General Poker Discussion Poker Forums

[quote]No, that's not what I'm arguing. It makes some people wealthier. How many is determined by a lot of factors. You're more productive with a computer, but if your boss got you a faster one that allowed you to do more work in the day, that doesn't mean he's automatically going to raise your salary.[/quote]

Capital goods innovation increase society's productivity --> increase society's wealth. Again, you are pointing out examples of how *some* people might not be benefited. And anyway, if everyone in the company is more productive and the business therefore makes more money, the workers will certainly benefit. You will never have a government regulation that makes it such that there aren't some people who have it bad.



[quote]
No man, the essence of marketing is creating demand. Calling SUVs more stylish, etc than station wagons is marketing. Desires is a much better word for you to be using than benefit. [/quote]

You are clearly ignorant about what marketing is. Straight from the first pages of a textbook used at a top 10 business school in the US - "Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client."

"Marketing isn't just selling and advertising. Unfortunately, some executives still think of it that way. They feel that the job of marketing is to "get rid of" whatever the company happens to produce. In fact, the aim of marketing is to identify customers' needs and meet those needs so well that the product almost "sells itself." If the whole marketing job has been done well, customers don't need much persuading. They should be ready to buy. And after they buy, they'll be satisfied and ready to buy the same way the next time."


[quote]
Now that is subjective.[/quote]
How is that subjective? People who have high quality products are wealthier than they otherwise would be without them, all else being equal. The fact that someone can afford an ipad who wouldn't have been able to afford even a desktop computer 15 years ago is a clear sign of a increase in wealth. If your argument is about whether or not technology actually makes people happier, that's a different story and is much more philosophical and actually unrelated because we are talking about wealth, not happiness.

[quote]
It makes some people wealthier. For others they get paid the same amount while now having work able to tap them on the shoulder wherever they are, increasing the amount of hours they work for the same amount of money.[/quote]

Again, you aren't looking at the total benefit to the economy as a whole and what is benefiting the most people, but rather just picking out examples of how some people aren't benefited by innovation. Never did I claim that innovation leads to Utopia and everyone is made rich when it happens - my argument is that more poor people become middle class and more middle class people become "wealthy" under a free enterprise system than under any other.




[quote]
If you're interested, I suggest reading All The Devils Are Here. It's better than Too Big To Fail IMO. I've talked about this before but here's the jist:
In the late 80's, easy credit did not come from the FMs. Didn't come from banks. It came from wall street. They had invented a new financial product (that BTW caused George H Bush to have to bail them out of when it blew up in their faces the first time). [/quote]

a) Didn't know the fed/fractional reserve banking didn't exist during the 80s. oh wait, it did. Didn't know getting government bail outs is part of capitalism. Oh wait, it's not. Didn't know the government ran up huge deficits in the 80s despite Regean's rhetoric. Oh wait, it did.

b) part of investing is that you can lose money. As sauce123 put it nicely in one of his blog posts, "It seems to me that people have a mistaken view of what investing is, and that this mistaken view leads to bad intuitions about policy. I think that when people hear "investing" they think of a practice which is guaranteed to have positive returns in the long run, subject to some short term fluctuations up and down. (a funny consequence of this view might be that people holding it have the intuition that shorting something is somehow morally reprehensible.) A possible reason they might think this is that over the past 60 years, which coincides with just about everyone currently investing's lifetimes, the American stock market has had extremely positive returns fairly consistently. However, there is absolutely no reason why this trend has to necessarily continue- past trends do not determine the future: this is the problem of induction. I think people think that Wall Street has somehow "rigged the game" and deprived their investments of the positive returns which are their just due. But an investment (in a stock, for example, not going to talk about derivatives) is just that, owning a very small part of a company. If the company does well, the investment likely produces positive returns, if the company does poorly (for whatever reason) the investment is likely to produce negative returns. Poker players know how to define that situation with a better term than "investment", we prefer to call it a bet."

rest of blog post http://www.leggopoker.com/blogs/sauce123/ shows how what you suggest about investing and the market is totally illogical.




[quote]
Like Countrywide. These companies got money from Wall St to loan to people to create a mortgage to bundle together. Not having the backing of the FMs made them riskier, which made people interested in hedging them. All was well and people were making money hand over fist. Then they ran into a problem. In order to keep the product going it needed raw material - mortgages. So they made riskier ones. Loaned to people who had no business borrowing. Mortgage companies had to produce loans if they wanted money from wall st. They lied to people to get them to sign. Told people to lie about their income. These excesses are well documented. It wasn't easy credit, it was go out a find someone to convince to get a loan. In order to keep sanity at bay, Wall St decided that they could bundle the bundles so that it would further reduce risk. The housing excesses and bubble were built by an unregulated derivative market.
Meanwhile, the government sponsored agencies initially took a holier than thou stance. When the government told them to lower standards, they basically said F off. They manipulated numbers to appear to be doing what they were told, while keeping their standards high. Then they saw how much wall st was making and took it as a threat to their dominance of their market. They were late to the party, but they were much bigger than anyone else so when they jumped in, it was like a fat guy jumping into a pool with most of the water already gone.
However, the driving force in the financial crisis was the unregulated derivative market, where Wall St. created a product, was able to make it out of whatever they wanted to, and traded it. The sick thing is they all knew it wasn't sustainable but they did it anyway. They took 5 good loans and 2 bad ones and called it an A. Then they took that package, added 3 good ones and 4 bad ones and called it an A. Then kept doing that on a grand scale.[/quote]




[quote]
Greenspan has been a free market disciple since before the Nixon era. You won't find a guy more flabbergasted that the free market failed in this instance than him. [/quote]

I have no idea how you can claim that the chairmen of a CENTRAL BANK - arguably the biggest affront to free market capitalism there is, was a disciple of free markets. If you want a disciple of free markets, read Rothbard. Greenspan is not a free market guy at all. Arguably the most important good in a economy is money. When a government decides what is and what isn't legal tender and then has a central bank determine the supply, that is 180 degrees opposite of a free market.


[quote]
Free means exactly that. Unfettered. A rule is a regulation. Fraud resulting in a penalty means there is a regulation against fraud. You're talking about fair, not free. [/quote]

No, free means unfettered from PRIOR RESTRAINT. It doesn't mean you can commit fraud lol.

[quote] A private protection agency has no authority to jail anyone unless that's mutually agreed upon, at which point you've just formed a government.[/quote]

I guess a better description for anarchy would be the absence of the State instead of absence of government, because you keep trying to call voluntarily agreed upon private agencies governments, so, although they aren't governments, even if you want to play semantics and call them governments, these governments are different than the State.

[quote]
[quote]I agree it's not a real choice. Much like buying gas. It's an illusory choice. [/quote]

Actually we would have a lot more energy choices if we had free markets instead government intervention in the energy industry, government favors to oil companies etc

[quote]But to your first point, tax rate is the price you agree to pay when evaluating your other product qualities as you put it. To the second, indeed there are barriers to any kind of movement whether it's to a new place to live or into a new (to you) market. [/quote]

Legal barriers. Your use of the term barriers is way off. See below.

[quote]To your third point, that was not the point of having many states, nor does the Constitution grant the majority of power to the states, nor was it intended to. [/quote]
lmao have you read the 10th amendment? All the powers not granted to the federal governments or prohibited for the States is left to the states. Being that not many powers were left to the federal government, that means the majority of the power is left to the states. I actually don't know if I should have responded to this because I think it might be a joke.



[quote] federal tax rates and regulations exist because if you lived on the border of NC and SC and wanted to trade with your neighbor across the line, you were subject to your own state taxes as well as theirs, and what you wanted to trade had regulations in your state that were different than the regulations in his state.[/quote]

there were no federal tax rates until 1913, and there weren't really many federal regulations in later hafl of the 19th century, so not sure what your saying here.



[quote]
Come on now. A true barrier is defined as exactly and only the barrier you don't like? An average joe cannot enter the cell phone provider market unless you're trying to tell me you're not in it because of the telecommunications laws. Cause I can tell you I'm not in it because I don't have billions of dollars, billions of acres of land, billions of miles of fiber optic cable, and several years in which to combine them all. That's not a barrier, that's a freaking mountain range. And that's even if the law is 'do whatever you want dude'. [/quote]

Lol the phrase "having no barriers to entry" doesn't, never has, and never will mean that anyone can enter a market. By your definition having a below average IQ is a barrier to entry. And you don't have to have it such that every person has exactly the same capital available in order to have a market that can be entered by enough competing firms to achieve equilibrium. You just have to have a market that can be entered by enough competing firms to achieve equilibrium.


[quote]
I don't think we're going to convince each other so I'll let it die after you reply (you can have the last word). [/quote]

I don't mind keeping it going if you don't. I love defending freedom any time I have the opportunity to.

....However, the driving force in the financial crisis was the unregulated derivative market, where Wall St. created a product, was able to make it out of whatever they wanted to, and traded it..... .

All sides were at fault, but to deny any responsibility/role the government played in seeding the whole problem really is not objective.

Community Reinvestment Act forced banks and financial institutions to give loans they normally would not give for simple reasons of credit/ability-to-pay.
......Then the "coercion" part. If the financial institutions did not give more loans -- to allow everyone to have easy home ownership.......they would lose their FDIC protection and their ability to expand (services, branches etc). <--- bang. Give loans or you are screwed. Gun to head by govt.

So along comes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Government Sponsored Enterprises <-- bang
What were the institutes going to do with loans that were like hot potatoes? Bundle them and sell them back to the taxpayer (FM & FM supported by Barney Frank)......and apparently, they bought bundles from FM&FM because the loans were GOVT insured.
NOTE: FM&FM own or guarrantee something like 60-70% of home mortgages (I must double-check this point). Meaning the taxpayer is forced into the mortgage business.

That is the nutshell of it. A lot of people were involved, but to blame only George Bush and the banks exclusively -- is not objective. But we have been over this several times

Note: The Bush Administration did put up early warnings and tried to put regulations in place.....but guess what? Barney Frank and Maxine Waters (and others) basically called it scare tactics and descrimination against poor people.

"What housing bubble?" <-- BarneyF: Finacial Services Committe Ranking Member
"This is not the dot-com situation" <-- WAT?!? BF again.
"You are not going to see the collapse...." <-- again
"I don't see anything in the report that raises safety and soundness problems." <-- again
"Frankly, we were trying to fix something that wasn't broken.. We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac" Maxine Water


MUCH MORE but I have written this before. Takes a lot of time.
For anyone to be objective IMO, they really cannot defend Barney Frank and the Government in their heavy-handed role of the housing/financial crisis. That is unconscionable.
Government royally screwed up -- and then lied and passed the blame. But this is a perfect example of how the Government is never held responsible (unless his name was Bush. lol)


VIDEOS BEFORE THE CRISIS
Barney Frank in 2005: What Housing Bubble?

The partisan fighting when warning bells were going off before the crisis Watch who defends and denies there is a problem. Full footage can be found on CSPAN.

Barney Frank at very beginning of crisis. Still denies a bubble.


BUT AFTER THE CRISIS???
Barney Frank: I Didn't Push Home Ownership

Barney Frank on Larry King Show BUSTED LYING and pushing the blame

Barney Frank Freddie Fannie Flip

========
....and finally, a good book that takes no prisoners or sides. All are held accountable.
The Housing Boom and Bust -- Thomas Sowell

Apparently this law doesn't matter as much as I thought, since the DOJ already has enough power to shut down megaupload relying almost entirely on what can only be described as ass smoke and hyperbole: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120119/13052817473/doj-gives-its-opinion-sopa-unilaterally-shutting-down-foreign-rogue-site-megaupload-without-sopapipa.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/00373617487/megaupload-details-raise-significant-concerns-about-what-doj-considers-evidence-criminal-behavior.shtml

That is the nutshell of it. A lot of people were involved, but to blame only George Bush and the banks exclusively -- is not objective. But we have been over this several times

I'd add that the entire monetary and banking system also deserves a large portion of the blame for keeping interest rates way too artificially low below market for way too long.





.

Videos of them in their own words BEFORE the crisis
Barney Frank in 2005: What Housing Bubble?

The partisan fighting when warning bells were going off before the crisis Watch who defends and denies there is a problem. Full footage can be found on CSPAN.

Barney Frank at very beginning of crisis. Still denies a bubble.


BUT AFTER THE CRISIS???
Barney Frank: I Didn't Push Home Ownership

Barney Frank on Larry King Show BUSTED LYING and pushing the blame

Barney Frank Freddie Fannie Flip

========
....and finally, a good book that takes no prisoners. All are held accountable.
The Housing Boom and Bust -- Thomas Sowell

I'd also add the Austrian economists predicting/warning about it

Ron Paul - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INvKPYdTs3E

Peter Schiff - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

If you want. I'll quit when I get tired then.

Capital goods innovation increase society's productivity --> increase society's wealth. Again, you are pointing out examples of how *some* people might not be benefited. And anyway, if everyone in the company is more productive and the business therefore makes more money, the workers will certainly benefit. You will never have a government regulation that makes it such that there aren't some people who have it bad.

You are certain the workers would benefit, yet concede that some might not dependent on what the business decides to do with its extra cash. Certainly no government regulation will solve everyone's problem. That's not the point, and I never said tons of government regulation for all.

You are clearly ignorant about what marketing is. Straight from the first pages of a textbook used at a top 10 business school in the US - "Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client."

"Marketing isn't just selling and advertising. Unfortunately, some executives still think of it that way. They feel that the job of marketing is to "get rid of" whatever the company happens to produce. In fact, the aim of marketing is to identify customers' needs and meet those needs so well that the product almost "sells itself." If the whole marketing job has been done well, customers don't need much persuading. They should be ready to buy. And after they buy, they'll be satisfied and ready to buy the same way the next time."

Any product anyone ever buys is something they need? All those infomercials are needed products that are selling themselves? This again is the difference between theory and real world practice. Businesses make products that are a combination of the profitable, sellable, re-sellable (ie customers will buy more), that can be efficiently built and desseminated. A person or people decide what those things are and which direction to go. Admittedly, I was focused more on the advertising side than the focus group side because the Big 3 decided to build SUVs not because people wanted them and they knew that but because the Big 3 wanted a profitable vehicle that did not require R&D or innovation.

How is that subjective? People who have high quality products are wealthier than they otherwise would be without them, all else being equal. The fact that someone can afford an ipad who wouldn't have been able to afford even a desktop computer 15 years ago is a clear sign of a increase in wealth. If your argument is about whether or not technology actually makes people happier, that's a different story and is much more philosophical and actually unrelated because we are talking about wealth, not happiness.

It's subjective because your description of the ipad /ipods as increasing their standard of living is an opinion. The ability to play games in a variety of locales is not a traditional gauge for standard of living. As for the ipad/computer thing, it may be an indication that that person is wealthier but the only way to show a large portion of people are wealthier would be statistics showing more people own ipads than owned computers.

Again, you aren't looking at the total benefit to the economy as a whole and what is benefiting the most people, but rather just picking out examples of how some people aren't benefited by innovation. Never did I claim that innovation leads to Utopia and everyone is made rich when it happens - my argument is that more poor people become middle class and more middle class people become "wealthy" under a free enterprise system than under any other.

And my argument is that unregulated free enterprise will not result in upward mobility, but instead will result in wealth traveling upward, leaving people behind. And that this is due to human nature. In a completely free system, one will be paying for everything, and according to what one can afford. If you can't afford the cleanest water, there will be 85% clean water available. If you can't afford that, there will be nuclear waste infested water at 10% the cost of clean. If you can't afford higher education, you don't qualify for the jobs that pay you enough to purchase the things necessary for advancement, like a computer. Without one, you can't compete with those who have one. They get paid more. They can afford things beyond food, clothing, shelter, and water, you can't. All the while, the more goods and services they have to buy cuts into their wallet. And companies sell to everyone, so most of the money goes to them. They keep as much of it as they can as profit.
This is not to say that all the money will only move upward, but its cycle through the ecenomy will eventually land most of it at the top.

The truth of the matter is that the derivative market that fueled the home loan excesses in order to provide raw material for the derivatives was a completely unregulated market that was responsible for the financial crisis. I know it's hard for free marketeers to accept and they want to blame government anytime something goes wrong, but this time, this one was on the free market.

a) Didn't know the fed/fractional reserve banking didn't exist during the 80s. oh wait, it did. Didn't know getting government bail outs is part of capitalism. Oh wait, it's not. Didn't know the government ran up huge deficits in the 80s despite Regean's rhetoric. Oh wait, it did.

b) part of investing is that you can lose money. As sauce123 put it nicely in one of his blog posts, "It seems to me that people have a mistaken view of what investing is, and that this mistaken view leads to bad intuitions about policy. I think that when people hear "investing" they think of a practice which is guaranteed to have positive returns in the long run, subject to some short term fluctuations up and down. (a funny consequence of this view might be that people holding it have the intuition that shorting something is somehow morally reprehensible.) A possible reason they might think this is that over the past 60 years, which coincides with just about everyone currently investing's lifetimes, the American stock market has had extremely positive returns fairly consistently. However, there is absolutely no reason why this trend has to necessarily continue- past trends do not determine the future: this is the problem of induction. I think people think that Wall Street has somehow "rigged the game" and deprived their investments of the positive returns which are their just due. But an investment (in a stock, for example, not going to talk about derivatives) is just that, owning a very small part of a company. If the company does well, the investment likely produces positive returns, if the company does poorly (for whatever reason) the investment is likely to produce negative returns. Poker players know how to define that situation with a better term than "investment", we prefer to call it a bet."

rest of blog post http://www.leggopoker.com/blogs/sauce123/ shows how what you suggest about investing and the market is totally illogical.

Working backwards: I didn't suggest anything, I stated facts. I don't know where you got the idea the I said investment must lead to profit. Further, your blogger specifically excluded derivatives, which is specifically the market I was talking about, from his little rant.
To a), it existed, but the derivative market was unregulated. If banks had no reserve requirements, then they would have been even more exposed than they were. The biggest problem banking-wise is that the reserve requirements were not enough. If you remove those requirements, banks would over extend themselves like crazy then fail. We know this to be true because even with requirements, they overextended themselves like crazy and would've failed if not for intervention. I don't know what the deficit under Reagan has to do with the derivative market, so I'll leave that.
Bailouts are part of capitalism in that it's a possible way for government to enter into the economy. If it wasn't for that bailout (which in turn resulted in HW Bush's tax after read my lips and cost him the election), millions of people would've been crushed.

I have no idea how you can claim that the chairmen of a CENTRAL BANK - arguably the biggest affront to free market capitalism there is, was a disciple of free markets. If you want a disciple of free markets, read Rothbard. Greenspan is not a free market guy at all. Arguably the most important good in a economy is money. When a government decides what is and what isn't legal tender and then has a central bank determine the supply, that is 180 degrees opposite of a free market.

Read up on Greenspan. The guy worships at the temple of Ayn Rand. He ferociously defended against any attempt to regulate the derivative market (and there were attempts).

No, free means unfettered from PRIOR RESTRAINT. It doesn't mean you can commit fraud lol.

So a free market is one where there's a regulation against fraud today that wasn't there yesterday? If there is no rule against fraud, why can't you commit it?

I guess a better description for anarchy would be the absence of the State instead of absence of government, because you keep trying to call voluntarily agreed upon private agencies governments, so, although they aren't governments, even if you want to play semantics and call them governments, these governments are different than the State.

The only correct definition of anarchy is a system in which there is no authority over a population. A system by which a paid arbitrator with final authority is a type of oligarchy. In any case, even with the oilgarchy, there will be unequal amounts of influence based on the size and power of a business.

Actually we would have a lot more energy choices if we had free markets instead government intervention in the energy industry, government favors to oil companies etc

We're kind of locked into gas at this point. I was just saying paying taxes is like buying gas. Sure you could move (for the former) just like you could decide to walk (for the latter) but neither is an actual, practical choice.

Legal barriers. Your use of the term barriers is way off. See below.

Legal is a qualifier to barrier there. I completely agree that legal barriers are laws.

lmao have you read the 10th amendment? All the powers not granted to the federal governments or prohibited for the States is left to the states. Being that not many powers were left to the federal government, that means the majority of the power is left to the states. I actually don't know if I should have responded to this because I think it might be a joke.

Have you read the whole document? Know any of the history of its creation and passage? It's an amazing political document not just for its content but also for the politics of its creation. Its design is such that the federal government can kind of decide how much power it wants. And keep in mind these are people who are much more strongly anti-central control than people are today. And actually had the ability to decide how it was going to be. And they still eventually recognized that to continue to exist, they needed centralized gorvernment.

Lol the phrase "having no barriers to entry" doesn't, never has, and never will mean that anyone can enter a market. By your definition having a below average IQ is a barrier to entry. And you don't have to have it such that every person has exactly the same capital available in order to have a market that can be entered by enough competing firms to achieve equilibrium. You just have to have a market that can be entered by enough competing firms to achieve equilibrium.

If you want to enter a market and you can't, there is a barrier. Absolutely if you want to start a hedge fund but are too dumb to know how to do it you're intelligence is a barrier. No, people don't have to have the exact same amount of capital. They have to have enough to provide the product on a scale to be profitable, not sell to the established companies in the market, and survive price wars with deeper pocketed competition. It's possible, that's why Home Depot and Lowe's haven't replaced most mom and pop hardware stores. Oh wait, they did.

I don't mind keeping it going if you don't. I love defending freedom any time I have the opportunity to.

Lol. A bit precious there, no?

The free market leads to monopolies in markets where it is possible to create market barries. That is a trivial observation.

In order to avoid monopolies you need a monopoly that removes market barries.

super enlightening statement by improva.

governments aren't perfect, and i've made my fair share of complaints about them here, but in the end, we need monopolies wherein we're collective members (government) and which are guided by laws and principles that try to rise above the base motives of business in order to prevent the rise of business monopolies which have no laws or higher principles to guide them. it's a great balancing act, and it'll never be perfect, but it's the best system i think.

you used to be able to paint the work "taxi" on your car in New York City and give people rides and you had yourself a business if you priced your rides where people were willing to pay for them.

i'll ride in that taxi.

Apparently this law doesn't matter as much as I thought, since the DOJ already has enough power to shut down megaupload relying almost entirely on what can only be described as ass smoke and hyperbole: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120119/13052817473/doj-gives-its-opinion-sopa-unilaterally-shutting-down-foreign-rogue-site-megaupload-without-sopapipa.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/00373617487/megaupload-details-raise-significant-concerns-about-what-doj-considers-evidence-criminal-behavior.shtml

i've tested out some MU based movie sites (you know, for research), and it was a real hit & miss affair with constant dead links, so it seems like MU complied with whatever takedown notices it got fairly well imo. but what do i know?

i thought this thread was supposed to be about sopa lol

You are certain the workers would benefit, yet concede that some might not dependent on what the business decides to do with its extra cash. Certainly no government regulation will solve everyone's problem. That's not the point, and I never said tons of government regulation for all.

lmao if 75% of workers benefit and 25% don't, how is that not a great scenario? YOU PLAY POKER. You should know about means, averages, expected value. On average, the workers benefit. Overall, the society is benefited.

Any product anyone ever buys is something they need? All those infomercials are needed products that are selling themselves? This again is the difference between theory and real world practice. Businesses make products that are a combination of the profitable, sellable, re-sellable (ie customers will buy more), that can be efficiently built and desseminated. A person or people decide what those things are and which direction to go. Admittedly, I was focused more on the advertising side than the focus group side because the Big 3 decided to build SUVs not because people wanted them and they knew that but because the Big 3 wanted a profitable vehicle that did not require R&D or innovation.

Most of your arguments in this thread have been a play on semantics. Clearly, most products aren't food, water, clothing, and shelter, so no they don't "need" them in that sense. "Need" in this context means an economic desire. All marketing starts with the consumer's needs (wants) in mind. When deciding how to design or produce a product, the consumer is still the one in mind. Anything that won't add satisfaction to the consumer is discarded.

And it's not theory, it's practice. It's what a hugely successful venture capitalist is teaching at one of the top business institutions in the world.

It's subjective because your description of the ipad /ipods as increasing their standard of living is an opinion. The ability to play games in a variety of locales is not a traditional gauge for standard of living. As for the ipad/computer thing, it may be an indication that that person is wealthier but the only way to show a large portion of people are wealthier would be statistics showing more people own ipads than owned computers.

Surely I don't need a statistic for you to agree that an absurdly higher % of people own some kind of computer today then they did 15 years ago? Or that an absurdly higher % of people own cell phones then they did 10 years ago? Or that the average household has more and better TVs etc etc. It's no coincidence that the market where government has interfered the least (technology) is producing the best products that even many poor people can afford and own. If the government would stay out of the way in the market for every other good, especially money, you would see the same thing happening in those markets.

And my argument is that unregulated free enterprise will not result in upward mobility, but instead will result in wealth traveling upward, leaving people behind. And that this is due to human nature. In a completely free system, one will be paying for everything, and according to what one can afford. If you can't afford the cleanest water, there will be 85% clean water available. If you can't afford that, there will be nuclear waste infested water at 10% the cost of clean. If you can't afford higher education, you don't qualify for the jobs that pay you enough to purchase the things necessary for advancement, like a computer. Without one, you can't compete with those who have one. They get paid more. They can afford things beyond food, clothing, shelter, and water, you can't. All the while, the more goods and services they have to buy cuts into their wallet. And companies sell to everyone, so most of the money goes to them. They keep as much of it as they can as profit.
This is not to say that all the money will only move upward, but its cycle through the ecenomy will eventually land most of it at the top.

a) property rights would take care of your cute dirty water example. if you pollute someone else's property, you're responsible. that's much more effective than the EPA, which effectively allows people to pollute much more than they otherwise would be able to.

b) you have a very poor understanding of how money and prices work. you talk as if there is one company and all these poor people throwing money at it, then it takes the money and hoards it. That is absurd. In a free market there is maximal competition, which means multiple companies offering the same product. This drives prices down, which benefits all these helpless people you are inventing. The company also has employees, in case you didn't know. The company then pays these employees, and they can go spend their money on other products that are affordable to them because of the competition in the market for those products. And when a business man makes a lot of money, he doesn't hoard it. He has it invested, where other smart and ambitious entrepreneurs can gain access to it and benefit consumers some more. Then if that entrepreneur makes it, he has his money invested where it can be loaned etc. etc

The truth of the matter is that the derivative market that fueled the home loan excesses in order to provide raw material for the derivatives was a completely unregulated market that was responsible for the financial crisis. I know it's hard for free marketeers to accept and they want to blame government anytime something goes wrong, but this time, this one was on the free market.

lmao community reinvestment act, fanne and freddie, subprimes, federal reserve keeping interest rates below market. THIS WAS GOVERNMENT. The damage throughout the economy would have been minuscule compared to what it was had these things not existed. Stop acting like you are blind when these things are presented clearly right in front of your nose. It wasn't a free market at all. Not even close.

Working backwards: I didn't suggest anything, I stated facts. I don't know where you got the idea the I said investment must lead to profit. Further, your blogger specifically excluded derivatives, which is specifically the market I was talking about, from his little rant.
To a), it existed, but the derivative market was unregulated. If banks had no reserve requirements, then they would have been even more exposed than they were. The biggest problem banking-wise is that the reserve requirements were not enough. If you remove those requirements, banks would over extend themselves like crazy then fail. We know this to be true because even with requirements, they overextended themselves like crazy and would've failed if not for intervention. I don't know what the deficit under Reagan has to do with the derivative market, so I'll leave that.

IN A FREE MARKET, RESERVE REQUIREMENTS WOULD BE 100%!!!!! Anything else would be fraud (i.e. fractional reserve banking is fraud).

The fact that the above paragraph is written as if I was advocating less reserve requirements shows a total ignorance of monetary theory and what free market economists advocate

Bailouts are part of capitalism .

This just further exposed a pathetic ignorance of what capitalism is.. I cannot have a reasonable discussion with someone who has absolutely no clue about the most elementary aspects of capitalism.

Read up on Greenspan. The guy worships at the temple of Ayn Rand. He ferociously defended against any attempt to regulate the derivative market (and there were attempts).

Stop telling me to read up on Greenspan lol. You need to read up on some economics sir. A CENTRAL BANK AND GOVERNMENT MANDATED FIAT MONEY IS NOT CAPITALISM, IT'S NOT FREE MARKETS. Anyone who would advocate a central bank (Greenspan) and fiat money is not a free marketeer.

And fwiw many of the great libertarian theorists had a lot of issues with Ayn Rand. Read up some more on it.

So a free market is one where there's a regulation against fraud today that wasn't there yesterday? If there is no rule against fraud, why can't you commit it?

In practice, you can commit it today because the corporations are in bed with the government (see Jon Stewart's recurring segment, "How the fuck is it that Martha Stewart went to jail!?), but that's beside the point.

Anyhoo, it doesn't mean that laws against fraud weren't there yesterday. It means that costly regulations of prior restraint that costs business' billions of dollars (and thus costs Americans millions of well paying jobs) do not exist.

The only correct definition of anarchy is a system in which there is no authority over a population. A system by which a paid arbitrator with final authority is a type of oligarchy. In any case, even with the oilgarchy, there will be unequal amounts of influence based on the size and power of a business.

Read up on anarchy as a political theory. There are many different forms of it, but none of them mean a system where there is no law or contractual agreements etc.

Legal is a qualifier to barrier there. I completely agree that legal barriers are laws.

Its design is such that the federal government can kind of decide how much power it wants.

That's a joke. I guess you think the federal government has the authority to set up concentration camps. After all, it can kind of decide how much power it wants.

The constitution was written to restrict the power of a centralized government, as the Founders knew the track record that centralized governments had throughout history.

If you want to enter a market and you can't, there is a barrier. Absolutely if you want to start a hedge fund but are too dumb to know how to do it you're intelligence is a barrier. No, people don't have to have the exact same amount of capital. They have to have enough to provide the product on a scale to be profitable, not sell to the established companies in the market, and survive price wars with deeper pocketed competition. It's possible, that's why Home Depot and Lowe's haven't replaced most mom and pop hardware stores. Oh wait, they did.

That's not what economists are talking about when they refer to market barriers. Yes, if I have a 75 IQ I won't be starting my own business, but that's not a barrier to entry that economists are referring to lol this is pretty basic stuff. Read up on some economics.

super enlightening statement by improva.

Considering the government is what creates market barriers, I don't think it's that enlightening.

governments aren't perfect, and i've made my fair share of complaints about them here, but in the end, we need monopolies wherein we're collective members (government) and which are guided by laws and principles that try to rise above the base motives of business in order to prevent the rise of business monopolies which have no laws or higher principles to guide them. it's a great balancing act, and it'll never be perfect, but it's the best system i think.

Governments don't prevent monopolies, they create them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU

i'll ride in that taxi.

LOL

I don't mind keeping it going if you don't. I love defending freedom any time I have the opportunity to.

In your toy game one player at the table will bring a gun.

You are not defending freedom. You are defending no or very few rules - which has nothing to do with freedom - it is an illusion. In the free market the strongest players will determine the rules and change them as they see fit. There is no such thing as the free market.

You are not defending freedom. You are defending no or very few rules - which has nothing to do with freedom - it is an illusion. In the free market the strongest players will determine the rules and change them as they see fit. There is no such thing as the free market.

It's not that there's no rules, there's no prior restraint, no coercive mandating of how a private property owner runs his business, and no coercive socialistic distribution of wealth. Fraud laws and property rights are pretty darn strict rules.

In the free market, the strongest players are the ones who provide the most benefit to the consumer at the lowest costs (prices). It's a win/win relationship and it's the only truly humanitarian system for society.

you guys are awesome I deucescracked. The debate on here surpasses that on any floor in any house or any chamber of any government, and that is precisely why I amongst others oppose SOPA and any other attempts to disarm freedom of speech, especially on the internet. Its a beautiful thing

WWW

Also one thing that's clear is that you are all highly intelligent people who could and should be running for office in your respective countries. I don't know where you are from, but if more people like yourselves ran for office then there is more than a good chance that what you are collectively reasoning for (reason!!) would prevail.

I happen to agree with AGTJ overall because I believe capitalism to be the fairest system devised my mankind to this date, and I have interpreted his sentiments to be most aligned to those pure capitalistic principals. At the same time improva and nawhead are both vastly intelligent and probably have an entirely different perspective on the matter with equally good reasons. Improva made a good point about the Scandinavian/American dream earlier in the thread, which is an interesting diversion. Let the discussion continue

In your toy game one player at the table will bring a gun.

You are not defending freedom. You are defending no or very few rules - which has nothing to do with freedom - it is an illusion. In the free market the strongest players will determine the rules and change them as they see fit. There is no such thing as the free market.

+1

Considering the government is what creates market barriers, I don't think it's that enlightening.

Governments don't prevent monopolies, they create them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU

no comment on the 1st video. but in the 2nd video, Friedman says, "in almost every case, temporary monopolies develop, and if the government doesn't come in to shore them up, they fall to pieces."

so his solution is to get rid of all government intervention. but this is incomplete logic and he's mistaking the arrows of causation. the temporary monopolies gain power and then use that power to buy government support in order to become a coercive monopoly. so the only way to realistically stop this is to limit monopolies after they gain this type of power to affect government.

the government is a many-headed monster. there are checks and balances. the anti-trust laws are there to fight this type of corruption from within and without.

and in the segment, Friedman poses his favorite question, "you have one law you can pass. its only purpose is to reduce the extent of monopoly. what law would you pass?"

his answer is free trade: a law to eliminate all restrictions and foreign tariffs.

so his proposal is to make a law that stops other laws from being passed? it's a great idea i think, but again (and why i get tired of some scholars and economists), it's completely unrealistic. we're back in Theoryland with "rational agents" and "free markets" and "one law to rule them all."