jswinghammer

Zero unless they are rewriting history to claim they saw it 6 months to a year out when it was obvious to anyone who wasn't drunk on soaring home and equity prices.

The basic problem is that you're playing the devil's game when it comes to debt. You might think you are getting the upper hand but the house always wins. The banks always win in this scenario because they get bailed out when they lose and they collect your interest when you "win". It becomes difficult to see how this scenario helps the common man.

So far the predictive value of these models has been zero and Austrians tend to have a much clearer understanding of what is happening on a macro level. That's been my experience over the last decade or so. After awhile it helps to notice such things.

The basic problem is that the models are not testable in the way you think they might be. Economics is inherently a deductive discipline and anything you can think of as coming from economics that is valuable in any way came from someone's head and not from testing models. Economists get into trouble by trying to pretend they are physicists.

Virtually everyone you encounter in the government subscribes to Keynesian economics to the degree that they understand anything at all about economics. When economics is explained in the media at all it is through the lens of Keynesian economics.

Most Austrians understand mainstream economic theory much better than mainstream economists understand Austrian theories. Evidence being Krugman's disastrous attempts to discredit Austrian Business Cycle Theory. It isn't a perfect theory but Krugman can't even explain it let alone criticize it.

Most of the elites spend their money on buying more influence. They hold debt instead of cash if they hold anything at all outside of whatever they consider to be balanced portfolio.

No it isn't. It is theft if you are making wages at X price with the understanding that X bought you Y goods in return. If inflation drives up the costs for Y goods so you get Y-Z goods in return then suddenly you got less than you intended for your labor. In a free market prices generally fall.

In the current market they rise at random rates across sectors. Currently we have people spending a lot of time figuring out how to pay for medical care and higher education because that's where the inflation has hit the hardest.

Loans are not evil and I will challenge anyone who suggests that Mises or any other Austrian believes so. That loans under a fractional reserve constitute fraud is something that is debated a bit. I think at this point the consensus is that it does constitute fraud and should be illegal.

So much to learn, you still have. A most basic study of the Federal Reserve would lead you to the exact opposite conclusion. They try to keep interest rates as loan as possible until price inflation gets out of control. I spend a lot of time caring about this issue and all the hype about what the Federal Reserve cares about is just that-hype. They want to inflate the monetary supply all day every day and that's why they buy debt every month as part of QE-infinity. That it hasn't worked does not mean that they do not desire inflation but rather that they have no clue as to what they're doing.

Except that the risk is asymmetric in that the bank gets bailed out if you can't pay and you don't. They loaned out the phony money and you paid it back with your labor.

I am not. The real purpose is to inflate the monetary supply for the benefit of the large banks. On those supposed goals they have entirely failed anyway.

Friedman was a Keynesian heretic. Instead of looking at aggregate demand he was looking at the total money supply. The basic problem is that he lacked an understand of the boom itself and focused entirely the bust's mechanics.

The argument for inflation goes back much further than Friedman. Emperor Diocletian tried it and failed. Despots throughout history have attempted it as well and failed (eventually). Inflation "works" in the short term but eventually you pay the price for it in the form of a bust.

I guess that the bad guys liking something isn't entirely sufficient but it should be fairly damning evidence.

It is a tax. It actually occurs the moment anyone takes out a loan in a fractional reserve system. The money is created from nothing at that moment. Government just tends to borrow huge sums of money through this mechanism.

What you are describing is exactly why Keynesian economics fell out of favor in the first place. For a time it was thought that the business cycle was a solved problem and only a historical memory. Oops.

Given that the entire point of the Federal Reserve is to promote inflation it's probably good that they think it's a good idea-otherwise why do they think that they exist?

The whole problem is that inflation is theft. You are basically having your property taken out from under you without realizing it. It's historically been very popular as a means of taxing the public without them realizing that's what you're doing.

This probably not the space to get into all this but reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island" is a good start. That the major players in the banking industry got together in secret to write the Federal Reserve Act suggests who the system really benefits.

Hayek is an interesting character because "The Road to Serfdom" is not really his finest or clearest viewpoint on markets at all. I saw a video interview with him (you can find it on youtube if you want) where he just restates what I did that the economic calculation problem renders socialism unable to coordinate production effectively.

Russia as compared to the United States is still a backward country. Their wealth is nowhere near the United States and certainly didn't gain any ground during the Cold War period. It doesn't take much, if any, "growth" to force a nation as large as Russia to build a large military-particularly when you don't actually need to figure out the logistics of that army fighting an actual war (since Russia could never have done such a thing against the United States). Add to that forced labor and the basic confiscation of whatever you need to accomplish your goals and it all is pretty straightforward.

Amusingly that job still exists in my neighborhood of Boston for reasons that I cannot explain. I suspect there may be a law about it but I'm not certain.

Hayek and Mises were in total alignment on this point: economic calculation under socialism is impossible. Without a working price system economic coordination is impossible to sustain. Those communist countries were not growing at all. If you look at actual output compared to capitalist nations at the same time there is no comparison. The case of East vs. West Germany is sufficient to demonstrate this case.

In fact the problem that subsidies create in society is a little window into the problem of socialism that exists on a larger scale.

Hayek would probably agree with the sentiment that you expressed though.

Please tell me that people don't put Sithlord in job titles...

Arguments like this assume you can change one thing and society won't change around it. With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. The said a person living in poverty is probably better off than all the but the richest people at any time in human history. Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty. Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it.

This article is an example of the worst political commentary. It presents the context for this "observation" as being a decrease in both public debt and the size of the government. No such thing has happened or is likely to happen any time soon. The US federal government is the largest and most powerful state in the history of the world. There is no "cut" that could make that less true coming in the next few years at least.

The core issue is that while it may be true that the state does have initiatives to fund business innovation there is a false choice being presented. The example of Apple suggests that if the government didn't give them a grant they wouldn't exist. The problem is that we can't say that for certain at all. We don't know the outcomes in a world where the taxes or loans taken to pay for those grants didn't happen. It's not possible to say if the outcomes would be better or worse (for the cause of Apple Computer at least) had that grant not existed.

The state is a mixed bag. They currently take 15% of my income to pay for my "retirement" when if I had been able to save that I'd end up far more secure in my retirement than I will with social security. But that said they are using that money to pay for the life support that a lot of people need. Mix that with the constant wars and you can understand why crediting the state for its' light in a world of darkness is misguided.

There are a lot of other odd statements in here too such as describing the state as a risk taker as if the state is ever punished for its' failures. People don't even remember most of the CIA's failures as they line up for war behind its' current allegations in Syria.

Ultimately everyone pays. Since corporations aren't humans they aren't paying anything. Everyone else in the corporation has to take fewer profits and less compensation as a result of those taxes. They aren't free.

I can't help but believe there is more going on here than just age. The reason being my own experience with hiring the last decade or so. I don't see too many older candidates come across my desk but I never really care much about their age when they do interview with me. I'm just trying to find out something simple:

- Can this person program a computer?

I always come back there because it's actually more rare than I would have guessed when I entered the industry. I have to ask if these people actually know what they're doing or if they're just getting turned down a lot and happen to be older. Given the number of tech firms in San Francisco I have to assume that at least one isn't making a stupid mistake based on age. How could it be that all of them are overlooking these awesome folks? Most companies typically have standing hiring requisitions open basically all the time for developers.

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.

Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. So if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees of the company.

That their intentions aren't pure enough for some is not a reason to not celebrate what they're doing for their employees.

When people tell the story of great content they tend to focus on the very high points. "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter". Even "Mad Men" which isn't as good as "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter", which is arguable the best show on Showtime. Aiming for decent content isn't as meaningful as actually getting that content. Starz and Showtime have failed to get anything approaching HBO or AMC.

You can change your approach but you can't change your taste and if whoever is making content decisions at Starz or Showtime continues to have their jobs then it will not get them very far.

You see it now with the results of Microsoft copying Apple's strategy. Microsoft is doing the same thing that Apple did but since they're out of their element it's not going well. They would have been better off just being a boring company that made a great Office product and an increasingly 3rd party hardware partner friendly operating system. In the same way it would have been better for Showtime to just show movies that no one wants to see but pay for the opportunity to not watch.

In the US most financial education happens in books, radio, or television. There are several personalities who all say the same basic things: stay out of debt, save cash for when shit happens, save for retirement-probably 15% or as much as you can, save for your kids college as early as possible. Pretty much everyone says the same things and it's not bad advice.

People typically wait too late to save or pay off debt. It's very easy to hang yourself with debt in this country. It's probably the worst thing about living here. You can make good money and feel broke all the time because you signed up for two car payments, a student loan, and a 30 year mortgage where the payment almost entirely goes to interest for the first decade.

Meaning they give you your own money back to you for doing something they like. How generous.

The part that you are missing is that the media and people who have worked in government are calling him a traitor and suggesting many of things you have said the administration has not done. This means what you say is technically true but misses the important fact that the media has become a tool of the state. The administration can just sit back and let the agents of the state work in the media. See James Woolsey on CNN recently for an example.

Ron Paul said it best when he said "Truth is treason in an empire of lies." Snowdon may have broken the law but he exposed the higher law (the 4th amendment to the US constitution) is being violated at will all day every day.

I actually just hope that Snowdon exposed the worst thing that the NSA was doing. I suspect he did not.

It's one based on examining the history of governments.