I am not a fan of quantitative easing per se, I do believe in Modern Monetary Theory as a framework, but I would use it differently than the Fed does, mainly for a jobs program and some other economy boosting measures. In terms of Japan, as far as I know most people view its economic policy as something relatively positive that has stabilized things after the deeply shocking crash. Regardless of what you think of it though, it certainly is a great example that critics of QE, that claim it will lead to inflation, are completely wrong.
Edit: I have not discussed anything with jaden as far as I remember
Putting Japan on hold for a second, do you think fiat currency is legitimate ?
As i previously said, money is a title representing ownership of real value e.g. gold (or petrol if you're kissenger lol), with that as context would you want someone to duplicate the deed to your house or our car ?
Depending on how you answer that depends on how I answer Japan.
The question of legitimacy is is difficult. Fiat currency is a mechanism that works to abstract the economy to a point system. It is sanctioned by almost all states and by international institutions. It somewhat mirrors real power. And most people do believe in it (under the caveat that many might not understand how it works). These reasons are arguments for why it is “legitimate”.
Your argument is is course correct, that fiat currency doesn’t represent any real claim to ownership outside of what the issuing government guarantees, which it can change unilaterally.
Your question of whether I want someone to duplicate the deed to my house, of course I do not. But I also understand the reality that what is guaranteeing me the deed is the government, it’s court system and ultimately it’s monopoly on violence. If my government turned and decided that they do not back my claim to my house, but rather back the claim of my neighbor to my house, there is not much I can do about it. I still believe I am much better of under the governorship of a modern, western democracy, where I have some legal recourse as the owner of something, rather than in a lawless state like Somalia, where anyone who desires my things and is more powerful than me can take them without recourse. I hope this answers your question.
Mostly everything else you said seems reasonable. I just think it's immoral to replace value with force, which is what you're saying fiat currency is backed by. Or is that a miscontrual ?
I'm commenting on this
'
Your question of whether I want someone to duplicate the deed to my house, of course I do not. But I also understand the reality that what is guaranteeing me the deed is the government, it’s court system and ultimately it’s monopoly on violence. '
Have you ever heard of compensatory control ? It's a theory that people prefer grand unifying theories or narratives, because they put a comprehensibility to the chaos that is life.
I think statolatry is one form, religion another, for example.
Do you think this could be happening in terms of you accepting the necessity of the state ? To me the political class is like the scribal class pre Reformation. These people (scribes) were imbibed with the power of interpreting the word of God, the political class now act as gods.
The American empire is fast approaching the kill counts of the mass ideological movements of the 20th century; this fact is what moved me from a republican/Patriot/sympathetic-to-nationalism to an anarchist.
No human, or group of humans can responsibly wield omnipotence, each man can manage only himself.
I seem to also not be able to quote you. So I will do it by hand.
I don't think I am incorrect in this when looking at modern developed states like the US and Canada, Europe and Japan. It just seems like an accurate description. The state guarantees the property rights, arbitrates disagreements and enforces its property decisions through force when necessary. I'm not saying that modern states are the only system that can ensure property rights, and I would agree that good will within communities is an important factor everywhere as well, but we should at least accept the mere objective description of how property rights are arbitrated in modern states.
Your point about arms in a power vacuum is exactly the fear I pointed out, there's no guarantee that in a power vacuum my arms are any more powerful than those of the people who want my property. I do not believe that I would be able to stand up to Exxon or Amazon if they desired my property, they are just more powerful, so my only choice would be to join some other organization that can aid my rights and then we are already back to a para-state organization that will ask for financial and social compliance for their aid, just as the state does now.
I have read this article before, as it states itself, this is somewhat of a fringe opinion, and the vast majority of articles and scholarly work does not really view Somalia as a great success story. But that is not the important point to me, my point was that I would prefer to live in a modern state that guarantees my property rights, rather than a state-less custom and individual force based social order like Somalia or others we could conceive.
I believe that fiat currency doesn't replace value with force. But is a representation of both value and force, just as all previous systems of monetary exchange were.
I have heard of it. And I agree with a lot of it, I am a big fan of Noam Chomsky and his work in Manufacturing Consent explains a lot of problems I have with the current order. I of course do not think that it is something that is happening to me, not to a degree that clouds my judgement (which I guess you don't either with your believe in free market, anarchist capitalism).
Yuval Noah Harari often talks about the narratives that we use to organize society, and I do think that is true. Believe in states, democracy, capitalism, communism, social democracy and others share a lot of similarities with believes in religion, in god kings, in naturalism, etc. I don't view that as a negative or positive at the face of it though, we should look at the actual, real world implementations to decide what we like and what we do not like about the societies we find.
I agree with you on the American empire, I don't believe that libertarianism and anarchist capitalism is the answer, though I used to when I was younger. If anarchism is really important to you, maybe you should look into some traditional left forms of anarchism, they are more intellectually coherent, people like the aforementioned Chomsky (who I believe is an Anarchosyndicalist) for example.
I think libertarians see very real problems in society but come to the wrong conclusions as they are caught in the ubiquitous power of capitalism. The tagline "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" is very apt for a lot of people. If you are interested in that particular aspect, maybe you could read the late Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism", it is a relatively short book, but it describes this type of fallacy pretty well. Again, I would suggest to try to go to the strongest sources, people who actually believe in it, rather than places like Reason Magazine, the Cato Institute, the Mises Institute, where you will receive a very weak, straw man version of a lot of these political movements.
Or the Gun Owners of America, or the Jews for the Preservation of Gun (A real organization)
Generally speaking, if this gas company came for your land by force, and there was no govenment protections, you would find no shortage of gun owners willing to help defend your property.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
// Property rights are maintained with or without a state, hence why I'm an anarchist. Property rights are axiomatic, as long as humanity exists. If a state infringes on an individual's property rights e.g. dekulakization, l
// This ignores the fact that Amazon and Exxon only have money through providing value or government welfare. Because I'm an anarchist the government welfare is automatically something my argument will ignore here. If Amazon started hunting down and expropriating the property of it's customers, it wouldn't have funds for very long.
You act as though civilization has the same has the same incentive structure as a maximum security prison, it doesn't. In a civilization, without the perversion of the state, the order is maintained through the division of labor, which requires mutual autonomy.
Also if you think private entities would hunt you down because they have bigger guns, why does this not apply to the government ? They have the biggest military ever assembled on the planet, and yet you posit the state is a necessary entity to maintain civility. So youre left with either; the acknowledgement that the state is illegitimate but you have faith that the status quo will be maintained, even tho you argue in a free market society that the guys with the biggest guns will immediately come for you, or alternatively youd have to acknowledge that the thing holding Amazon or exxon back from destroying you now is their profit based incentive structure and that that wouldn't change sans a state.
// All of the opinions from the mises institute are fringe that doesn't make something untrue. I don't think you'd argue that tho because that'd be an obvious case of argumentum ad populum.
You keep impling that a state is what backs your property rights, when the truth is that as long as a state exists you're property rights are illusionary. The state takes a third of your income at gunpoint, the gun is the part that makes it non mutual and thus violates the non-aggression principle. I know you like MMT, however the fact is that the printing of money (QE) has resulted in a 27 trillion dollar deficit ( quite a bit of that being money given to the 1 percent aka corporate welfare) meaning each citizen is born with 60k in debt and it's also seen in the resultant lessening of the dollars buying power aka inflation.
Inflation can be simply illustrated with this little thought experiment. If you have an economy with 10 oranges for sale and 10 coins minted, the obvious price structuring would be one orange equals one coin. If one were to suddenly mint 10 new coins this wouldn't suddenly add value to the oranges, but your orange would now cost two coins, as the seller of the orange would be aware of the perceived increase in wealth. If you printed 27 trillion coins an orange could be a million coins. Oof plus you'd have to hire someone to move all those coins.
// This is false, money has always been backed by value until the heads of nation states figured out that control of the currency equals a deeper level of societal control. This is because money arises naturally through voluntary exchange, as commodity currency, and then as standardized money from private mints.
'Just as the money itself can arise without the intervention of political authorities, so too can the private sector handle the operations of turning the commodity money into coins. Indeed, numismatists agree that some of the highest-quality coins (and tokens) ever produced originated in eighteenth-century Britain from private mints.'
I know you don't subscribe to Austin economics, but the description of money here is factual.
If you have a left perspective on how money comes about I would love to read it.
// I don't think that it clouds judgement, to me it is an intellectual labor saving device, as well as existential analgesic.
For example a wash board Baptist, who conceptualizes reality as an arena for two Promethean Giants to battle over the ultimate fate of all sentient life isn't someone who would think with sophistication in other areas. Then you have people like jung, who thought about religion on a deeply philosophical and psychological level. I'm an antitheist, but I wouldn't call jung deluded or stupid. Ive even read theological works I've enjoyed.
I'm sure I think within the paradigm of compensatory control because I view rothbard's work as a worldview, not just an ideology. It's helped organize my life and alleviate existential terror. But it's important to note that austrolibertarianism is a system of legality and economics, and says nothing of moral/ethical standards or aesthetic tastes, etc. (That's the cult of Objectivism lol) and leaves room for a religious system, for example, to coexist with austrolibertarianism.
The main thing I pull away on a legal level is don't hurt other people, and on an economic level it's that mutually agreed upon exchange is the only legitimate exchange and thus necessary for any economy of any kind to exist. On at least this reductionistic level, I'm not sure how anyone could disagree.
// I completely agree and love anything I've heard from that guy (limited to podcasts).
// Libertarians dont believe in capitalism.
A free market, as described by austrolibs is unrealized, and will be as long as there is a state. A pillar of libertarian thought is the non aggression principle, the state is aggression incarnate.
There would still be violence without a state, there just wouldn't be monopolized violence, that also prints the money and codifies the laws.
@artol I just got the communist manifesto, the marx-engals reader (has stuff from capital), a mikhail bakunin book, and an anarchist reader that includes people like proudhon
Cool, the Communist Manifesto isn't really a good starting place, imo, a) it's Marx and Engels' earlier work and they developed their stance significantly, and b) it's a political polemic to get people affected by unjust treatment to take action, the Marx and Engels reader, if it is by someone who actually is sympathetic to their view, or perhaps even a Neo-Marxist, sounds like a good idea.
You raised a lot of points in your reply to me, and I would like to respond in some depth, but I don't think I have the time currently, I hope I might in the near future, but I can't promise that, I hope you'll forgive that.
Another book you might find interesting is the relatively recent “The People’s Republic of Walmart” which is a discussion of the advancements in central planning, and how large corporations act very much like centrally planned distribution machines. It’s a more modern rebuttal to Hayek’s calculation problem, that takes recent developments in computers as well as real world applications into account.
@ artol ludwig von mises was the one to point out the issue of cost calculation under a socialist/communist economy.
Are you saying that computers can over come this problem ? I don't see how, as humans are fickle and their tastes change constantly. Ithe first corporation who could predict consumer choices would immediately eclipse it's opponents, because they wouldn't need to do consumer research, in addition to perfectly allocating resources.
I don't see any evidence to suggest a corporation could emulate praxeological deduction.
An economic breakthrough of that caliber would surely have articles written about it. As far as I know cost calculation is only possible under a societal order operating on the division of labor, where each consumer is sovereign and free to choose.
So send me a paper if you know one.
I’m not suggesting that, I believe that both proponents of central planning and free market absolutists are misguided. I believe in a mixed economy, with robust state intervention when the market leads to economic or social failures.
I do believe that computers can aid in state and corporate planning of course, but the arguments that the book makes are pretty varied, I just thought you might find it interesting. The review/rebuttal you posted is interesting, it addresses one aspect I was also thinking about when reading the book, I.e. the difference between economic planning and a planned economy, I would not see it as black and white as the author seems to though, and do believe that corporations with budgets vastly larger than many nations that do rely in internal planning can be blueprints for planning in states as well.
I am not an economist, and so not really in the matter, as far as I understand it from my perusal is that the calculation debate is by no means settled, but it has lost a lot of its ardent supporters as after the fall of the Soviet Union most economists have adhered to a mixed economic consensus.
I did not mean to take credit from von Mises, btw, just referred to Hayek as his later work on the calculation problem has perhaps been discussed more recently in my experience.
@ artol what is a mixed economy and how is it possible ?
Either the economy is decided by choices made in a free market, or it is not. Von mises says as much in his magnum opus, human action.
How could the free market lead to economic ruin ? This would completely ignore history and the massive amount of wealth creation that occurred sometime in the mid 19th century. This was a result of property rights being respected.
Every example we have of a centrally planned economy is one that is ruinous. This is solely due to the cost calculation problem, that you're probably tired of hearing about by now.
What internal planning could walmart perform that would increase their profits while relying on methods outside of providing value to the consumer via fulfilling their needs, based on previous purchases ? I don't get what other information source you could mine from.
You're fine, hayek is more recent. I'm less familiar with his work because I'm told mises said it better. Liberalism by von mises was one of the most challenging books I'd ever read, until I cracked human action. I'm on page 260 of over 900. My next mission is man, economy, and state, by rothbard, which is 1500 pages.
I'm not an economist either, which is why I think austrolibertarianism
Isn't as popular as it should be because of it's scholarly density.
At the same time it becomes really simple once one understands praxeology, from Austrian economics, and the NAP, from libertarianism.
Praxeology says people have wants and seek to satisfy them. The NAP says to not aggress on anyone or their property. I can't see any objections to this two axioms other than the insistence that it's more complicated than that.
I am excited to watch the film and am thankful for the recommendation !
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