[quote author=AresMan]
It is ridiculously clear from the Bible that inflation and unjust balances are an abomination to God. [/quote]
1. Inflation? There is no mention in the Bible.
2. Unjust balances? Those exist with, and without, inflation. They can be found in all economic systems. Therefore, the prohibition against unjust balances is not tied to any one economic system or view of monetary policy. It's a
universal injunction against cheating in business dealings.
Sounds to me like you haven't quite established the validity of your assumptions yet. You should have done that, *before* trying to state your conclusions.
There is absolutely no way that Keynesian demand-side central planning can find any support in the Bible; on the contrary, such policies are flatly condemned in the Law for Israel.
No they weren't.
A study of history and of the Greek demonstrates that Jesus overthrew the money changers in the Temple because they were clipping coins to enrich themselves and inflate the shekel, directly contrary to the Law.
1. Feel free to provide a link to the history and the Greek you are referring to.
2. Then you misunderstand economics. You confuse (a) making an excessive profit with (b) monetary inflation.
Some Keynesians have even tried to use Proverbs 11:24 to support the Paradox of Savings, but in my book I demonstrate that the context (vv. 25-26) refutes such a claim and proves the opposite.
If you say so.
[quote author=AresMan]If you were truly a fully educated Austrian economist and defected,I would be very interested in how you somehow dismiss the school of thought that was consistently crying foul and predicting the collapse of the technology and housing bubbles years before they happened while the Keynesians were consistently wrong, saying "The fundamentals are sound" and "There is no way to detect a bubble until it bursts."[/quote]
Simple.
1. The Austrian school has been discredited long ago. Since it is always predicting disaster, nobody remembers the times when the predictions don't come true. Austrian school aficionados are somewhat like the "date-setters" in millenialism; when they miss their rapture date, they just pick another one and keep on going.
2. The Keynesians were not saying "the fundamentals are sound" and "there is no way to predict a bubble until it bursts". In fact, here is a Keynesian (or post-Keynesian) predicting the housing bubble back in 2002:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-run-up-in-home-prices-is-it-real-or-is-it-another-bubble
Krugman also predicted the housing bubble back in 2002.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/opinion/16KRUG.html
So did Nouriel Roubini and Steve Keen: they all predicted the bubble.
I can also provide you with other Keynesians, post-Keynsians, Marxists, etc. who predicted the bubble. Of course, if you had done your research properly before writing your book, you wouldn't *need* me to provide such sources, because you would have run across them during the research phase of your book.
You *did* have a research phase, didn't you?
Ok, so "naked greed" is only possible for heads of corporations that ultimately must satisfy the needs of others or go belly up. It's not really possible for those who believe they are entitled to the output of the labor of others. It's not really possible for those in power to maintain their lucrative, cushy positions in government. Right. :-\
Greed is possible for anyone. Show me where I said otherwise.
What I said was that libertarianism was just a fig leaf (that is, a cute intellectual rationalization) to explain away and justify greed. I said nothing about greed being limited to just corporate heads.
Do not create strawmen and then expect me to dance with them.
As far as "drugs and pornography," not every libertarian is a libertine. Also, perhaps if matters of morality not under the Enumerated Powers were left to the several states to determine of themselves, the competition under state solutions could determine a more efficient and optimal solution to moral matters than would a one-size-fits-all federal solution.
There's no evidence for that. In fact, the existing evidence points to the opposite conclusion: that individual states would abuse their power. During the early years of the Republic it was common for each state to impose religious-based laws that would bind everyone in that state, regardless of religion or denomination. Madison and Jefferson both warned against that.
If you were a libertarian, perhaps you were one out of tradition and not from educated conviction. Such naive arguments do not sound like someone who was thoroughly schooled in Mises.
Incorrect on all counts. I rejected libertarianism for the reasons I have stated in this thread, and elsewhere. As a political philosophy, libertarianism:
1. fails to account for real-world scenarios and externalities;
2. has no working prototype (either modern or historical) that its proponents can point to, and
3. is based on self-serving axioms that only make sense to other libertarians.
None of your comments address these three points.
Ok, so the fact that power always corrupts and does not permit libertarian government because of its own self-serving attachment to power somehow disproves libertarianism?
LOL
The failure of libertarianism is not because of the corruption of power. It's because nobody has enough faith in it to start a society and keep it running on those principles. Too much common sense prevails.
Look:
Libertarians are the ones proposing change to the status quo. Therefore, burden of proof falls on them to persuade the general population of the worthiness of their ideas and the proposed changes. Ordinarily when proposing a massive change like that, a good way to start is by modeling the problem (or the change) on a small scale. THis helps work out the bugs, demonstrate the principles, and provides an example that can be studied and questioned. Then, if the prototype passes inspection, the proponents can move to the next step in getting their idea adopted.
The problem is that libertarians can't even provide a working prototype. I'm not even asking for a full government of a country, or even a state or province. As I said: start small. But guess what? You can't even demonstrate a
town-sized implementation of libertarianism that has worked.
Apparently libertarianism cannot exist in nature, except at libertarian conventions or in artificial political greenhouses like a university dormitory. When released into the real world, without crutches to support it, libertarianism withers and dies on the vine. Given the utter inability of this political philosophy to stand up to the pressures of reality, why in the world should anyone take you - or libertarianism - seriously?
Sure, finding a fully libertarian government is virtually impossible, but one can demonstrate that the more libertarian a government has been, the more the nation has prospered; the more statist a government has been in history, the sooner it was brought to ruin.
Um, no that can't be demonstrated.
I could point out all the Keynesian predictions of doom and gloom for the economy in 1947 when the soldiers would return from WWII, but the Austrians predicted a real boom (not a bubble either). Who was right?
That depends on your context. In Europe, it was a total bust. And for a time in the USA, it was a total bust. The Austrians also mis-identified the source of the post-WW2 boom. You see, it isn't sufficient to be right. One must be right for the
correct reason. Predicting that it will rain because you saw birds feeding out your window this morning is not scientific. It may indeed rain, but it had nothing to do with seeing birds.
I could point out the Keynesians who proclaimed over and over again that certain government policies would eradicate depressions, yet the Austrians called the tech bubble bust and the housing bubble bust.
Feel free to do so. Stick around for questions.
