Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • **ANOTHER ROUND ON PAPARAZZI** April 21st, 2010 to Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at

    **ANOTHER ROUND ON PAPARAZZI**

    April 21st, 2010

    to Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at 2:35 am

    However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputation

    But this is valid with regard to anything, not only reputation. This does not help define property, it confuses. Any change has a negative effect on someone. Does that mean that any action whatsoever is a property right violation?

    This is one of the reasons why I reject the notion of immaterial trespass. Instead, I humbly propose that only those immaterial negative effects that are defined in contracts are to be prosecuted (i.e. contract violations).

    Furthermore…

    Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act.

    It is not necessary to own immaterial goods to make use of them, therefore from the existence of an opportunity you cannot imply ownership. As I said before, with immaterial goods, anything causally related is “making use of”.

    We can create representations of abstracts, can’t we? We’ve created plenty of them. I can stake a claim on land. I can form an abstract entity called a joint stock corporation, and then sell shares. I can marry someone and get a marriage certificate. I can get a receipt for a deposit. I can sign a contract. I can buy an option. I can wager a bet.

    Why can’t I stake a claim on a formulae? Or a brand or trademark? Or a design or patent? Simply because they require uniqueness against a broader pool of people, because are treated as first-come first-serve exclusivity, rather than an auction model, and because the market cannot expand to provide better and more accurate service than does the state.

    These registries try to prevent copying and bypassing investment (theft) rather than parallel innovation, which is in the market interest.

    Under the Hoppian property scheme land registries are maintained and protected by insurance companies and private firms instead of the state. But to limit the scope of property is to limit the competitive ability of groups to compete against other groups. The problem is that the government owns the registry and terms by which abstracts are registered, while denying the purpose for which we enact the registry: to encourage capital investment so that goods and services can be rapidly brought to market at lower risk rather than through direct subsidy. But in turn these devices can be used to prevent products and services from entering the market, and in particular, products and services that do not require capitalization, and that they too often endure long enough to create artificial monopolies. Book protections that persist beyond one generation of offspring of the author.

    Banks regulate their own ‘market’ of loans. Each stock market has regulations. Why can’t we have markets for other claims? Why can’t we auction off uses of a design, rather than simply deny competitors to the market. it’s the state monopoly that’s the problem.

    Material trespass and immaterial trespass are simply conventions driven by the ease of registry. In a man’s mind he can know his physical property, and know that any other object is not his physical property. If we could catalog ideas just as easily, would we not treat them as such? We do. We create ‘pointers’ to externally reference memories. They’re real world representations of abstractions.

    Is the purpose of the libertarian program to create a platform for cooperation and trade, to minimize the potential for government corruption, interference, theft, bureaucracy, waste, violence, class warfare, and exploitation using the evidence of how men actually act? Or is to create another silly religion that is contrary to the behavior of human beings, or is it just another absurd metaphysics like Marxism?

    A libertarian society must be one by consent – or we need to abandon the principle of non violence and implement it by force. And if it’s to be a society of consent, then it must reflect human behavior in order to gain consent. Human behavior, and the evolution of our knowledge, dictates that we leave the system for definition of property and the registry thereof open to innovation. Not closed, and limited to material constructs.

    The general body of arguments on this topic are reductio and illusory because of it. The real issue at hand is that in the division of labor, specialized knowledge is required to in order to innovate, and innovation in all but the black swan areas requires capital concentration, and markets are best served by their own division of labor in the act of policing fraud and theft, or even of registrations of claims against property. Government is not an innovative organ, and it is a corrupt and slow moving one.

    The issue instead, is to adopt a Hoppian division of labor and competition rather than a Rothbardian Luddite program, or a government-run monopoly program that by it’s very nature is expressly counter to the innovation, division of labor and specialization of knowledge needed to keep pace with our innovations, almost all of which, are currently ABSTRACTIONS. In this EXPANDING WORLD, the Hoppian model of privatization and risk management using insurance schemes rather than the monopoly of government is a superior answer than that of the Rothbardian Luddite model, which artificially Harrison-Bergeron’s” the civilization – to a man.

    If we can protect several property so that it can be invested in. We can protect abstract property so that it can be invested in. The institutional problem is registration and regulation. Not Rothbardian abstinence. And not to get a population to adhere to an absurd metaphysics. But to create institutions wherein real human beings can interact using real human innovations, almost all of which are abstractions, and most of which are now beyond individual comprehension. ( Property requires memory. Institutions are a form of social memory. Institutions educate indirectly. Memory becomes behavior. Behavior becomes normative.) Our problem is institutions, not beliefs. Actions not words.

    And any libertarian, and anarchic program that would simply force people to prefer to resort to violence to resolve differences, or which would impoverish the greater body of people by making them less competitive against other groups (which Rothbardian property would do) is simply to exchange the prosperity of the market for abstract registry of opportunities for the poverty of the bazaar society. It is regression. It is to limit man to the industrial age. It’s a Luddite philosophy.

    The anarchic research program’s undermining of the historic legitimacy of the state is separate from the use of non-state (insurance) institutions to maintain both real and abstract property.

    Focus on the right problem. Private, competitive, market institutions that divide knowledge and labor and provide service over government monopoly institutions that provide corruption, theft and incompetence.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:01:00 UTC

  • **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’** April 20t

    **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’**

    April 20th, 2010

    I love reading the UK press, because by and large, the quality of discourse is far beyond that of what occurs in the US. I posted on the IEA Blog, this response to the statement that, coarsely written and paraphrased here as ” Yes the Lib Dem’s may achieve power, but anything is better than ten years of substantial unemployment.” I’m a little cautious about sounding like a critic when I actually think that the IEA produces great thought. But it is far less work to criticize a good idea, than it is to refute an ocean of fantasy and ignorance. Hence I apologize if I come off a critic rather than an advocate.

    Unemployment results from the government’s confusion between consumption and production in that they assume that consumption is equal to production. Their policy of general liquidity that diverted capital from production to consumption and created both recursive asset inflation, and a reduction in competitiveness. This is the broken joint in Keynesian logic. It assumes that increasing liquidity can be put to increases in production. Production means that an activity increases output while decreasing man hours, and costs. The problem for any state is to put captial, not behind consumption, but behind increases in production that cannot be achieved by the private sector.

    … This concentration of capital will create new jobs, and ongoing competitiveness, from which redistributive capital can be siphoned. Private sector production increases will lead to some unemployment. Uncontrolled breeding and immigration will lead to unemployment, and particularly disadvantage second quintile workers. (A step above the bottom). So the state can divert this process by participating in funding international (export) competitiveness. The state must adopt a policy of investment, not liquidity or redistribution. Because only investment allows redistribution.

    (And the government, which consumes such a vast amount of GDP is simply a redistributive system.)

    A free market is a bounded market, because there are LIMITS to private investment. Since all borrowing is, under fiat money, borrowing from the middle and lower classes, and they (as we have just demonstrated) carry the risk of borrowing, then the reward for that investment should be returned to them. As such the state should borrow to create productivity increases (power, transportation, technical innovation, resource exploitation, and education) and return a portion of the profits to the citizenry as redistribution. Laissez faire both puts the citizenry at risk without reward, concntrates capital in the hands of a state sponsored class, and deprives the citizenry of opportunities.

    That is how to prevent ‘ten years of very substantial unemployment’. The party that accomplishes it is meaningless. THe party that ignores it is meaningless.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:00:00 UTC

  • **WHAT PROBLEMS SHOULD AUSTRIANS SOLVE. DIFFERENT ONES APPARENTLY.** April 20th,

    **WHAT PROBLEMS SHOULD AUSTRIANS SOLVE. DIFFERENT ONES APPARENTLY.**

    April 20th, 2010

    Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving.

    The problems that economists need to solve are not those which derive from the antiquated process of pooling, or aggregating quantities into categories. We know that aggregation of categories a failure as a strategy. We know that we must apply statistical methods across periods of differing utility and differing sentiments in order to find correlations from which we can deduce theories of causation. It is a loose set of tools for a complex world.

    The problem is to define institutions that would allow us to posses knowledge of human activities so that we can measure distortions of policy. The problem is institutions and data. It is not how to further plumb the depths of error – to divine nonsense from the nonsensical.

    The problem is our institutions.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:00:00 UTC

  • **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD** April 17th, 2010 Over on the IEA Blog

    **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD**

    April 17th, 2010

    Over on the IEA Blog, Eric Masaba asks the question: Why do black cabs cost more than Concorde?

    I couldn’t point out ALL the holes in this article, because the IEA blog limits the number of characters per comment. I find the argument for the virtue of brevity a ‘cute’ one because affirmations are the most brief of comments, while refutations are the longest.

    The state subsidizes the ‘Black Cabs’ of London.

    Hackney cab drivers inexplicably enjoy a rule stating that no one else can describe a taxi service as a “taxi” in their marketing, and the important restriction that no one else can pick up passengers on the street. These regulations have deep historical foundations, dating back to the days of Dick Turpin. In today’s world, they are anachronistic, anti-competitive and pointless.

    London cab drivers are a pleasure to deal with. They are an intrinsic part of the tourist trade. The Danes pay an entire social class to stay home so that the average clerk in a train station is educated, literate, well mannered, and a pleasure to deal with.

    When there are price comparison sites for insurance, airlines, hotels, holidays and office supplies, where we can buy the same product from a myriad of suppliers at different prices, how is it that there are very strict rules requiring that Hackney drivers receive a minimum wage for every mile driven yet private hire drivers do not?

    Because the market is an unlimited physical space and the streets of London are a limited physical space (and the tube is a monopolized space. And therefore Cabs require a very simple set of regulations in order to maintain quality.

    Why is it good for certain stripes of taxi driver to be able to oblige people in London to pay higher rates than the market would support if such a law was not in place?

    Why is it a good for the state to regulate any kind of competition?

    Why do the same drivers, who expect to be able to choose what clothes they wear (and how much they pay for them) and which airlines and car insurance firms they use, want to deny travellers in London the basic freedom to choose another vehicle service they can hail at the airport or on the street?

    They don’t. You can hire a car from the airport. You just can’t pick someone up on the street.

    If people want to pay for the superior knowledge that the Hackney drivers clearly possess, they will do so. If they do not care, they will find cheaper alternatives until the market has informed the black-cab community what customers really think and what price they are willing to pay.

    They are not paying for the knowledge. The state is using a knowledge criteria to create a hurdle for market entry. Just like they do for just about every kind of specialist.

    Many people are disgusted with the special treatment bankers received, but through the price controls and regulations on taxis in London, transport markets are being distorted to favour one type of vehicle provider.

    Bankers recieved special treatment because the state printed money without regulating it and forced banks either to compete for profits or to go out of business. This process of moral hazard created large banks that are pseudo governmental agencies, that were so responsible for subsidizing the national payroll and cash disribution and management system that if they were not rescued then the crash would have been worse. On the other hand, the state CREATED the moral hazard. But it did not have to. The problem has been that creating the ‘rules’ of the fair game in banking (defining the properties of property and it’s rules of transfer) has become extraordinarily complex because the object of definition has become exceedingly plastic. Derivatives and new financial instruments were a new form of property that many of us decried at the time, but that was unregulated because both the state and the purveyors of these new devices foolishly bought the argument that it was possible to insure that kind of risk, and secondly, because

    So, I have to disagree with the IEA’s position. Travel to NYC, Chicago, LA and ask yourself if the London policy is better or worse for everyone involved. And if we subsidize transportation like subways why cant we subsidize Cabs. If price is a concern, then If you want another choice, call a less expensive cab company on your cell phone. Prices aren’t everything. In fact, low prices and full competition in a market often accomplishes the lowest cost service at the lowest quality that is tolerable by consumers, and bars quality from availability within a geography. (Home Depot and Walmart in the US, and superstores versus butchers, bakers and the like in Europe). I am happy that superstores exist to provide additional choice, but only if there is a replacement ‘tax’ for using them by distancing them.

    From this simple analogy of taxis and tubes versus superstores and specialty stores, we can illustrate that reduced prices and a free market within geographic boundaries produce commodities, and thereby prevent societies from capitalizing long term values of aesthetics, choice, and the ’special’ environments we adore across all of europe in favor of a bland, disposable environment.

    We restrain competition in order to raise prices and therefore concentrate capital and we do it in many ways: political subsidy (money transfers like taxation, redistribution, and outright subsidy) constraining the market by qualification (lawyers, doctors and london cabbies), and constraining the market with monopolies (public transportation like Tubes and Buses).

    We unrestrain the market to reverse the concentration of capital and to reduce prices, and we do it in many ways: political subsidy of

    The natural order of man is to attempt to circumvent the market. The free market is a byproduct of the civic republican tradition’s advocacy of meritocratic equality. It is a rebellious movement against the control of markets and the expropriation of wealth by the state. Markets are a solution to corruption that asks us to create fair competition among equals and to maintain that set of ‘rules’ we call “competition in the market”.

    However, the natural behavior of man is to circumvent that market. The means by which he circumvents it are those tools we consider fair market competition: reducing prices, increasing choices, advertising and marketing. Not all cultures have taken this route. In fact, in history, the free market is an exception that concentrates wealth in hte hands of the monied, productive and creative minority. THis concentration benefits all by decreasing prices for nearly everyone. It limits the power of capitalists as long as there is enough money in circulation to create inexpensive competition.

    But since the culture or state determines the definitions of property (the means of calculating the use of opportunities to act) the rules for any ‘game’ are particular to that game. Rules are not universal to all games. They are plastic. And this comparison of Taxis to Tubes is perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate that these rules are inconsistent.

    But what may not be obvious is the DISTORTION that is created by the myth that rules must be equal for some things and unequal for others. Or, that lowest prices are the ultimate virtue to be sought by economsts and political economists.

    As a libertarian, I care that the choices available to me are not constrained by

    Concentrating capital attracts talent to the private sector where it is skimmed by private individuals, and those who lack talent to the public sector where it is skimmed by bureaucracy. Yet this is what most cultures seek to impose: expropriation by the bureaucracy.

    WE also constrain capitalists, and unconstrain capitalists. Capitalists can temporarily distort a market by applying capital that profits one company or anotther, requiring competitors to rely upon capital or depart. They can do this by simply extending debt, so that prices may be decreased in the anticipation of driving competition out of the market, and later increasing their share of the market as these competitors disappear. the problem with this technique is that talent accumulated in the industry is sometimes forced out. Niches are abandoned (the wall mart and home depot effect).

    The state acts like a disruptive capitalist creating temporary price decreases in return for decreased niche services, and in doing so makes it impossible to concentrate capital in niche excellences. It makes it impossible to subsidize a public good: choice of the more expensive, better, prettier.

    The purpose of the London cabbie is largely to create a public ‘good’. It enforces quality so that quality personnel can afford to work in the industry (rather than the horrid service, delivered by the filthy, ignorant and incompetent in US cities).

    Prices would drive down quality, and all that will happen is that you will need additional regulation to managed an impoverished and corrupt network of marginal businesses that deliver cheap but intolerable service that prevents quality competition from competing in the market.

    If you are willing to spend money on the tube. You have no argument against spending money to maintain a quality system of taxis. Just because market mechanics are POSSIBLE for taxis and IMPOSSIBLE for tubes, that doesn’t mean that taxis are not serving the same function as tubes.

    Lowest costs does not generally create a good. It creates a marginal enterprise.

    Aesthetics are forms of capital that are perhaps, the best investment that any civilization can make.

    For a country like the UK, whose history is an industry, you’d think that such a principle would be better understood. For a country that is creating demand through immigration, cash by selling off it’s assets, and the illusion of prosperity by dilution, inflation and redistribution, rather than by increases in productivity, it is understandable why a myth of exceptionalism would be a useful distraction from the fact that the UK is selling off its exceptionalism and it’s heritage, and would do even more so along with it’s taxi subsidies.

    Prices alone do not a world make. The purpose of the market is exploration. The purpose of unbridled market is prevent government exploitation. THe purpose of the regulated market is to capitalize SOMETHING for a social good. And not all social goods are consumables. Some social goods capitalize distortions to create beauty, which is a high return for a society, as all monuments, arts and architecture demonstrate.

    So, instead of universally pursuing consumption as an ultimate good. Instead of the keynesian virtue of spending. Perhaps we should balance our capitalist strategy with the art of saving. It took english civilization a very long time to create a culture of saving, and the institution of interest, so that the middle aged could save until they were old, and the old could lend to the young, in a virtuous cycle of investment that distributed the risk of long term calculation across a vast number of people, and wherein retirement security was an insurance scheme for the underclass rather than a mandate of the majority. This virtuous cycle was undermined. Perhaps we should return to it, and to other forms of capitalizing our civilization, so that we leave something behind for our heirs rather than the record of a visitation by locusts.

    Subsidizing quality is the entire point of aesthetics and the arts. And capitalizing everything from street signs, to cabbies to historic buildings to libraries and museums is an antidote to anti-historicism.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:57:00 UTC

  • **YES WE COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE SUFFERING OF CITIZENS** April 14th, 2010 Rebek

    **YES WE COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE SUFFERING OF CITIZENS**

    April 14th, 2010

    Rebekka Grun, on The Growth And Crisis Blog writes that we could have protected the consumers rather than the banks, in her posting

    Conditional Individual Bailouts – a Potential Anti-crisis Instrument

    Why not save the individuals that went bust rather than their banks? Unconditional bailouts, of course, would generate the wrong incentives (for the banks as well, by the way). It is therefore important to attach smart conditions to discourage free riding. For example a course in financial literacy and commitment to a program of (maybe painful) debt restructuring, and possibly further measures to improve the education or health of the affected individual or family.

    Your sentiment is correct even if you haven’t done the math on it.

    In general terms, there is a simply technique for doing exactly what you’ve suggested, but we lack the infrastructure for it.

    The arguments against the solution at the time were that we didn’t know how far prices would fall (I’m not sure, I think we were about right), and that it would make very visible that the government was the source of the problem (true), that it would have geopolitical impact on the value of the dollar (of course, but so would the alternative), and that it could be unfair to people who had behaved well (that would be fixable), and that it would encourage a bubble (this is false).

    The primary problem with distortions is that the distortions are in PRICING. Libertarians would call corrections ‘repricing’. The problem is that human beings must suffer a great deal and absorb a lot of stress to conduct that ‘repricing’. When the state, as the creator of the distortion by the manufacture of cheap credit, could easily reprice major (home) assets by repricing the DEBT of those assets.

    In other words, we could have easily corrected the economy by bypassing the banking system, and giving money directly to the citizenry as buy-downs on their mortgages, which would have provided them with cash to spend or to put into banks. Doing this is fine if you do it FAST.

    In other words, the state created both the BOOM problem and the CRASH problem because it relies on the irresponsible tool of providing general liquidity – easy money.

    In hindsight this is more obvious than it was at the time. Those of us who made this recommendation were the smaller voices, because the banks and the financial industry were so terrified and the impact on the economy if they failed, so severe.

    The problem for our country is to put this system in place, so that we are insuring citizens AGAINST their bankers, so that we can use the market to PUNISH bad bankers and their investors, rather than the citizenry.

    I’ve worked the mechanics of this process out in some detail, and it’s quite simple. It’s just novel. And it’s anti-bank. And that makes it dangerous to a lot of people in one of our biggest industries: finance.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:42:00 UTC

  • **Notes On “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”** April 13th, 2010 I’v

    **Notes On “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”**

    April 13th, 2010

    I’ve purchased two books, this one “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”, as well as “Economics As Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond”. There are any number of books on this theme.

    Note: This book was a waste of time and money. It is a silly marxist pamphlet. I can summarize it as “poor people breed too much and capitalism doesn’t care” when in fact, capitalism simply makes it very expensive to have children and those who breed irresponsibly are punished abstractly by enduring poverty rather than forced by village and tribal elders to leave their child exposed and dead. The vast silliness of the logic in this book is unworthy of further commentary.

    I’m surprised that this notion of economic religion is not more commonly discussed in the venal press. But it is too valuable a tool of those who wish to empower a democratic state and it’s politicians who are, quite frankly, at a loss to apply something other than the practicalities of getting elected, or the mysticisms of our founding documents, christian religion, or marxian fantasy.

    I start with Adam’s Fallacy.

    Using the KIndle edition on a mac, and therefore cannot annotate in place, and am not sure of page numbers. (This is a problem we need to fix, because we’re going to increasingly use dynamic text, which requires paragraph numbering not page numbering. Anyone remember wordperfect versus word?)

    PREFACE

    I am not sure I buy the argument that smith created a fallacy by separating market life from personal life. The Wealth Of Nations (TWON) is only the second half of his philosophy. the first is The Theory Of Moral Sentiments. (TOMS) They together represent his insight that the division of labor increases production and that human sentiments to cooperation at both the intimate, interpersonal, local, social and global level. While we are only in the preface, I’m not sure I buy the assumption because it’s too loose an assertion. Instead, I blame Knight and Keynes. Smith is nothing but a moral philosopher.

    “Contemporary economics has grown into a major intellectual industry” I hope this is elaborated further because it’s the the same problem presented by the clergy. People depend on perpetuating the faith.

    “Teaching economics reinforces the world view I call Adam’s Fallacy”. I don’t think so. I think that’s the crowd post 1900.

    “Teaching students to think like economists .. is hard.. and thinking like an economist … is just as value laden as any other way of thinking about society”. The idea in economic reasoning is the broken window problem: the need for all humans to think in terms of secondary causes and to follow the chain of secondary causes. This teaches people to think more deeply about the trade offs of both personal and political decisions. Yes it’s hard for people. Otherwise we wouldn’t need a market.

    CHAPTER 1

    “The moral fallacy of smith’s positin is that it urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it.”

    Well, now, we need a definition of evil, don’t we?

    “neither smith nor … his successors have been able to demonstrate rigorously ad robustly how private selfishness turns into public altruism”.

    I don’t think he says that. I think he says that by participating in the market europeans will have fewer wars.

    CH1 – The Division Of Labor

    “Smith leaves unanswered the chicken and egg question of whether it is ultimately the human propensity to truck and barter that lads to the division of labor, or the division of labor that compels people to exchange.”

    Isn’t this a false dichotomy? People have always bartered and exchanged. the division of labor is simply more profitable for the individual. Ask any art-jeweler or craftsperson, who starts out producing one offs, but determines that quality of life depends upon his or her development of a product line that can reliably produce revenue, so that she is free to create those individually interesting pieces.

    The VIrtuous spiral of economic development.

    “Smith puts his faith in the ultimate benefits to be gained from the virtuous spiral to in crease standards of living and enhance the wealth of …. the sovereign.”

    “Smith

    SAYS LAW

    “… rise in labor productivity has at least one immediate and negative effect: a reduction in the demand for labor in the industries undergoing raid rises in productivity. …. unemployment can result.”

    “thus say’s law is based on a belief in the efficiency of the financial institutions of a capitalist economy”

    I don’t think so. I think it’s based on the belief that no other alternative is available while retaining the productivity RELATIVE to other nations, so that wars can be averted, and we can overcome the myth of the fixed-pie.

    “some of these displaced workers will eventually find alternative jobs”

    Yes, they will. They just might not like them. The alternative is that people should subsidize workers to produce goods at increased cost of goods to themselves and/or that the entire enterprise of production that employs ALL workers will fail to compete for market share against people from OTHER nations. In other words, it’s the smallest of three evils.

    “It appears that over long periods of time, says law does operate”

    Well, of course it does. At this point I’m frustrated because I don’t understand the problem. I know marxian fantasy must be in here somewhere by now.

    THEORIES OF VALUE

    I cannot for the life of me discern what point he is trying to make here.

    MARKET PRICE AND NATURAL PRICE

    Well, since the time of smith we understand that the labor theory of value is flawed and we have dismissed this part of smith as an error. So I don’t see this as material.

    he states in many more words ,that natural prices and market prices are in disequilibrium at all times. This makes no sense because a natural price is a tool for us to use to conceptualize movement, and a market price is a thing that comes into existence. So far either he is trying to accumulate a later argument or he’s simply confused.

    “contemporary economics on the the hand, focuses more theoretical attention on the the ideal imaginary state of equilibrium where market price and natural price coincide.”

    At this point he is trying to build an argument upon a falsehood – the labor theory of value and natural price. I hope that this is going somewhere. Either that or he is trying to state that the DSEM construct is a myth, and we all understand that it’s a myth. There is no bell curve. There is no equilibrium. It’s just a construct we use so that we can apply math because without that construct we CANNOT apply math.

    WAGES

    “… wages have the social function of allowing workers to reproduce themselves” (he means have children). “In order for wages to perform this function, they have to be high enough to allow workers to buy a subsistence standard of living”

    Ok, so this is supposed to be that the poor have the right to breed? So when did this become a social good? the problem for mankind since industrialization is that people simply don’t die, and they’re expensive. Our problem is overpopulation not supporting the unproductive people’s fantasy of unrestrained child birth.

    “Smith associates high wages and a high workers standard of living with a growing capital stock”

    Yes, I agree.

    at this point I understand that he is providing contemporary context. I read the rest of chapter1 and move to chapter 2 in the hopes that he is going to provide some insight here. Note to authors. Make your premise first then prove it so we don’t have to guess our way through your fantasy.

    FAR AHEAD

    “Behind this…. lies the unpleasant truth about capitalist social relations. The organization of the social division of labor through commodity exchange and wage labor systematically inverts the ordinary logic of human relationships.”

    What logic is that? That people have not exposed children for years, or even outright murdered them or sold them into slavery if they could not support them? In fact, breeding differences account for large differences in the prosperity of difficult cultures. So is this the author’s point? That he has some fallacious concept of the ‘right to breed’, instead of the ‘responsibility to only breed a child you can afford to feed?”

    Then he goes on to say that marx systematically breaks down and…. helps us understand. What he does instead is create a system of justifying primitivism.

    Look. We converted from hunter gatherers to farmers. We figured out how to control our breeding by creating the ‘family’ and monogamy. This made families economic units that could manage resources.

    We invented the market, and the tools of quantitative cooperation we call money, accounting, numbers, interest and credit. We increased our ability to breed further, but penalized those who have less foresight.

    Capitalism creates temporary extraordinary wealth then forces people to control their breeding in order to participate in the wealth. Those who don’t, suffer because of their choices.

    We just have a more abstract way of controlling population.

    ( INSERT A VAST AMOUNT OF JUSFICATIONISM OF MARX HERE. )

    ESCAPING ADAM’S FALLACY

    “thus we cannot look to capitalism to solve inequality and poverty”

    That is correct. WE can only look to capitalism to provide the incentives for controlling reproduction so that the poor do not doom themselves to perpetual poverty in a world where children do not provide security or comfort but are a drain on resources.

    In other words. This is a silly marxist book, and I wasted two hours reading it. The chinese solved it with the one child policy, and it was a good policy and successful. Rather than redistribute ourselves into mutual poverty and regale the thought leaders of the past, you could simply write a book on the value of the one child policy, or at least, pay men and women to sterilize themselves. Capitalism makes poverty a choice of reproduction.

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    2 Comments

    CurtD

    April 14th, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    From a comment on KVAMS blog. [http://kvams.wordpress.com/…/adams-fallacy-by-duncan-foley/…](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fkvams.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F04%2F08%2Fadams-fallacy-by-duncan-foley%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR2JIAIzxFveUkqUiYKeiTXLXbaLTX6NRJW3Gu5dGWYZNkjzLpjptZEP-XM%23comment-175&h=AT0cL7Q2FG02b8LFg3RbWwsIGmEluDNuns7-dp4ah37K-OSJ1HaEmwC3MPjnfoP24oREXbOQCsVz8P0-FjyFSDjnQ9qObSqGRscqFwH-wEKqL9eAiu2CS179X8FQsPRoK-sTa26txBs1rE4VnwFT1E9DXXkg2wMROqaKhrZojYrIkOfFchcgoEResqkl3Wj3kX2sNC2-Xl3fA6zJkxyPq32Ow0I_6lIdeADuOgttq4wkCzYmLbSfEEh4jquZP5vW8yH7_TkY599HMytmUQbWalSUjwdNNPmLp9V9iBbmXAChS8MI6MMOlUSTBPF6_ih5PnHzucpXllhiGHavTpKkTc8EvPXUgsPpIxG4I53yu_oc9ktUbZ5NVSYrBt9IHnaHOfSOlohFMnxJ0Mx3bgydJgqdZo4CRyQrM5PYfM0aNsCliXpTk6ch-TIdK8-B0gDt-GL7fK0_f2sfosC-luq43UBUDVxaNNv5zVS2vgUDv8uTTZAa-fckdtJ9hRP03IWq8nhnh8rJ4q7bm8fAmmciJjtuUGnBHpX9Xle6C_fDzGXLFa0paNZyvsrOH9WIMhdLAoaIIXg1bbyZMsugQOuJ-3ZcdN3gEziTdvW5hS_4bXq65-5An32STctoRK_65VEjjIU9REv9Yr8ukLXMtXon)

    I’m sorry but I read this book in detail, took copious notes, and it became painfully obvious early on that the authors only criticism is that the division of knowledge and labor that creates the virtual cycle of prosperity does not account for taking care of people who cannot control their breeding and doom themselves to perpetual poverty because of their inability to control their reproduction.

    The author fails to state his own fallacy, that societies no matter how primitive control their populations and punish breeders one way or another. This is his assumption, that primitive societies take care of their young rather than expose them, or outright kill them or control their breeding. And he fails to state that the only reason these people can LIVE today, even if in poverty, is because of the productive virtuous cycle of those people who DO control their breeding.

    The problem for every civilization is creating prosperity (increased production) FASTER than people breed. From that context, the irresponsible breeders are using the virtuous cycle to create steal from and undermine the creators of the virtuous cycle.

    The whole point of capitalism is that it increases quality of life but increases the COST of each human life, and therefore controls population by CHOICE OF PARTICIPANTS rather than by murder and starvation.

    Basically this book is another silly marxist bit of apologist drivel that does nothing to advance anything in society and I’m sorry I wasted two hours working on it.

    CurtD

    April 14th, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    Of course I see this as a ’sex and fertility residue’ which is that women have the silly belief that they have the ‘right’ to have children, and others have the ‘duty’ to pay for their ‘right’. And that children are a ‘good’ rather than a cost. Rather than the obvious reality that children are a good only if you can afford to raise them and not create a burden on society for having done so. And women have that luxury only because increased production has made it possible for women to have their children without having them starve to death, and daeling with the suffering of watching. in other words, they are offloading the responsibility to control their breeding onto someone else. In other words, the market makes it possible for women to irresponsibly bear children without bearing the consequences of providing for or dealing with the emotional pain of the child’s starvation and death.

    (Of course, this is intentionally inflammatory.)

    Now in reality, the point is that we have to and always have had to, control our breeding, and that the path to prosperity is increasing production while decreasing our rate of reproduction.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:41:00 UTC

  • @bullybe Take me a while to explain this but we are pretty much autarkic now, an

    @bullybe

    Take me a while to explain this but we are pretty much autarkic now, and with the current trends in overpopulation we have the greatest resource in the world – the mississipi river valley. So if we shut the borders, expel the invaders, we are set until the population decline in the slum-world evaporates.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 02:42:44 UTC

    Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/102624353576304884

  • RT @david_perell: Wow. In 1941, Detroit had a bigger economy than any foreign co

    RT @david_perell: Wow.

    In 1941, Detroit had a bigger economy than any foreign country except Britain, France, Germany, and possibly the S…

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-14 14:51:28 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1161651559626924033

  • Really? interesting. Then why did all ancient peoples who survived build granari

    Really? interesting. Then why did all ancient peoples who survived build granaries? Why did temples exist? (banks).

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-12 20:35:34 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1161013378325852160

    Reply addressees: @Utleyjacobite @BestyDevosEd @joffiecakes @Boneist @NoahRevoy

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1161007760701644802

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

    Original tweet unavailable — we could not load the text of the post this reply is addressing on X. That usually means the tweet was deleted, the account is protected, or X does not expose it to the account used for archiving. The Original post link below may still open if you view it in X while signed in.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1161007760701644802

  • GUESS: 1. “Wimmenz.” 2. Transformation to service economy – No multiplier to ser

    GUESS:
    1. “Wimmenz.”
    2. Transformation to service economy – No multiplier to services as in products.
    3. Regulation of such services b/c talent limit.
    3. BAUMOL effect: a subset of industries cause all prices to increase.
    4. All gains in income are absorbed by housing prices.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-12 19:23:26 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1160995224954507266

    Reply addressees: @ThomasEWoods @Cernovich

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1160977122653085696

    IN REPLY TO:

    @ThomasEWoods

    Imagine being “completely mystified” by this chart. https://t.co/H7VZEQPTh8

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1160977122653085696