Free Market Fantasies by Noam Chomsky 4/5

ImperviousMason Says:

Jan 16, 2011 - free market crazy herethought provoking stuff here

pyannaguy Says:

May 7, 2011 - "Free Market?" Free Shit. They want things privatized when money's to be made - socialized when they want somebody else to pick up the tab. Glo-baloney ...That's BS for 'Race to the bottom." Corporate feudalism - it's been in place for years. Politics (Government) is their Public Relations arm - the "front office" for Big Money.

DystopianEmpire01 Says:

May 12, 2011 - Giving tech to china so they can make cheap stuff for the market has put the screws to us all.

davehutchinson67 Says:

Jul 16, 2011 - @communistrussia He usually does...he opened my eyes 25 years ago when I discovered him. What a great man.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 1, 2011 - @boing3887 It was Bernanke, not Milton Friedman, who said that fed has power to create inflation by dropping money from helicopters. The point was not that it was a good idea, but that it was an arrow that would always be present in the quiver. If you can provide any amount of liquidity when things get bad, then that means you don't have to be quite as diligent about providing liquidity before that.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 1, 2011 - @optimistsRUS The purpose of money is to facilitate trade. A second purpose is to store value, and it turns out that it has to store value to facilitate trade, but that is a derivative purpose, not the central focus. If I fix houses, Joe grows pomegranates, Sally bakes bread, Tom makes clothes, and Rachel runs parties, then in an ideal world, by working together, each of us should be able to do all that. Guess what? With money we can!

boing3887 Says:

Dec 4, 2011 - @sfjeff1089when bernanke was talking about helicopter drops, he was referring to a famous quotation by milton friedman - google "milton friedman helicopter drop" and you'll see ample sources. and milton friedman would not say that it was a bad or good idea absolutely, but depending on the context and situation. so in certain situations, yes, friedman would indeed be in favor of helicopter drops for the liquidity as well as the expectational effect

boing3887 Says:

Dec 4, 2011 - @sfjeff1089i'm right with you on that. money is a construct we create for our own needs - but just because it's not "real" doesn't mean that it doesn't have real consequences. what shocks me again and again is that the austrians don't seem to understand that inherently money is not "real" - they act like gold has some absolute value because it's shiny or because "people have used it for thousands of years." they don't seem to understand the concept of utility...

boing3887 Says:

Dec 4, 2011 - @sfjeff1089whoops, to clarify - i was "right with you" on your comment to optimistsRUS

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @demik027 That's the problem.  A big chunk of us believe that hyperinflation is in the cards, and another big chunk believe that hyper-deflation is expected. The treatment is opposite and until we can agree we support the enemies of liberty.In fact, the conditions are very much like 1930 right now. Productivity has been climbing rapidly even as wages fell. If wages were rising while productivity fell, then we would be in danger of "Full employment, but nothing to eat".

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @sfjeff1089 (continued), but if you look at the opposite problem, Full efficiency, but no-one to buy it. That is the story of the deflationary depression. We saw in 1930 that a massive percentage of the real economy was replaced with asset bubbles. This shrinkage was hidden until the bubbles collapsed.Since the shrinkage was very directly caused by fewer middle class dollars, there was a multiplier effect to it. Finance workers were also customers, and their suppliers were customers too.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @sfjeff1089 Warren Harding essentially ran on the same platform as Ronald Reagan, only he was more extreme. The other differences were the tariff trigger and the gold standard back then.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 yeah, It reminds me of the emperors new clothes. How many millions of words have been devoted to the question of whether or not Gold is money with no one ever asking the question of whether money is money.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 hmmm, I had missed that...

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 This sounds a lot like 1 equation 2 unknowns. I think you have to go beyond the standard multiplier effect to understand this. Certainly the multiplier effect has an impact, but in actualilty, the standard multiplier of bank reloans is probably less important in the long run then the other multiplier effect of what spending money gets diverted to saving. In any case, it should be obvious from your description that something needs to be understood differently in our standard model.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 I have been wondering about that. One possible impact of moving money from spenders to savers should be to move bond prices up and decrease the "Natural" interest rates in an economy. When the economy is in massive imbalance, altering the money supply prevents the vicious circle associated with the imbalance, but it can't affect the imbalance directly. In other words, it saves us from depression, but only until we stop, then the depression arrives and remains until we fix behavior.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 This could be the most important question our economy faces. Look up Naomi Wolf.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @enomarekim Our civil rights are already compromised. That cat's out of the bag. The only solution I am aware of is to be a nation of laws living under a rule of Law. Of course rules need to be figured out, but if we can keep the number of companies that live and die based on influence and power small compared with the number of companies that live or die based on good service, then it is a good start.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @enomarekim You raise some good points, but there is one flaw. We do have a solution that is better than just giving up. Small government is not the same thing as privatized government. "Ownership" of certain problems does not can and can not fall with the private companies that the service is privatized to. Think about Education. Barring the invention of slavery, No private company would never be able to harvest the results of the 20 years investment in education.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @enomarekim So to summarize, I agree that this is a problem we need to solve, but solving the way a lot want is not removing the possibility of government inefficiency, but rather creating a profit incentive to create government overbilling.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @boing3887 I agree with this completely. I think of people's requests that we get rid of public sector so we just have the private sector as being like requesting we fire all the referees in football to get rid of waste and leave us with the efficiently producing players.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @enomarekim Actually, bubbles occur when you transfer money from spenders to savers via anti-union policies, low tax rates on the rich, and other anti-progressive policies. There is a reason for a 70 year Kondrateiv cycle. That's how long it takes the last batch of people who said "never again" to die off and be replaced by the complacent. Private companies specializing in large scale wealth transfer from the public sector know that the only way it works is if they build up anger at big govt.

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @pyannaguy However it is reaching crisis proportions now. We now have a private police force and private prisons, and we have trained them in the art of torture and secrecy. Murphy's famous quote is about product design. Give a million toys to kids and anything that can go wrong will for at least one kid. Just like in a country the size of the USA, there is someone with the skills, ability, and motivation of a Hitler or a Stalin. The only reason it could never happen here is opportunity.

boing3887 Says:

Dec 5, 2011 - @sfjeff1089i would actually take your football analogy a step further - i'd argue that trying to get rid of the public sector is like trying to erase the yardage lines, take down the goalposts, and plow up the turf like farmland

sfjeff1089 Says:

Dec 9, 2011 - @sfjeff1089 However it is getting close to the point were we can't say that. Building up a suppression culture is difficult, just like it is difficult to build any corporate culture (with obvious added difficulties), but once you do build a corporate culture, it is hard to get rid of (and a suppression culture has extra defenses as well). Fortunately for any would-be oppressors, we have already given up independant press, habius corpus, internet independence, state sovreignty, etc.