty rare to owe someone lots of money and them say, 'nah, just pay me if you can whenever'.

When you have enough competition in a market, the prices for very similar products are all pretty much the same duh.

Duh? Duh as in see, equilibrium has been reached in the cell phone market, complete with its regulations? Or duh as in, there's no difference between equilibrium and collusion?

If they weren't, say they were higher, the company with the higher prices but same product would go out of business or be forced to lower prices. On the other side of it, if a company lowered its prices below average costs they would go out of business.

That simple huh?

In case you didn't know, the government is made up of people.

Sure is. That's why it gets messed up too. One good thing though is people who study it don't ceteris paribus them away.

you don't have the right to damage my propety, simple as that.

one more thing. I thought you were against SOPA, even though it's trying to stop the lake (internet) from infringing on someone else's intellectual property rights (the river).