jswinghammer

Say would tell us something else-that supply is paid for with supply. Ultimately math cannot make you richer-you need to produce more to consume more.

Ford and a lot of other thinkers thought this way but a basic understanding of how things are actually produced and paid for would tell us that high wages are not what causes prosperity but rather high wages are a sign of prosperity. In a world without continual non-stop inflation higher wages aren't necessary to raise your standard living because falling prices would do it.

The basic issue is that economics is not an empirical discipline but rather a deductive one. You cannot test anything in isolation because you cannot have a control. All economists can say is "If you do X when nothing else changes Y will result". It is basic economics that when the government mandates a price floor then anyone who cannot sell their goods for anything below that floor will not be able to sell their goods. Thus it will hurt those it's trying to help. No studies are going to disprove that. It's elementary logic.

And anyone who has done any serious reading of economics is well aware that Smith is hardly considered authoritative on any subject in economics. His only insights are almost word for word copies from Cantillon. I'm not the biggest fan of Rand but she's far from a joke. Her writings deserve to analyzed and taken as seriously as any other philosopher.

I don't know if PG is the right about everything he says or even most of what he says but he has inspired a lot of people to do things (largely for the good of society). A philosopher could hope for little more I suspect (not even suggesting PG would self-ascribe that term but I would ascribe it to him).

Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.

The issue with that comment was that you were introducing off topic points that weren't previously discussed or defined. You mentioned assistance while mentioning "in isolation" as the basis for my analysis which is the only point in which my analysis could possibly be valid. If you start introducing variables outside the discussion it makes it hard if not impossible to seriously discuss the impact of a policy change or some market force change. For instance we can see that in general as supply increases the price will drop absent other factors. There are tons of factors that could be introduced to make my minimum wage argument invalid. For instance if the market wage is never practically below $5 then a minimum wage of $3.60 is unlikely to have an outcome (unless something changes).

The argument against the minimum wage is in the realm of deductive reason and not something you look around for proof of or proof against. It's basically the economics equivalent of 1+2=3. If there are problems with that equation we need to analyze it in its' space and not look around for cases when we think 1+2 != 3. The problem with verifying laws of economics is that we don't know what we're seeing the effects of in reality. Cultural, weather, moods, government policies, etc. could impact what we're seeing in data without it being clear why or how. Empiricism can inform our analysis or can give us new routes to inquiry on but it can't be used to argue for or against the laws of economics as we understand them. I'd avoid reading economic studies of anything for this very reason.

None of what you said is coherent to me but I withdraw my comment that you rightly described as needlessly provocative and apologize for it.

It would a stretch to equate the current state of climate science with the current state of physics in terms of the reliability of its' predictive models.

With the series of exposes about the shortcomings of the peer review process it seems odd to lean on that very much. This seems particularly true since this topic is so politically charged and there would be virtually no funding available for climate change research absent government spending.

I think the commenter is referring to the "Little Ice Age" which we do have a substantial amount of evidence for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

It would suggest that the climate fluctuates even during periods where carbon emissions from humans was far less than today.

What you described is not wealth as the question was posed. They are all lifestyle choices that wealth enables.

Yes.

Income does not rise with the cost of consumer goods. Why is it that people feel so much poorer now than they did 30 years ago?

The reason that inflation is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is that the poor do have small savings and that gets robbed from them as the newly inflated money makes it way through the bank accounts of those with influence first and don't ever the poor in any positive way.

No offense but it sounds like we'd better off without you working. If you think minimum wage laws don't harm anyone you're terribly mistaken. They invariably hurt marginal and low skilled workers. The very people you aim to help.

Econ 101 is a misnomer of course because economic understanding developed over thousands of years starting with Plato really (however misguided he was on the topic). There is much to learn still but it sounds like you are just looking in the wrong directions.

Is there an argument there?

Of course not. They're just people responding to incentives to make the best choices they can. I don't judge anyone on welfare or not.

Inflation is a redistribution scheme of the poor to the rich and from savings to spenders.

Life becomes a lot simpler when we just eliminate all these schemes and just let people solve problems for themselves. This expectation that you can disrupt the economy in a major way and have the rest of the society stay static around me is a very serious reasoning error.

That's basically all nonsense. If I have money and really feel like the poor are going to take it then I can buy security or just move far out into the country. Rich people were far less secretive in the past than they are now (for a variety of reasons).

If a basic income means that I can support myself without work and have a decent living then I'm probably not working-it's pretty simple. I suspect you'd have fewer apps being built, manual labor getting done, tough problems getting solved, etc. And if I can't then why are we bothering again?

The communist revolutions of the past tended to be largely nationalist in their roots. The poor ended up being terribly harmed by those revolutions (as did many other people I suppose).

1. would probably work better in a basic income world because in theory the resulting boom and bust cycle would cause less distress because people would have something more to fall back on. Eventually this has to end but in the long run we'll all be dead anyway.

2. is unlikely because no one wants to pay for anything.

This whole idea is a very naive scheme to try to solve the obvious problem with welfare that there are large groups of productive people who pay for those who are not. It creates a great deal of anger in the productive group so if you can mitigate that anger then maybe you can continue your welfare schemes. I'm going to guess that this basic income would not entirely replace welfare programs.

I find it so interesting that there are so many things being proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy and contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession. Between this and this recent minimum wage increase nonsense it seems like we're hell bent on just saying "To hell with what econ 101 says, this sounds good to me!"

I keep hoping that the adults show up and just start ignoring all this and letting everyone know they're being ignored. I suspect that will not happen in this case. It never has before.

The reason is no longer true but it was true that corporations needed more educated workers to perform certain tasks and college graduates were relatively rare. Most of the college graduates in my parents' generation were gainfully employed consistently in my childhood. That is definitely not the case among my college educated peers today. Many are underemployed and in debt.

Some of the issue is that people are chasing the economic signals from an age past where the conditions were just different.

Yes. Sometimes he's good but definitely not on this topic.

It does that anyway. The currency itself would be stable and there would be no guessing games about what was going on with monetary policy since there would be no policy to discuss.

The government could keep currency stable by simply not permitting more to be created. Done. That's not the intention. The intention is to make sure the banks can loan out as much as they want when they want and then get bailed out when crashes occur.

No but if you reduce the quality of my lemons then yes you did do something akin to theft. That's what inflation does it. It debases the quality of money.

Inflation can't continue in a free market forever because eventually a crash occurs because inflation kicks off a boom bust cycle. Taxes have nothing to do with inflation and don't change anything on their own. They may reduce the pool of capital and may force people to the credit markets but we need more information before saying such a connection exists.

Evidence suggests that it they are correct but the part you are missing is that the whole point of the system is to bail out the large banks when their bets go bad. All in the name of the people. Whoever they ever are.

19th century America is close enough and the results astounded the entire world.

He's an Austrian economist and yes he like all of them saw this coming in 2001 and maybe earlier.

Tell me again about that across the board improvement:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/top-1-got-93-of-inc...

Right. There's no way to disprove theories that are tested in this way. Proponents of the theories being tested could always say that the attempt wasn't large enough, that the officials didn't believe enough in the policy, that the gods were angry that quarter, etc., etc. At some point you need a sound theory to draw back on that does not require this sort of testing to stand on its' own.

Real monetary expansion is much greater than 2-3% on average. The price inflation they calculate might be 2-3% but look at college or healthcare costs. That new money finds a home somewhere and I'll tell you now that that's where it ends up these days.