I, justino

Hornberger's Blog - Conning the Poor

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:17:06 -0600

The biggest con in history — bigger even than Social Security — might well be the one in which statists have conned the poor into believing that the welfare state helps them. If those at the bottom of the economic ladder were ever to realize how badly they’ve been conned, that could spell the end of the welfare-state way of life.

A Redistributive State of the Union | Michael D. Tanner

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:44:05 -0600

A Redistributive State of the Union | Michael D. Tanner:

We all seek a society in which every American can reach his or her full potential, in which as few people as possible live in poverty, and in which no one must go without the basic necessities of life. More important, we want a society in which every person can live a fulfilling life. But the evidence is now inescapable that the best way to achieve that goal is not through welfare-state redistribution of wealth, but through the creation of more wealth. We should judge the success of our efforts not by how much charity we provide to the poor, but by how few people need such charity.

The Statist of the Union | The Beacon

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:11:05 -0600

The Statist of the Union | The Beacon:

Unsurprisingly, President Obama’s campaign speech masquerading as the routine address to Congress, spelled out in the Constitution and known as the State of the Union, was saturated with every prevalent form of modern American statism—protectionism, corporate-liberal socialism, nationalism, and militarism. In a couple areas, however, he was particularly bold in his statist proposals.

US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:39:05 -0600

US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes:

Recent comments by U.S and Israeli military leaders indicate that the intelligence services of the two countries agree that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb, a crack in the Western narrative that the U.S. press corps won’t accept, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

Profits Are Socially Responsible - Doug French

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:06:06 -0600

Profits Are Socially Responsible - Doug French:

A free society cannot survive without entrepreneurial action as well as entrepreneurial profit and loss. Entrepreneurs adopting benefit corporation charters may be well-intentioned, but they should heed the words of Mises:

The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all.

Hornberger's Blog - Thou Shalt Not Covet

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:33:05 -0600

Hornberger's Blog - Thou Shalt Not Covet:

President Obama says that people are poor because others are rich. What a crock that is. It’s nothing more than a refusal to accept personal responsibility for the failure of the welfare-warfare way of life and the managed-economy way of life that that statists have foisted upon our nation.

dead flag blues: Appeal to voluntarism when discussing icky societal issues is...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:11:00 -0600

dead flag blues: Appeal to voluntarism when discussing icky societal issues is...:

bbcity:

If your only goal for social progress is to ensure people don’t hold guns to one another’s heads, you shouldn’t run around calling yourselves a philosophy, ahem, libertarians.

Libertarians hold that “to ensure people don’t hold guns to one another’s heads” is a necessary — though, depending on the circumstances, maybe not sufficient — condition for social progress and human virtue.

Libertarians may be wrong that liberty is a necessary condition for social progress, but it is a misunderstanding of the libertarian position to believe that libertarians’ only goal is liberty or even that liberty is the greatest value. In fact, I would imagine that a significant number of libertarians hold that liberty is the most suitable political means to the other goals they seek to gain or to keep. I believe that explains why libertarians — or to the extent they are libertarians — are unwilling to compromise liberty in the pursuit of other values they personally cherish even more greatly.

EDIT

Oh, and libertarian thinkers (save for Walter Block and Robert Nozick) agree that indentured servitude — like income taxation — is illegitimate.

Krugman Sinks to a New On-Star Guided Low

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:48:14 -0600

Krugman Sinks to a New On-Star Guided Low:

The idea that free market types remain entranced with the fantastical entrepreneur as the building blocks for a productive economy is a blatant smear on Krugman’s part. No surprise from him there. What he fails to specify is that every participant in the complex system known as the market acts as an entrepreneur in forecasting their own financial conditions. Steve Jobs and the teenager at McDonald’s both make subjective decisions based on their own ability to satisfy demand. Capitalism is a function of economic actors collaborating en masse in the constant pursuit of improving their own standards of living. Starkly dividing a free economy’s success by individual or collective factors is pure demagoguery.

Column on the Bottom Line on Obama-Economics

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:43:16 -0600

Column on the Bottom Line on Obama-Economics:

Parents, after all, own their resources and owe some of it to their children; this is not the case with governments and the citizenry. They don’t own anything at all without confiscating it. At most they may do this up to what is needed for administering the laws of the land–providing the citizenry with national defense and a sound legal system and its maintenance. Even some of this can be achieved without much government management. After all, who is the government but other citizens who have been hired to do a rather limited job in the country. It is up to the citizenry to secure for themselves economic growth, solvency, innovation, investment, etc. To attempt anything more would involve the government in tasks that free citizens aren’t entitled to.

— Tibor R. Machan

Free Markets Save the Planet

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:15:18 -0600

Free Markets Save the Planet:

A startling new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) reveals a free-market way to thwart climate change: Create a free market in energy. Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, estimates that 37 nations spent $409 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2010. (By comparison, renewables received $66 billion in that same year.) Impressively, if fossil fuel subsidies were eliminated, this would avoid 750 million tons of CO2 by 2015, and could potentially save over 2.5 gigatons of carbon by 2035. The latter is 70 percent of what the European Union currently emits. In total, by ending these distortions in the energy market, the world could reduce half of the carbon emissions necessary to stop a 2°C (3.6°F) rise in global temperatures.

Economic Fairness and the State of the Union

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:17:39 -0600

Economic Fairness and the State of the Union:

Those who receive subsidies from the government reap income due to their privileged status vis-a-vis the government and they do so at the expense of other people. The only way for the state to fund subsidies is through taxes, borrowing, or inflation or some combination of the three. All of these sources of funding results in wealth being redistributed from some citizens to others at the rather arbitrary desires of bureaucrats.

A return toward economic fairness and justice requires a return to a free society. A return to a free society requires a return to private property.

— Shawn Ritenour

The New Yorker Has a Sobering Look at the Whys of America's Prison-Industrial Complex - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:10:31 -0600

The New Yorker Has a Sobering Look at the Whys of America's Prison-Industrial Complex - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

[O]ne piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two.

Mises, Human Action, Part 4, Chapter XV | Library of Economics and Liberty

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:06:16 -0600

Mises, Human Action, Part 4, Chapter XV | Library of Economics and Liberty:

The market does not directly prevent anybody from arbitrarily inflicting harm on his fellow citizens; it only puts a penalty upon such conduct. The shopkeeper is free to be rude to his customers provided he is ready to bear the consequences. The consumers are free to boycott a purveyor provided they are ready to pay the costs. What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow men and curbs innate tendencies toward arbitrariness and malice is, in the market, not compulsion and coercion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen, and penal courts; it is self-interest.

— Mises

Larry Summers Distorts Capitalism

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:41:48 -0600

Larry Summers Distorts Capitalism:

So let me get this straight “The problem is [wages] they have stagnated or fallen measured relative to the price of housing, health care, food and energy or education.”. “The difficulty is that in many of these areas the traditional case for market capitalism is weaker. It is surely not an accident that in almost every society the production of health care and education is much more involved with the public sector than the production of manufactured goods.” So the fact that the stagnating productivity is in areas where government has the most power is an argument AGAINST capitalism?

— Michael Price

Why Libertarianism Needs our Adjective, Jeff Sachs Version | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:05:45 -0600

Why Libertarianism Needs our Adjective, Jeff Sachs Version | Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

I think that libertarians see liberty as a precursor to the other values, while non-libertarians see liberty *as* one of the values, and has no problem giving up liberty to get more of another value. That’s why the discussion always moves away from the other values to liberty. And that’s why Jeff Sachs thinks libertarians only care about liberty — because when he talks about giving up liberty, libertarians hear him wanting to give up ALL the other values.

— Russ Nelson

atomicsocialist: Not at all, it’s because the completely...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:51:32 -0600

atomicsocialist:

Not at all, it’s because the completely unregulated derivatives market incentivized giving loans to people who couldn’t afford them and would surely default. The exasperated boom and bust practices of the fed which are fairly new did have something to do with the crash however it was mostly because a completely unregulated derivatives market allowed companies to build CDO’s they knew would fail and then bet on their failure. When the market finds a way to incentivize failure and foreclosure, you’re gonna see a whole lot more of it.

You make some good points.

According to Kevin Carson, mortgage-backed securities had been a relatively insignificant market until they were guaranteed by Freddie Mac and reserve requirements were set lower for MBS’s than mortgages held by the originating bank. Since those regulations gave banks an incentive to sell their loans as quickly as possible, their lending standards collapsed.

On a further note, I am reminded of a point of “dialectical libertarianism” that the lack of a regulation does not necessarily mean that the degree of government intervention is smaller. It may be that the regulation in question acts as a limitation on some other grant of government privilege. Removing those constraining regulations would increase the government’s intervention into the economy. I would argue that would be the case with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and reduced lending standards, for example.

What Is Regulatory Capture? (by EconFree)

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:05:16 -0600

What Is Regulatory Capture? (by EconFree)

Cronyism in America (by EconFree)

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:59:51 -0600

Cronyism in America (by EconFree)

anticapitalist: You’re implying natural rights, which do not exist. There are no inherent...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:14:15 -0600

anticapitalist:

You’re implying natural rights, which do not exist. There are no inherent rights associated with being human.

I think you are right to be skeptical of claims to rights. Just so we are on the same page, my understanding of rights is that they are moral principles sanctioning the actions for an individual to take within society.

Just as moral principles are logically derived from Man’s nature as a volitional being to determine which actions promote one’s values on a personal level, moral principles are necessary and logically derived from the fact of Man’s volitional nature to determine which interactions promote one’s values on a social level. Those moral principles necessary for Man (in the capacity of Man as a volitional being capable of reason) for living within society are called rights.

Since you seemingly dispute that an individual has the right to life simply by one’s existence, I would further argue that just as one’s life is the fundamental (or, ultimate) source of one’s values, the fundamental (or, ultimate) source of rights is one’s life.

>”There is no agreement to it. The non-aggression principle exists as a fact of reality whether one acknowledges it or not.”

Prove it. How can a principle exist in reality anyway? Like what does that even mean?

A principle is a proposition that identifies an essential fact. The fact being identified in the non-aggression principle is that Man (in the capacity of Man as a volitional being capable of reason) to live within society must be free to use one’s mind to reason since Man has no automatic (innate or revealed) means of knowledge other than reason.

Coercion (even defensive coercion) is inherently destructive and particularly destructive of thought. This coercion is of moral value when used defensively to destroy destruction, but the initiation of coercion (or, aggression) destroys one’s only means of knowledge, reason, and thus the only means of one’s survival as Man.

>Whether property (which I suppose you to mean the ownership of property) is violent or not, what matters is whether the ownership of property is an act of aggression and against whom if no one owns (in a moral sense) the property in question.

Firstly, you haven’t proven that the non aggression principle is valid/not a social contract.

I elaborated on that point above that why non-aggression principle exist as logically coherent independent of anyone’s acknowledgement of it.

Secondly, you haven’t proven that property is valid/not a social contract.

As I have addressed before, “because people have the faculty of volition (that is, they have the choice to think), a person is responsible for (or has claim to) the consequences of his or her volitional actions. A corollary of this principle of personal responsibility is the principle of property ownership, which is the practical means of rendering the freedom of personal responsibility into effective and material form for life on Earth.”

Property is an act of aggression against all those who use a given amount of property.

You do not object to property ownership. You object to absentee property ownership.

I have addressed this point of absentee property ownership already as well in the post linked above. “An important distinction is that the principle of property ownership does not stem ultimately from a person’s action generally, but from a person’s judgment. With that the case, the passage of time or distance is irrelevant to whether a person remains responsible for his or her actions, so the ownership of property rights is not tied to whether one possesses the property or not.”

Eugene Robinson and the Luddites

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:16:22 -0600

Eugene Robinson and the Luddites:

Robinson is still correct in one contention; capitalism doesn’t have a heart. That’s because capitalism isn’t an entity but a term to describe men, possessing hearts, who engage in enriching trade and production. If Robinson and his like-minded peers fail to understand the market process, what hope do they have offering suggestions in the first place?

— James E. Miller