Sensible Erection | Confessions of a Wall St Nihilst

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

quote [ Guys with power, guys like me, we lie. You got that? ‘Lie’ as in ‘My Lai’ the massacre—as in, ‘My Lai you long time, me so free-markety.’ You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear. ]

rumpelstiltskin

[literature] [by Lord of the Barnyard@1:56pmGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

lsdbeta said @ 2:04pm GMT on 5th May
how i miss you exile.

Nihil said @ 2:35pm GMT on 5th May
Mark Ames doesn't hide that he's got a very clear agenda and I take what he writes with a handful of salt, but I sure as hell enjoy every single word he types. Utter cynicism and forceful conviction is a rare and sweet melange.

On a separate note, this might interest our eternal debates: 38 percent of Americans view "libertarian" favorably to 37 who view it unfavorably. Democrats (39-37) and independents (44-32) view the term most favorably, while Republicans view it negatively by a 13-point (31-44) margin.

On another note, I thought at first that the thumb was a cockring after some severe body-modding.

And finally, +1 The eXile. Every country should have one.

nbob said @ 2:38pm GMT on 5th May
The term 'libertarian' or the idea?

nbob said @ 2:39pm GMT on 5th May
Oh I see it now...

feel free to downmod my previous comment into oblivion

ComposerNate said @ 3:30pm GMT on 5th May [Score:5 Funny]

maryyugo said @ 3:58pm GMT on 5th May
Hilarious!

spite48 said @ 5:47pm GMT on 5th May
Man that's good.

Krutz said @ 5:49pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Insightful]
Oddly enough, that's about the attitude I'd expect from most cats, anyway.

maryyugo said @ 5:52pm GMT on 5th May
Housecats maybe. The outdoor variety keeps plenty busy or they don't stay alive.

Krutz said @ 5:59pm GMT on 5th May
*looks at the word "housepets" at the bottom of the cartoon*

Indeed.

arctan said @ 12:28am GMT on 6th May
Er, the cat in the cartoon is *talking* about those other cats, so... yeah.

snowfox said @ 12:51am GMT on 6th May
Really? That isn't my experience with cats at all, but you get out of the relationship what you put into it. Maybe you should try harder.

VictorTyne said @ 4:15am GMT on 6th May [Score:5 Insightful]
You rescue a kitty from the pound and they hide from you and shit on your bed and only warm up to you years later and then your sister goes off to college but won't take the cat with her even though it was supposed to be her responsibility so your parents sucker you into taking it in even though your landlord doesn't allow pets so you have to hide it from everyone and then it develops diabetes because your parents were too cheap to buy anything but the cheapest catfood for the first twelve years of its life so you're stuck with a fifteen-year-old diabetic cat with no teeth pissing bloody urine over every square inch of carpet you own and you don't know what you're going to do until one day you wake up to find her cold dead corpse curled up on your favorite sweater and your heart breaks because you realize just how much you loved your little cat.

a.talisan said @ 4:18am GMT on 6th May
O_O

hellboy said @ 4:31am GMT on 6th May
O_Q

devilsad said @ 5:06am GMT on 6th May
It sure is dusty in here today..

shiney things said @ 3:06pm GMT on 6th May
Hugs?

I gotta go pet my cats...

snowfox said @ 5:39pm GMT on 6th May
Yeah... none of mine have been like that. Marc and Annia were a little scared at first, but they were actually wild. Truly domesticated cats I've dealt with were nice from the start. Even the ferals started being nice within six months.

donnie said @ 4:29am GMT on 6th May
Sad...

Krutz said @ 2:46pm GMT on 5th May
Every single player in finance suddenly had to face the fundamental problem—this whole fucking economy is built on fraud and lies and garbage. So when Lehman collapsed, every single player panicked, going, ‘If Lehman was nothing but a Ponzi scheme—and I know what I’m running is a Ponzi scheme—holy shit, that means everyone else is running a Ponzi scheme too! Run for the exits!’

Once again, the tea-partiers have picked the wrong target....

clair7857 said @ 3:28pm GMT on 5th May
That conversation is so contrived.

klingon_fodder said @ 9:08pm GMT on 5th May
(mark ames) + (contrived) = redundancy

maryyugo said @ 4:10pm GMT on 5th May
It's way overcomplicated and full of red flags. For example this old piece of shit -- a classic red flag that someone hasn't done their home work:

"America is ranked only 17th in the world in life expectancy."

So once more because nobody seems to get it. Life expectancy, a crude measure to start with and one which has nothing to do with what an individual can "expect", has to do with life style choices and genes more than with medical care quality. Another misused measure of medical care quality is childhood and perinatal mortality. That also has to do with genes and lifestyle choices and it depends mostly on choices about getting or not getting prenatal care. If you have bad genes, use drugs, don't eat correctly, and don't get prenatal care, you'll have high childhood mortality.

Now to the stock market. In fact it is a game of musical chairs. Few if any stocks are worth what people pay for them in terms of likely future earnings much less actual dividends. It's all and only about what people think the stocks will sell for in the future. And that's loaded with hype, misdirection and outright fraud. And that's before you get to derivatives.

I didn't the read the whole article. It takes too much time and is doubtfully worth it.

Yes, drug companies are incredibly slimy and so is Wall Street. So is just about everything. Do you like where you get your weed from? Have you looked inside a supermarket recently for something safe to consume by an adult? Know any benign or altruistic large corporations (OK maybe Google is almost neutral)? How about the fact that virtually every consumer product in the US is made in China, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico or ???? None of this news.

drunk said @ 4:22pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Insightful]
It's not about what something is worth.
It's about what you can get for it.

maryyugo said @ 5:10pm GMT on 5th May
Yes. I decided to upmod mostly because some of the links are very interesting and seem reliable.

absterjo said @ 12:19am GMT on 6th May
I didn't read your whole comment. It takes too much time and its worth is doubtful.

Navier-Strokes said @ 2:23am GMT on 6th May
Amen to that.
Back when I was on the Street, I coined two values:
market price and true price.
When the market goes up or down without new information,
it's not like the true price has changed,
only what people are willing to pay for something.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:36am GMT on 6th May
and don't forget arbitrage.

donnie said @ 12:14pm GMT on 6th May
That's what the true price is. The correct term for the other concept you refer to is "valuation".

Oedi said @ 6:10pm GMT on 5th May
I get my weed from friends in Humboldt and Fresno... It's all clean.

maryyugo said @ 6:24pm GMT on 5th May
More homegrown? If so, good trend.

backSLIDER said @ 7:47pm GMT on 5th May
I buy from a guy who's plant I've seen and I watched him set it up. It's beautiful.

maryyugo said @ 7:52pm GMT on 5th May
It would be even prettier if it were legal as it should be-- legal, regulated, standardized, licensed and taxed. Like the drug it is.

arctan said @ 10:12pm GMT on 5th May
Life expectancy, a crude measure to start with and one which has nothing to do with what an individual can "expect", has to do with life style choices and genes more than with medical care quality.

The "genes" thing I balk at; it sounds like code for "You know we have too many black people here and they just die faster because it's in their blood" -- the old excuse for why black people have a significantly shorter life expectancy than white people in the same country even though Society Is Totally Not Racist Anymore We Swear.

Individuals may have their life expectancies affected by their genetics, but it averages out at the level of population. Trying to claim that the reason America is less healthy than Sweden is Sweden's "better genes" is edging very uncomfortably into racist nonsense.

If you have bad genes, use drugs, don't eat correctly, and don't get prenatal care, you'll have high childhood mortality.

And you don't think *any* of this has to do with the culture surrounding the health care industry, and with a system that makes people think of health care as a luxury commodity they choose to purchase if they can afford it as opposed to a basic societal infrastructure that everyone is born into?

Nihil said @ 12:42am GMT on 6th May
The "genes" thing I balk at; it sounds like code for "You know we have too many black people here and they just die faster because it's in their blood"

Jesus fucking Christ, you're paranoid. That's a ridiculous accusation even if it's maryyugo who said that.

arctan said @ 10:52pm GMT on 6th May
Did you see the rest of my comment? If we were talking about two different people, it'd be fine -- when you bring up "genes" as a reason for a major difference in life expectancy between *two entire nation-states*, that rings alarm bells in my head.

1000gpw said @ 1:14pm GMT on 6th May
Not just stocks, but jewelry, art, sports memorabilia, historical artifacts, most cloths, expensive cars, large houses - they're all about how much someone is willing to pay.

But they do have utility - showing off how much you paid for it and thus how much cash you got. The pursuit of status is hardwired in our genes.

v21 said @ 4:41pm GMT on 6th May
Yeah, but there's no reason we can't pursue status in a way that doesn't fuck those without. I mean, any more than being low-status is, generally.

valen85 said @ 5:44pm GMT on 5th May
God I hope Canada can survive...

klingon_fodder said @ 1:01am GMT on 6th May
why bother? and after the arctic melts, who'll care?

f00m@nB@r said @ 2:17am GMT on 6th May
don't worry: donnie will save you all!

donnie said @ 4:04am GMT on 6th May [Score:1 Informative]

Chop-Logik said @ 3:27pm GMT on 6th May

maryyugo said @ 7:50pm GMT on 5th May
The more I read of this article in bits and pieces the more I like it. My problem is that the tone is so pessimistic and the total acceptance of the few details I know are bogus or hype makes me suspicious about the author.

Journalist meaningless and misleading, bullshit spins like "prescription drugs kill one American every five minutes" worry me about the author's ability and sincerity. Maybe drugs do. Maybe they don't. What's the source? How many people's lives are saved by (mostly) the same drugs given the same way? What's the risk to benefit ratio? What happens without those drugs? Life isn't a simple black and white and misleading with loose use of statistics couched in lay terms isn't reassuring.

Still, it's definitely an interesting read.

I'm a bit surprised there aren't more opinions.

Nihil said @ 8:31pm GMT on 5th May
You're rather spot-on for once. Ames often gives me the impression of loving chaos for chaos' sake - looking not so much for the truth but for what is most outrageous, which, the world being what it is, does often match the truth, but you can't really tell just by reading his articles, because he only cares about getting your blood boiling, not about persuading you with sensible arguments.

But he's not a pure hypocrite doing this only to sell, or to get pageviews; were that the case I don't believe he would have left the USA for '91 Russia, or that he would have risked arrest so many times. Chaos is just what apparently gets him going, like the class vandal/clown in middle school, only one that never quite grew up, and was lucky or smart enough to find a place and time where he fit just in.

Oh, and he shouldn't be mistaken for a heroic defender of the exploited masses, of course. I don't think I ever read anything constructive by him, and I'm pretty confident that if said exploited masses ever DID rise up in arms as he continually prods them to do, he would just write mocking articles from the comfort of the nearest brothel. Still, I think having him around is a net positive - certainly so for those of us who are both curious and sceptical.

animus kadmon said @ 8:10pm GMT on 5th May
I think the only problem I see with the article is that the author didn't break the interviewee's neck afterward.

Provided the interviewee was an actual person instead of an invention of the author as I expect.

Fr3nZy said @ 8:47pm GMT on 5th May
I skimmed... meh

Two great books on the origins of this subject (in fact written before it actually had all hit the fan)

FIASCO - Frank Partnoy
Liars Poker - Michael Lewis

I work(ed) in Hedge Funds, these books amused me.

maryyugo said @ 6:38am GMT on 6th May
Did working in hedge funds amuse you? Did it amuse your wallet?

Fr3nZy said @ 4:00am GMT on 16th May
Hmmm. It was interesting. Yes, the pay was good. Was it enough to put up with:

Traders throwing objects at you, whilst abusing you for their own shortcomings.
A culture of physical violence, excessive profanity, and metaphorical dick size comparison.
Excessive bullshit, rule bending, dubious moral values, borderline illegal activities.
Lapdances on the company card. Oh yeah, I forgot that.

Ummmmm. Still no :)

afrasr said @ 9:12pm GMT on 5th May
Man, the thumb made me nostaglia hard for my days back on my high school farm.

They had a brahmin bull, who had been hand raised..

He was close to a metric ton of muscle... but he still thought he was a calf, who thought he was a puppy.

He would come bounding upto to people, and they would run thinking he was charging them.. so he would chase them, thinking it was a game.

If you stood still, he would just bound up and want to be patted and scratched behind the ears.

Naruki said @ 11:47pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Informative]
They had a brahmin bull,

They had a fictional two headed bull?!

Maybe you meant one of these. :-)

klingon_fodder said @ 9:20pm GMT on 5th May
i am reminded of:

americans are only rich because they charge each other too much

swiss are only rich because they charge everybody else too much

ok, let's stipulate that any organized economic system is a scheme whereby those organizing and operating the system do so to their own advantage for as long as they can get away with it -- then the peasants arise and run around with some heads on spikes, until the troops mow them down -- then the next organized economic system is installed and play resumes -- isn't it about "run around with some heads on spikes" time now?

which reminds me of a recent article about how business schools have ruined USA business -- all the top students learn to manipulate finances, not how to manage enterprises -- GM's last few bosses all came from the finance side and proved they know shit about making cars etc -- and there's an old study showing that an oversupply of lawyers results in reduced GDP -- so maybe some biz & law schools need to be bombed -- it's all for national security, hey?

a.talisan said @ 4:10am GMT on 6th May
isn't it about "run around with some heads on spikes" time now?

Sure is. Only problem is that in order to get those heads, usually a very large number of us peasants have to die. And we're not quite that pissed off right now.

We're pissed off in the way of scrambling-desperately-to-hold-onto-what-we-need-and-scavange-what-is-left-of-our-life-while-everyone-else-does-the-same with the vague recognition this is someone else's fault.

donnie said @ 9:46pm GMT on 5th May
This is one of the worst articles I've ever read. It focuses on nothing more than the incoherent blathering of a coked-up financial jockey. It feels like Jerry Springer in a cheap suit trying to act like he's suddenly sophisticated. Heavy on emotion and finger-pointing, light on fundamentals, facts, and logic.

Naruki said @ 10:09pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Insightful]
With a review like that from you, I'll take it as high praise. :-)

donnie said @ 10:25pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Funny]
Yeah, well...say what you will about the tenets of Classical Liberalism, dude - at least it's an ethos.

Naruki said @ 10:45pm GMT on 5th May
Aren't you a bit out of character? And into someone else's?

donnie said @ 11:42pm GMT on 5th May [Score:1 Insightful]
I think the proper phrase is out of my element, and yes - I excel at that.

snowfox said @ 1:01am GMT on 6th May
He's right about it being a confidence game, but that should be damned obvious. What is money? It's just a symbol for confidence, status or trust (which are eerily related). Where he fails in his understanding is in his belief that the end of the current economic powerhouses will doom everyone. All of the physical objects and people will still be there, even if we lose all of this imaginary confidence we trade. If we can get over the mind game of money, everything will be ok.

Also, this should be obvious, but I swear some people didn't get the memo: Telling people in the news that the economy is crashing will cause the economy to crash even if it was doing just fine. If people would stop worrying about what they hear and keep their behaviors more consistent, we'd be better off. But everyone thinks short-term. Everyone wants to game the system. Everyone wants to jump ship instead of grabbing a bucket.

What's wrong with our economy is human nature and its characteristic lack of good judgment, especially in regards to long-term planning.

Navier-Strokes said @ 2:27am GMT on 6th May
I think my econ professor said it best :
if enough people make irrational decisions in the same direction,
it becomes the rational decision.

This may be why economics is broken.

donnie said @ 3:27am GMT on 6th May
Idiocy - pure and simple. Rational is only meaninfully and objectively defined as selecting an effective means to achieve your stated goal. If my goal is to bake a cake and the means I choose to do so is to use my non-existent powers of pyrokinesis, then I have made an irrational choice. By this means, I will never achieve my goal. If ten million other people also choose to attempt to bake cakes with their non-existent pyrokinetic powers, it remains an irrational decision and nobody will ever end up with a baked cake.

In the face of such irrational decisions, the intelligent person will see that there is a great demand for baked cakes and a dearth of savoir-faire in making baked cakes a reality. He will then purchase an oven, bake cakes, and make a ton of money.

Economics is broken because the custodians of the monetary system themselves make the most critical errors in rationality - their selected means to address economic problems do more to harm the system and exacerbate the problem than they do good. It certainly has become the accepted decision to make and it enjoys immense popular support, but it does not make it rational.

donnie said @ 3:30am GMT on 6th May
To extend that - if my goal is to make a lot of money, and the means I select to do so is to take advantage of flaws in the monetary and economic systems created by governments, and furthermore if by selecting those means I am successful in making a lot of money, then I am NOT making an irrational decision. I have been successful in achieving my goals. The government, however, who have extensively chosen to intervene in the market with the stated goal of reducing instability and corruption have done nothing but make those problems worse - government action is the only irrational element in the economic system because it is the ONLY ONE which consistently fails to achieve its stated goals.

donnie said @ 3:32am GMT on 6th May
...and, by means of force, I should add, does not suffer the loss of economic power associated with such failures - the typical "invisible hand" method of removng decision makers from the market based on their competence to make rational decisions.

snowfox said @ 3:35am GMT on 6th May
Actually, you are making an irrational decision in the long term. When you game the system, you hurt others. You piss in the well. If enough people do that, the well turns to piss. Sure, it seems beneficial in the short term, but if bad things happen in society because of your choices, eventually that would hurt you as well, and may have lasting consequences for your genetic line.

This is what I am talking about. People think short-term. Being selfish makes sense in the short-term, but over a long period of time it is a foolish decision.

donnie said @ 3:50am GMT on 6th May
But you can't base rationality on your own subjective valuations. The only measure of rationality is effectiveness at achieving stated goals. What you are doing is being critical of the goals that others have. So long as you wish to be free from intervention in making up your own mind about what goals you feel are worth pursuing and which are not, you must be willing to accord the same to others. How else can everyone maximize their happiness save to be free to pursue their own goals - those things they want most - as well as being free from being forced to pursue goals which others deem of greater value?

The interest rate is the key factor which moderates the time preference of a society as a whole. The degree to which people think into the future is a direct function of the interest rate. In a free market environment, this is dictated by the balance between savings and investment. When savings are high, interest rates drop, and vice-versa.

In times of plenty, to be colloquial, we are more apt to consume in the present and enjoy those things that life are about enjoying - whatever they may be for any individual. In times of scarcity we are more apt to save and invest for the future. Only the subjective valuations of all people as concerns the balance between their desires in the present and their willingness to sacrifice for the future can dictate the interest rate - the degree to which we consume or invest.

The problem occurs when the interest rate is centrally dictated - when the state decides what the interest rate is irrespective of the supply of goods, savings, investment, or what have you. The desires of the people in the society do not enter into the calculation - rather than millions of people making millions of decisions every day which collectively meld into an organic rate of interest, there is one stern decree from the authority at the top.

When the authority at the top is in error, then the balance of human activity in the sphere of that rate of interest will become irrational to the degree that is necessary to make up the difference between the real interest rate (the free market value) and the dictated interest rate.

In this case, it was a protracted period of excessively low interest rates which caused the problem. It stimulated an unnatural desire for investment which was not reflected in the actual supply or demand for goods. An artificial store of value was needed to absorb this artificial desire to invest created by an artificially low interest rate - people had to adjust their time preference to suit what was decreed.

In this most recent case it was housing which absorbed the extra investment money and the prices became inflated to reflect that. The problem wasn't anything that anyone is rattling on about - human nature, evil people, blah, blah. The problem was the artificial interest rate. If you don't understand the interest rate you have absolutely zero hope of ever understanding macroeconomics.

donnie said @ 4:19am GMT on 6th May [Score:1 Funny]
What is most insidious about this is that the effects of the interest rate on human action are almost subconscious - because it is so far removed from the particulars of day-to-day life, it goes almost unnoticed. What it does is create a society where the appearance of scarcity or plenty is an illusion and people automatically adjust their behaviour based on their perception of that illusion.

It would be as though the grain silo was made to appear full by some force and so the farmers took a summer off to enjoy themselves rather than toiling in the fields planting wheat. Their decision was not intrinsically irrational - it was correct based on the available information. Nevertheless, it would appear in retrospect that they were behaving with a short-term view - not planning ahead for the winter to come. In fact that's not the case at all - they simply were made to believe that they had more in reserve than they did and acted accordingly.

This is the ultimate effect of any intervention from a central government - regardless of the primary effects, there is always associated an intrinsic destruction of market information. It's not that the information is hidden or just requiring a brighter mind to determine, it is actually destroyed - the task of real economic calculation frustrated by an external forcing.

It would be like trying to determine the weight of a person whilst riding a roller coaster and having no means of looking outside or gaining information about your surroundings - every bend, every roll, every twist would alter the apparent force of gravity and the reading on the scale would bounce around. The true mass of the person in question would be very difficult to measure.

Just the same, the task of separating real supply and demand from the always-changing supply of money and the interest rate, which is never consistent with any known reality, is equally difficult. When you can't determine who wants what, how much of it they want, and what they are truly willing to pay for it, then the task of making a living and doing so efficiently becomes a real quandary. Waste is inevitable - the end result is always the same, poor economic calculation resulting in imbalances most commonly perceived in the form of everything being all fucked up.

arctan said @ 11:07pm GMT on 6th May
Why do you keep typing all this shit? It's the same shit over and over again. It's like having the fucking Gospel of the Second Coming preached to me while I'm in the train station trying to have a serious talk about Israeli politics.

Is it really us you're trying to convince or yourself? Do your beliefs just not feel real to you unless you repeat them to a large group of acquaintances and strangers at great length at every fucking opportunity?

donnie said @ 11:15pm GMT on 6th May
Well, everyone who replies to it generally fails the reading comprehension test in an egregiously obvious way. I figure that nobody actually reads any of it so I post it up now and again in the hopes that perhaps one day someone will take the time to read it before replying with reflexive dogma.

arctan said @ 11:22pm GMT on 6th May
Yeah, see, it's just like getting evangelized to again and again. When people simply express disbelief or contempt of your random presuppositions you reply that they simply didn't LISTEN.

"But don't you UNDERSTAND that Jesus is the only way to Heaven?"
"I don't believe in Jesus or Heaven."
"YOU'RE NOT LISTENING TO ME! Let me explain it again..."

Basic presuppositions that underlie every single one of your arguments that most people with any amount of real-life experience can tell are retarded are plentiful, but take this one: The belief that "free negotiations" between individuals will always lead to results that are fair, logical, moral and "accurately reflect what people really want and how much they want to pay for it". It's almost not worth talking about because if you really take that as one of your foundational beliefs about life then you're not even in the same reality as the rest of us.

donnie said @ 11:50pm GMT on 6th May
So...you don't believe in interest rates? You don't believe interest rates affect economic decisions? You don't belive interest rates are a function of savings and investment? You don't believe in such a thing as savings and investment? What?

I don't quite get what you're trying to say here.

snowfox said @ 12:42am GMT on 7th May
Interest rates are just something we imagine based on what we think future values will be, which are pretty much based on how confident we feel to spend money, and oddly, views on those two things affect eachother, creating an infinite loop of irrational speculation.

It is all in your head. Our economy is an insane circle jerk of k-level thinking.

donnie said @ 1:30am GMT on 7th May
"Interest rates are just something we imagine based on what we think future values will be, which are pretty much based on how confident we feel to spend money, and oddly, views on those two things affect eachother, creating an infinite loop of irrational speculation."

Except for the irrational part, that's exactly right - it is a loop. An engineer would call it a feedback system - strange as it may sound, it's one of the best ways of achieving stability in many physical systems. Speculation is impossible to be rid of - we all do it because nobody knows what the future will bring. If we weren't allowed to speculate we'd all walk right off a cliff. No speculation is the equivalent of zero interest in the future - the ultimate in short-term thinking. The degree to which people are successful in any aspect of life is directly proportional to their success in being rational speculators - not only in finance, but every aspect of being a living person requires it.

donnie said @ 1:50am GMT on 7th May
The other alternative in a no-speculation world, of course, is stagnation. If we restrict ourselves to activities with risk which approaches zero then we can avoid speculaton, but we also avoid progress. The first human to take a day away from hunting to teach himself to fashion a spear was a speculator - he speculated that if he risked taking a day off of hunting he could use the weapon he created to be a more effective hunter, thus gaining the long-term reward of more free time. This reasoning continues into the future. When speculation is unsuccessful then there is a price to pay - no spear and a day of going hungry. The risk has to have the natural penalty associated with failure to be effective, however, in fostering rational risk taking.

In the case of massive government bailouts there was a great moral hazard in the entire finance industry - the penalty associated with failure was not proportianal to the risk, and artificially so. The logic of governments is that by subsidizing risk they can accelerate growth - more risk takers means a higher chance that some of them will be successful at creating growth in the future. Funding the sciences carries the same rationale, as does, in a way, insurance. Collectively people can finance a greater risk if their efforts are focused.

The only real objection I have to that sort of thing is when the element of choice is removed - when people are forced to contribute rather than make up their own minds about where they would like to "spend" their risk, so to speak. Even when I personally feel that the activity is worthwhile and useful - which in many cases you may be surprised to think that I do - I still feel that it is wrong to impose that valuation on another person against their will, no matter how few those people number.

arctan said @ 3:57am GMT on 7th May
Yes, donnie. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. Either we jump on positive feedback loops and fling ourselves off every cliff we see or we huddle in the caves, terrified to move.

Because there's no such thing as tempering speculation through any kind of rational planning, because anyone who dares suggest that any kind of principles or methods might apply to figuring out what choices are stupid and suicidal and what choices are promising and worthwhile is being a Wise Owl and a tyrant etc.

The only real objection I have to that sort of thing is when the element of choice is removed - when people are forced to contribute rather than make up their own minds about where they would like to "spend" their risk, so to speak. Even when I personally feel that the activity is worthwhile and useful - which in many cases you may be surprised to think that I do - I still feel that it is wrong to impose that valuation on another person against their will, no matter how few those people number.

If I don't do something to stop those people fucking themselves then they're going to fuck me, because despite all your tedious bullshit about finding ever-more-exacting ways to define "initiation of force" the fact remains that in reality whether you define what someone does as "force" or not it will affect me regardless, because we all live in one small world with limited resources and packed with side effects.

arctan said @ 4:33am GMT on 7th May
I don't believe that there's a Real Correct Interest Rate, which is a pretty close parallel with what I was talking about above. (Now you're being the creationist who says "What? You don't think there's a First Cause of the Universe? So you don't think that cause and effect exist? You don't believe in science?")

I believe that the interest rate is something that can be set by institutions and, once set by institutions, affects human behavior. I do not believe that there is a "real" interest rate based on some "real" measurement of what people "should" be investing (which thanks to the magic of markets is a magically accurate aggregate assessment of Our Collective Rational Belief Of The State Of The World Based On All Available Evidence or somesuch bullshit) and that deviating from this "real" rate leads to terrible catastrophe.

All evidence is that, in fact, the easiest way to get otherwise-rational people to commit their energies to suicidal and catastrophic decisions is to split decision-making power among a really big group of people and then have them compete against each other for short-term goals. That's what the Prisoner's Dilemma *is*.

snowfox said @ 5:43pm GMT on 6th May
Maximizing happiness at the expense of others is unethical. If your stated goals do that, then I am not being subjective when I say that screwing other people over isn't fair.

You just want to justify an every-man-for-himself, why-should-I-care-about-anyone-else kind of system. I disapprove.

donnie said @ 10:46pm GMT on 6th May
Who said anything about it being at the expense of others? This is a construct of your own biases and ignorance, not of what is actually at hand.

Consider that any sort of existence in a free economy involving direct or indirect exchange - that is life outside of being a self-sufficient hunter/gatherer/agrarian - is entirely predicated on developing a skillset and aquiring the appropriate assets with which to produce or deliver goods and servicess to a willing buyer. The entire concept is based on working to provide things your fellow humans find valuable, and the same for them - to produce things that you find valuable. In this way, you can each benefit from the specific expertise of others through free trade. The free market is all about expending your efforts to best serve the desires of other people - to make or do things that increase their satisfaction and help them achieve their goals. The main defining feature of the free market is that everyone is free to make up their own mind about what they find valuable - it's got nothing at all to do with morality. It works by the most fair critera you could ask for - that if you want something from someone else, you need to reciprocate and provide something that they find valuable as well.

Nobody likes the person who wants their back scratched but refuses to scratch anyone else's. It's all about cooperation and mutual respect - everyone doing their best to try to figure out what everyone else wants out of life; about working to try to provide those things for each other.

Now, if you happen to want to make strange clay sculptures and nobody else wants your strange clay sculptures, then you will obviously live a materially poor life, finding it difficult to find other people who are willing to trade the fruits of their labour for the fruits of yours. Now, we could say that it is unfortunate for that person that what they love in life is not appreciated by others, but who honestly should be at fault for such a circumstance?

Some might suggest that this poor person should be assisted from the public purse because their passion in life is insufficient to fund their own subsistence. But isn't this more like what you are suggesting? Why should the sculptor care about anyone else or what they want? They deserve some sort of minimum compensation just because? Interesting, isn't it? How the socialist method, although lauded for being more caring and supportive of the notion of a community, actually does more to support a fragmented and isolated society - one where people don't have to care about what each other wants, but can toil away fruitlessly at whatever they feel like.

Put down your prejudice for a moment and try to think clearly - you'll see that most of the rhetoric that churns in the back of your mind is nothing more than that.

ComposerNate said @ 11:00pm GMT on 6th May
A state-funded museum provides a source of tourist income for neighboring businesses, and culture for everyone, a sense of maturity for a district.

Music has such value to me I have dedicated my life to it, yet I've not paid for any in a decade, and have plenty of company. The money I've made from music over the last decade would not financially support me a month, so now it's all online freely available. I make money with a hobby instead, and live minimalist.

Monetizing value doesn't work for everyone or everything. You likely realize this, so I'm just sharing thoughts before drifting off to sleep.

arctan said @ 11:02pm GMT on 6th May
Consider that any sort of existence in a free economy involving direct or indirect exchange - that is life outside of being a self-sufficient hunter/gatherer/agrarian - is entirely predicated on developing a skillset and aquiring the appropriate assets with which to produce or deliver goods and servicess to a willing buyer.

Only if it's completely impossible to take advantage of people through means such as intimidation or guile into buying something at a price other than the price they really should be paying. (Only if you buy into the retarded assumption that if someone "willingly" pays a price that automatically, by definition, makes that price correct.)

Now, we could say that it is unfortunate for that person that what they love in life is not appreciated by others, but who honestly should be at fault for such a circumstance?

We could say that you're being ridiculously naive if you think the only "mispricing" that occurs in the economy is because other people don't like your folk art as much as you do, as opposed to people being able to gang up on other people through various social levers to take stuff from those people that they don't want to give up. (And NO, donnie, one does not require "government coercion" in order to do this. Human nature is more complicated than that. Social prejudices, ingrained cultural behaviors, being able to control the flow of information or just getting to the bulk of existing resources first and "claiming" them first to give yourself a first-mover advantage -- all of these fall outside your insanely narrow definition of "coercion" and are regularly strategically used to maximize profit.)

Some might suggest that this poor person should be assisted from the public purse because their passion in life is insufficient to fund their own subsistence. But isn't this more like what you are suggesting? Why should the sculptor care about anyone else or what they want? They deserve some sort of minimum compensation just because?

The sculptor doesn't get "compensation" because I should be forced to pretend I like his sculpture. The sculptor gets "compensation" -- i.e. gets a minimal guaranteed level of support from society -- because it is better for me to live in a society where people feel a certain sense of security and comfort, where you have wiggle room to decide how much you want to whore yourself out in exchange for trinkets from others as opposed to self-whoring being an absolute all-consuming necessity lest you starve to death.

You do realize that, in the absence of an imaginary all-powerful police state, the actual natural response to constantly harshening the rules ("CONVINCE ME WHY I SHOULD FEED YOU OR YOU *STARVE*") is not people magically becoming more productive or more industrious, but people breaking the rules, right? The natural result of poverty is violent crime -- is people deciding "I work my fucking ass off but society doesn't think I'm interesting or talented or valuable enough to give me anything, so fuck them" and breaking a window and just taking shit.

The point of the welfare state is largely to prevent that, both the small-scale thefts and robberies and the large-scale enraged peasant revolution. (And I know your opinion is that the orderly taxation carried out by a welfare state is morally equivalent to torches and pitchforks, but fuck your opinion. You bitch and whine about filling out an income tax form as though it were the same as having your house burned down by desperate starving peasants precisely because you have never been in the latter situation and seen what the desperate struggle to earn a living does to the human race, thanks to being shielded from it by the Canadian welfare state you so despise.)

donnie said @ 11:11pm GMT on 6th May
Well, whatever - we can disagree about a bunch of shit that I don't even feel like debating with you. Personally, I would be thrilled just to have an interest rate that was determined on the open market. For the amount that I care about blowing sunshine up your ass, you can have your damned welfare state. A free-market interest rate would be enough to make me leap for joy. Baby steps. Maybe after a few centuries of that humans will grow up enough to take another step.

arctan said @ 11:18pm GMT on 6th May
It's not much of a "welfare" state if it sits on its hands while most of the underclass has whatever savings and whatever decent jobs they manage to get blown to shreds every twenty years -- thus making sure they remain in the underclass -- because of bankers playing through the Prisoner's Dilemma with each other, is it?

arctan said @ 4:46am GMT on 7th May
Or, let me put this in stilted and crappy terms that nonetheless are probably terms you can understand:

Controlling the interest rate is part of controlling the supply of money. Money is something that only exists because the government creates it -- not just in the literal sense of printing paper currency but of legally creating and enforcing the idea of "legal tender", of "property rights", of "enforceable contracts", and of all this other bullshit that doesn't actually exist in the State of Nature.

As with every other monopoly power the state wields, the only justification for allowing the state to alter the State of Nature to such an extent is *for the welfare of the people the State takes care of*. "Money" itself has no real value -- the government dictates what the value of money shall be in order to best secure the welfare of its people. "

"Property" itself is not a real thing at all -- in the State of Nature land is just land, we were all put here by God and there is no good goddamn reason one monkey can tell another monkey the second monkey doesn't have the "right" to stand around and take a shit in whatever plain or hill or forest the monkey chooses to take a shit in. The government creates the concept of "property" in order to secure the welfare of its people.

Any time the government abandons this responsibility -- not just a "power" or "privilege" or "right" but a DUTY, a SACRED DUTY to manage its definition of money, of property, of ownership, of law FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE IN IT -- then that government has begun to lose its legitimacy as a government. I only tolerate cops telling me where I can and can't go if I think the idea of people owning land is, in the long run, good for all of us. If it ceases to be so, then fuck the cops and fuck the property deeds and out with the torches and pitchforks.

That is how real life works. All this shit about money and property and interest rates -- it's just a game we play. And as with all games you get immersed in the game and think of the game as "real" at your peril -- all games are ultimately dictated by the meta-game, the "I don't care what the rules say, if I keep losing I'm getting up and leaving the table" game.

This is one reason another discipline that hates neoclassical economics is political science -- because poli sci nerds study the very delicate process of creating and maintaining the structures that the really wonkish neoclassical freshwater economists think are laws of fucking nature. (Which is why a really wonkish asshole like von Mises decides to actively *replace* whole massive fields of study, like psychology or political science, with his bullshit pseudosciences like "catallactics" and "praxeology", which have the benefit of requiring absolutely no empirical research and always coming to the same simple conclusions. Yippee.)

Naruki said @ 11:31pm GMT on 6th May
Why would a few centuries change it? People have held your idiotic beliefs for millennia and we still haven't weeded that stupid out.

snowfox said @ 12:15am GMT on 7th May
Stop insulting me, donnie. Seriously, you keep saying words like "ignorant" and "idiotic" in your responses to me and it does not endear you.

You said that rationality was defined by achieving stated goals. I claim that this assertion is utter bullshit because it covers people achieving their goals by fucking over others, which damages society and ultimately harms them. That is not rational. Being a selfish person is not rational. You only think it is because you are good at justifying foolish behavior.

Now speak nicely to me or shut the hell up.

snowfox said @ 12:40am GMT on 7th May
Here are your exact words:

The only measure of rationality is effectiveness at achieving stated goals.

This statement at its face is nonsensical. If my stated goal is fling shit at people and I do so successfully, am I rational? If my stated goal is to peel my legs with a putty knife and I succeed, am I rational? If my stated goal seems like a good idea to me, but brings about devastation... am I rational?

The answer should be a resounding no, donnie. Stop trifling with definitions to obfuscate the issue. Stop using lots of fancy rhetoric. It makes you seem pompous, but doesn't make you right.

donnie said @ 1:20am GMT on 7th May
"If my stated goal is fling shit at people and I do so successfully, am I rational?"

Of course. I may find your behaviour distasteful, and should your shit land on me then I would consider it an act of aggression which I would agree should be disciplined by a justified use of force - ie: the rule of law.

One can be rational while simultaneously being criminal. The free market doesn't necessarily reward rationality, though, if that's what you're getting at - it's part of success, but not all of it.

"If my stated goal is to peel my legs with a putty knife and I succeed, am I rational?"

Of course. If, however, your stated goal is to relieve yourself of your depression and despair, then you are not being rational. Perspective is everything.

" If my stated goal seems like a good idea to me, but brings about devastation... am I rational?"

If devastation was your goal, then yes. If it wasn't, then no. If devastation was a side effect that you couldn't care less about, then yes. In all cases, if the devastation was to property which was not yours, again it would be criminal and subject to discipline under the rule of law.

snowfox said @ 1:28am GMT on 7th May
You have seriously just said that the mentally ill are rational if they intend to do whatever it is that happens. That is ridiculous.

donnie said @ 1:37am GMT on 7th May
You're assuming that the mentally ill are capable of setting goals and that their actions are means to achieving them. I wouldn't say that's always the case. When a person can't control themselves - when they act reflexively or instinctively - then you wouldn't consider them rational. In that case, to paraphrase Rothbard, we can only understand such behaviour, as opposed to simply observe it, to the degree that we can impute motives to such persons that we can understand. It would be like saying a tree is rational because it has a goal to convert sunlight to energy and is successful in doing so. In that case the result is positive, but there is no more conscious effort than in the case of an insane person without the capacity to tangibly or correctly interpret or interact with the world around him.

arctan said @ 4:13am GMT on 7th May
One does not have to be "mentally ill" or to "act reflexively or instinctively" to have conscious goals that one then undermines by taking actions incommensurate with those goals.

Indeed, that's not even defined as insanity -- that is fundamental to the human condition. Our brains are flawed machines. We need to rely on crutches like education and tools and EACH OTHER to keep ourselves constantly in check, or we do really stupid shit.

This is very obvious to anyone who actually studies human thought processes rather than adhering to the blind libertopian dogma that any analysis of human nature that does not treat people as sacrosanct black boxes is "tyranny". It's one reason the discipline of psychology is the one that gets along least well with neoclassical economics, as is generally the case with people who study a phenomenon and then run into people who claim that that phenomenon is unstudyable or that studying it is immoral because of some stupid dogma (cf. evolutionary biologists and creationists).

snowfox said @ 3:09pm GMT on 7th May
But you aren't saying it's never the case, so if your statement on rationality is to be followed, some mentally ill people should be considered perfectly rational.

Sop trying to weasel out of this. Your statement was definitely wrong and I have proven that. Just admit it and stop struggling... it'll all be over soon, baby... shhh *strokes hair*

donnie said @ 9:51pm GMT on 7th May
Her lips are poisonous venom
Wicked temptress knows how to please
The priestess roars, "Get down on your knees"

The rite of the praying mantis
Kiss the bones of the enchantress
Spellbound searching through the night
A howling man surrenders the fight

donnie said @ 1:23am GMT on 7th May [Score:1 Underrated]
Also, I apologise if I sounded mean.

arctan said @ 10:53pm GMT on 6th May
government action is the only irrational element in the economic system because it is the ONLY ONE which consistently fails to achieve its stated goals.

Because everyone who sets out to invest in the stock market with the stated intent of making tons and tons of money quickly has succeeded in that goal.

Are you fucking high?

donnie said @ 11:03pm GMT on 6th May
Of course they don't, but in losing their shirt they also lose their power to make investment decisions - the market removes that privilege based on their failure. Governments, on the other hand, gain income coercively and therefore are free to fail consistently and repeatedly without ever experiencing a reduction in the scope of their ability to make massive financial decisions.

arctan said @ 11:05pm GMT on 6th May
Of course they don't, but in losing their shirt they also lose their power to make investment decisions - the market removes that privilege based on their failure.

And everyone who trusts those people and everyone who trusts those people and everyone who trusts everyone else, all the way up the line, deserves to be totally fucked in the ass by a bubble economy because economic instability and the accompanying misery, violence and chaos is a God-ordained punishment for our cognitive defects as a species. Everyone who suffered from those stock market crashes somehow at some point deserved it for interacting with an economy that contained people who made bad decisions based on others' bad decisions.

Seriously, fuck you.

Navier-Strokes said @ 5:37am GMT on 6th May
Wow.
Yes, if the long run people will see opportunity where it formed and it will go away.
For instance, MBS were way undervalued (read, a few people were being irrational and ran away from them, which slowly led to runs on the bank, and so other more rational people were lured away from them as well), which in part led to liquidity issues at places like Lehman, which in part led to their bankrupcy, which led to everyone shitting themselves and running for the exits instead of keeping their calm.
I'm not even gonna get into the hedge funds that were massively shorting Lehman, thereby exacerbating the problem, and thereby helping promote the market instability (there's your shortsightedness, I'm sure their portfolios paid the price for that when everything else tumbled in Sept 08).

If you have problems with the statement
"if enough people make irrational decisions in the same direction,
it becomes the rational decision."
see this guy
As for the rest, I just don't have time to argue this all, I'm going to sleep.

donnie said @ 5:48am GMT on 6th May
You don't have to remind me of what happened, I was there too. I witnessed the same collapse you did. The information you present changes nothing. As for the guy in question, his credentials are irrelevant. An illogical statement speaks for itself.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:35am GMT on 6th May
meta game? who woulda thunk!

donnie said @ 2:52am GMT on 6th May
What is money? It's just a symbol for confidence, status or trust (which are eerily related).

To a pit trader or vapid suburbanite, perhaps, but that's a painfully narrow view. Money as a concept and money as in currency forcibly controlled by the state are also very different things. Unless we're clear and precise with definitions and the structure of our arguments then none of this mindless prattle matters - this is my beef with the argument. It's just some dude venting without any structure or logic to his words. It's a piece of writing designed to resonate with the wrong half of the human brain.

Telling people in the news that the economy is crashing will cause the economy to crash even if it was doing just fine.

Artificial crashes have no more legs than artificial bubbles. Sane people very quickly re-acquire valuable assets sold off at irrational discounts and things continue just fine. The real problem is ignored here.

If people would stop worrying about what they hear and keep their behaviors more consistent, we'd be better off.

Another statement with absolutely nothing to back it up. Why? By what logic does this statement hold any truth to you? Volatility is an essential component in the determination of market prices. What it indicates is uncertainty. You're essentially arguing that it would all be better if everyone was simply smarter and more prescient - more certain about the future whims of the global producer and consumer base. Wouldn't that be nice, sure, but it offers no reasonable means of how to achieve this. Psychic classes in public schools, perhaps?

More worthwhile, and to the point, is that we discover the major sources of uncertainty in the marke and where they come from. It is an inescapable conclusion, for example, that coercive intervention in the market creates uncertainty about real prices. The problem isn't money - the problem is the way that our elected governments have chosen to implement it and the ways they have chosen to intervene in the marketplace.

But everyone thinks short-term. Everyone wants to game the system. Everyone wants to jump ship instead of grabbing a bucket.

And if there was no system to game? Then what? Why isn't it the system's fault for existing in the first place? Nature doesn't have a system - we built one with our governments. Why is it not painfully obvious that the problem is there? What is "confidence" in money when that confidence is based on the money issuer's inclination to create more of it when it may or may not be wanted? It's a "have your cake and eat it too" situation - either you take the corruption and inequity and volatility which comes as a result of having a centrally dictated economic policy or you live with the harsh realities that if you screw up you pay the price.

I'll give you this about your analogy - it's accurate in one detail. Most seem to see only two options - either jumping ship or grabbing a bucket. The smart ones jump ship, the suckers grab a bucket, both bitch about it, and when someone has the audacity to suggest repairing the hole, everyone takes him to the damned woodshed.

Human nature is highly adaptable to long term planning. The monetary system is the primary obstacle to that simply happening naturally. I mean, wouldn't you plan a little more long term if interest rates were 18%? Buy now, deal with it later is a symptom of low interest rates, and only one place in any given country is responsible for what those rates are.

snowfox said @ 3:32am GMT on 6th May
The problem does lie in education. People do not understand money, or the economy, or how retarded shit can drive the economy. If they did, we'd see improvements, and certainly fewer people would fall victim to scams.

We live in a society that embraces ignorance and delusion as a way of life. The only way to change that is to forcibly crack the facade. Some are too stupid or too delusional to accept reality even at that point, but they'll be small in number.

donnie said @ 4:30am GMT on 6th May
We live in a society that embraces ignorance and delusion as a way of life.

See above.

snowfox said @ 5:48pm GMT on 6th May
Pfft. So what? Way of life changes with the times. What is true now is not necessarily true years from now, and if you don't understand that, then you are ridiculously myopic.

donnie said @ 10:48pm GMT on 6th May
I'm not disputing that point. In fact, I think I was making a case for the fact that things change. What was important was the way in which the interest rate either does or does not accuratey reflect the current state of the always-changing state of society. Did you read?

snowfox said @ 12:11am GMT on 7th May
You said "See above." Maybe you should be clearer in what "above" means.

Naruki said @ 12:29am GMT on 7th May
Maybe you should stop trying so hard to make him make sense. I think tamp will be sane sooner than donnie will be right.

snowfox said @ 12:34am GMT on 7th May
Tamp already is sane. An insane person would be inconsistent in their behaviors. No, Tamp is definitely a creative type dicking around. I treat her comments as a sort of poetry and from that perspective many of them relate something with elements of truth.

I tried to friend Tamp on facebook, but she ignored me.

Naruki said @ 12:44am GMT on 7th May
Tamp is insane. Being consistent is not a measure of sanity. Being (socially?) connected to reality is. Tamp is disconnected. But he's very sensible in his madness.

donnie on the other hand is very consistent, and otherwise connected to reality, but his arguments are stark raving mad.

If you take the view that everyone is insane, then you can't really discuss this because your point is already made.

But if you take the view that most people are mostly sane, then tampride is not most people. Doesn't make him wrong, though.

snowfox said @ 12:52am GMT on 7th May
I know some sane artists who would do the shit tamp does. You don't know that tamp doesn't lead a normal social life outside of SE. All you know is what tamp has presented you. Consider it performance art. And it's too controlled. Tamp is definitely not what you think.

And donnie isn't crazy. He just fundamentally misunderstands human nature and seems to reject any concept of a common good.

Naruki said @ 1:45am GMT on 7th May
Sorry, but you are not at all credible on this issue. When you meet tampride in person and see him at home for a while, then you can come back and make slightly more credible assertions.

And I didn't say donnie was crazy. I said the opposite, in fact.

See, you have some insane ideas as well, but generally you are sane. That doesn't make you right, but it doesn't make you wrong, either. Being sane is not about being right or wrong, consistent or inconsistent.

donnie said @ 1:55am GMT on 7th May
For the record, I don't at all reject the concept of a common good. I just reject the use of force as an effective or legitimate means to achieving said common good.

Consider that your neighbour spends money improving his house - in doing so he has improved the look of the neighbourhood. His lawn is nicer, his house is more elegant, even your own property value goes up because of his efforts. Does he have a right to send you a bill? He has contributed to the value of the property of everyone on the block, but should he be able to forcibly extract payment for that?

snowfox said @ 2:12am GMT on 7th May
My taxes go up because my property value went up. Can I send my neighbor a bill?

Also, at some point force becomes a necessity. If someone is trying to kill you, talking them out of it may not work. There are two things that keep you from attacking others: empathy/sympathy and self-preservation. Force is always going to come into play. It is unavoidable.

donnie said @ 2:17am GMT on 7th May
I agree on the latter point and never have I expressed a reluctance to use force against an initiator of force in defense of one's own private property. Initiation of force is the key, and in the case of your taxes going up you know I'd argue against that too. ;)

arctan said @ 4:09am GMT on 7th May
What's interesting is that I wrote a really long post a while ago painstakingly explaining a rather simple concept -- you can't base a whole goddamn philosophy around the concept of "initiation of force" when there is no way to define "initiation" of anything considering that history goes backward and backward and backward into the hazy mists of time without a specific Day One.

But yeah, donnie, I'm the one who just never pays attention to anything you write or answers any of your questions.

So again, donnie, why shouldn't all Americans and our neighbors to the north pack our bags and sail over the oceans? Isn't the ENTIRE SYSTEM OF OWNERSHIP OF REAL PROPERTY throughout all of North America based on original land grants that were quite obviously illegitimate "initiation of force" against the Native Americans/First Peoples? Wasn't the land you and I live on originally "claimed" under the auspices of a force-initiating government that you despise? Absent said force-initiating government, how the hell do you take a patch of beautiful virgin forest in British Columbia and say that any individual person can somehow do something to suddenly cause that unowned land to become "owned" by him? Doesn't *all* "claiming" of real property require some kind of "initiation of force", by definition? John Locke's conundrum of the fallen autumn leaf and what it means to "add value" to it?

Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK is your answer to this? And don't fucking tell me to read a 500-page-book by Friedrich Hayek. It's a simple goddamn question and I want to hear your answer to it -- if there's no "initiation of force" then how does the whole arbitrary game of divvying up God's creation into pieces of "property" and declaring who starts out with what "property rights" over what even get initiated?

donnie said @ 5:49am GMT on 7th May [Score:1 Funny]
The past is the past. Since our actions in the present cannot affect it, a logical theory should concern itself only with what to do about the future. It should answer the question of how can we change our behaviour in the present to avoid the problems of the past.

Naruki said @ 6:10am GMT on 7th May
So stop fucking bitching about anything that happened before right now.

arctan said @ 1:09pm GMT on 7th May
It doesn't matter if I started the Monopoly game with $50 and my brother started it with $15,000 as long as we all agree to play by the rules starting now? And if he now easily beats me, I shouldn't bitch because whatever unfairness -- "initiation of force" -- happened was in the past?

Seriously, it's like saying if I broke into your house and stole all your furniture it doesn't matter because that was last week, and this week you're still obligated to pay me a fair market price when I try to sell it back to you.

But never mind that. At least concede that this new principle of yours is directly contrary to your bullshit about "initiation of force". A belief that force is only justified in response to the "initiation" of force is ABSOLUTELY DEPENDENT on having an accurate and comprehensive idea of the history of the situation stretching back to Day One -- it's your fundamental basis for determining the difference between horrible, evil, unconscionable "theft" and justified, awesome, righteous "self-defense".

And now you're abandoning that for this "let bygones be bygones" nonsense?

(Let me make it clear I'm not talking in abstractions. I'm saying that the distribution of wealth in the developed world *right now* is the direct result of people seizing shit by force in the past and selling it to people in the same class as they were, and that this is *doubly true* in the New World, which is an entire economic system based on grabbing land from the Indians and working it with slaves. There can be no justification of any system of governance or property here based on "Well, those are the rules, fair is fair, no initiation of force" because THE WHOLE HOUSE OF CARDS was based on the "initiation of force". The only moral justification of maintaining the system rather than letting it all burn down is the WELFARE of the people currently within it.

This is all very, very basic poli sci; debunking the gaping holes in Locke by asking "What about the Indians?" is a freshman trick. Only truly blinkered ideologues refuse to acknowledge it as being really fucking central to a critique of the moral legitimacy of some Lockean minimalist state.)

arctan said @ 4:04am GMT on 7th May
Consider that your neighbour spends money improving his house - in doing so he has improved the look of the neighbourhood. His lawn is nicer, his house is more elegant, even your own property value goes up because of his efforts. Does he have a right to send you a bill? He has contributed to the value of the property of everyone on the block, but should he be able to forcibly extract payment for that?

Umm... yes.

That's the whole justification behind eminent domain, land usage laws, etc.

It's astonishing that you can come so very near the point I've been trying to hammer into your head -- that the very idea of treating land, the original "real property", as individual pocket-universes that "belong" to individual people who have totally sovereign rights over them, is logically incoherent and always has been -- which is why that's never been how it's legally worked and someone, be it the manor lord, the city zoning board or the condo association has always actually exercised sovereign rights over land usage precisely so that I can't randomly decide to make my own lot of land a gigantic pile of animal feces and thus ruin everyone else's land by extension. Because land is not actually separate pieces of stuff that individuals can separately own -- it's all one big thing that is affected by each of the individuals who use it one way or another, and that means there needs to be one overarching authority over how it's used, so one guy can't poison all the running water underground with "his" tannery that happens to be on "his" arbitrarily-divided portion of the surface above it.

And that if land itself can't be "owned" in the totally sovereign way you claim things should be owned, you can say even less so about things that aren't even as real as parcels of land, like "owning" a "company" or a "patent" or a "share of stock in a corporation", all of which are wholly imaginary things that can only exist when a government creates them at all.

But knowing you you're going to just ignore this, claim that I'm incapable of reading the things you write, say some nonsense about "tyranny", etc.

Naruki said @ 5:35am GMT on 7th May
But knowing you you're going to just ignore this, claim that I'm incapable of reading the things you write, say some nonsense about "tyranny", etc.

Not being even the slightest bit sarcastic here: yes, that is what he will do. He may post a 1000 word essay about how he's not ignoring you, but that's exactly what he'll do.

So... why let him get to you? I mean, I know a thing or two about obsessive compulsive behavior, but even I realize that donnie has blind faith in his economic god and nothing you say is going to sway him.

Nobody salvageable is actually listening to him anyway. So, relax, make as brief a reply as you can stand, and move on.

arctan said @ 1:09pm GMT on 7th May [Score:1 Underrated]
I yell at donnie because it has fewer negative consequences to my life than yelling at other people who hold similar opinions whose decisions actually affect me.

Naruki said @ 1:33pm GMT on 7th May
Good enough. I just worried that you thought you might be reaching him. I hate to see all that effort thrown away.

arctan said @ 2:17pm GMT on 7th May [Score:1 Interesting]
Well, I think freshman poli sci debates are interesting in their own right -- it's the underpinning of the world we live in that a lot of us take for granted without really examining it -- and so I think it's interesting to pick apart exactly why donnie and his teabagging friends are deluded even if we all already agree that they are.

The distressing thing is really that very few people are crazy enough to actually sit down and read all the Austrian school nonsense that informs donnie's ideology, but the ideology itself has percolated into the wider world in the form of sloganeering and sign-waving and is now mindlessly parroted by people who don't even understand it. ("Taxes are tyranny! Don't touch my Medicare!")

And this process is actually occurring at a faster rate than the outward percolation of the intelligent reasons educated people dismissed such ideas en masse long ago, because we don't have the benefit of being frothing zealots who see life as a holy crusade to bring down Leviathan. You will hear a lot more ordinary people who've memorized some kind of anti-tax script ("The more they raise taxes, the more they squash the American Dream! No one can create jobs if there's too much taxes! The government has no innovation, only the private sector can!") than people who have a similar kneejerk reaction against it.

It's much like how it's much easier to get people whipped up and excited about creationism than evolution, or at least it used to be -- and so a lot of evolutionary biologists felt they had no choice but to set aside doing actual science and become professional anti-creationism debunkers.

The same needs to happen with global warming skeptics and most especially with all these teabaggers sucking the cocks of discredited fools like von Mises and Hayek and Nozick without even knowing who they are.

donnie said @ 9:48pm GMT on 7th May
The distressing thing is really that very few people are crazy enough to actually sit down and read all the Austrian school nonsense that informs donnie's ideology, but the ideology itself has percolated into the wider world in the form of sloganeering and sign-waving and is now mindlessly parroted by people who don't even understand it.

On this point we are in agreement.

donnie said @ 10:02pm GMT on 7th May [Score:1 Funny]
Also, I don't JUST read Austrian School books. You'd probably be surprised to find I also have Keynes's "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" on my shelf, among others. Only a fool lives on a monoculture of ideas.

arctan said @ 4:34am GMT on 7th May
Also, just because I really have nothing better to do tonight:

For the record, I don't at all reject the concept of a common good. I just reject the use of force as an effective or legitimate means to achieving said common good.

Every single thing a human being does is a kind of "force". The attempt to draw a bright line between "force" and "non-force" is a philosophical maneuver that breaks down incredibly quickly. Even a fucking five-year-old can find the holes in it. ("Mom! Make him stop!" "Stop what? I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!")

arctan said @ 10:54pm GMT on 6th May
Human nature is highly adaptable to long term planning. The monetary system is the primary obstacle to that simply happening naturally.

Because incredibly ruinous bubbles never happened under a gold standard economy? As opposed to happening ALL THE TIME?

mrcucumber said @ 11:31pm GMT on 5th May
nice thumb.

cardinal said @ 6:31pm GMT on 6th May [Score:1 Funny]
"You have no idea how deep this goes."

I've always wanted to use those words while wearing dark sunglasses and a trench coat but never while being raped.

Chop-Logik said @ 6:53pm GMT on 6th May
2 outta 3 ain't bad, eh?

klingon_fodder said @ 4:27pm GMT on 7th May

everybody who doesn't think wall street is a rigged game, raise your hands

Naruki said @ 10:18pm GMT on 7th May
My penis is raised, but that's unrelated. And it's not a hand anyway.