Rumford

Sounds like a really interesting book! I read the synopsis and the mainstream is sorely in need of a approach that acknowledges the extreme complexity and heterogeneity of an economy. Nothing irks me more than to see Paul Krugman speak of the world as if it can be quantified in a handful of "aggregate" variables and then blame his political enemies any time things don't go according to plan.

Your instincts are not wrong, believe it or not. Unfortunately most economists fall short of the current state of their science. The first thing one needs to understand about economics is how rife it is with special pleading from selfish interests, because the output of economic science is so important to justifying public policy prescriptions. One thing that is constantly ignored is how government fiddling with the interest rate has a way of warping the capital structure into unsustainable configurations. You don't need an economics Nobel Prize to know that when Venezuela puts price controls on food the grocery stores go empty. But there are much more powerful special interests served by price controls on borrowed capital, so a lot of effort goes into willfuly bad "economics" aimed at justifying the practice.

The truth will out, complicated character-assassination plots notwithstanding.

Imagine what would happen if the Pentagon were held to Sarbanes-Oxley the way private businesses are.

The existence of central planning anywhere in Western financial systems is even more insulting. After watching the examples of our good neighbors to the East you'd think we would have learned our lesson by now.

The latter half of the 19th century up to WW1 was the USA's longest sustained period of high growth and high economic mobility. No central bank. Moderate deflation was the norm. According to the likes of Paul Krugman Americans should have been eating dirt and living in caves by 1913, but the exact opposite happened. Growth that the Keynesian technocrats have yet to match.

Except even then, government intervention in money fixed a certain price ratio of gold and silver. When that ratio no longer reflected the real market prices, chaos predictably appeared in the banking system. Go back over the history of the late 19th century panics and you'll notice one metal was fleeing the country and causing a lot of controversy. That's a government price control at work, not unfettered capitalism. The Federal Reserve Act was the wrong solution.

And yet even with the Fed, there's the stubborn little fact of the crash of 1920 -- bigger than that of 1929 -- and the rapid recovery that followed. The Fed, Congress and the Presidency did basically nothing and it was over in 18 months. So judging from the objective facts laying before us, it looks like the central planners perform best when they avoid central planning.

Well, one satirical short story and actual historical socialism's mountains of corpses.

Like maybe don't put a Soviet-style central committee in charge of the money supply?

It's depressing to me that modern economies like the US and Europe can be so shot through with central planning, and then when they produce bad results everyone pretends it's the fault of some freewheeling laizzes-faire policy that never existed.

Ever read Harrison Bergeron?

Making everyone equally happy is impossible, so the regime ultimately resorts to making everyone equally miserable.

Past experience makes me pretty confident of what I'll find this time.

Point taken, and I'm glad you see the merit in the discussion about what things the state has any right to do. After all, sometimes trespassing is the right thing to do. I certainly hope the fire department doesn't wait to be invited if they notice my house is burning down!

I guess I'm just extremely certain that after studying the lineage of a ban like this, one would discover that no, it really isn't necessary. Maybe I'll go test that hypothesis later.

What if they already are? I can think of a handful of newsletters that command a three-figure annual subscription price. The people who buy them must regard them as useful and of sufficient quality. It could be that the rabble of news sites drowning in ads are mostly schlock, and that their business model is one of attempting to monetize some of your least-attentive moments.

> "Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up"

I'm a big believer in Chesterton's Fence too, but what do you do about fences put up by someone who had no right to put it there? If someone erected a wall through the middle of your kitchen, would you have the same reticence to tear it down? The way I see it, the state has no right to enforce a ban like this, and we would be justified in ignoring and circumventing it.

The simplest thing I could suggest is to repeal all government-enforced occupational licensing. For heaven's sake you need a state license just to give manicures. In America.

This includes everything from manicurists to medical doctors. Repealing these would do two things. First, it would eliminate an unnecessary barrier of entry into a wide variety of occupations, unleashing a great many new job opportunities. Second, it would give consumers -- particularly the poor -- access to low-cost alternatives that today are illegal. Government approval is no guarantee of quality anyway. We don't need it.

I would also suggest eliminating the Federal Reserve System and its monetary policy of gradual inflation. America's period of greatest economic growth was between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Under a regime of moderate deflation the economy grew 4% year-over-year for a sustained period. Living standards rose across the board. Economic mobility was high. I believe this to be directly attributable to the incentives that exist under a monetary policy of slow deflation: saving is rewarded, prices fall over time, yet innovation and wise investment are greatly rewarded. (Gradual inflation, on the other hand, impels people to borrow and borrow a lot, which just on its own reduces one's economic mobility. Excessive borrowing can also be understood as consuming too much in the present at the cost of the future, which is where the boom-bust cycle comes from. Gradual inflation also makes saving extremely difficult. Anyone who doesn't want their savings to erode over time is forced to become a speculator. It subsidizes Wall Street at the expense of every holder of Dollars.)

Okay, so the 50 million number emerges gradually. What do you suppose the first million are doing while the other 49 gradually emerge? Unless they're complete derelicts, they're going to be looking for ways to make themselves more productive again. How many of them will not succeed?

There does happen to be historical precedent for this in the many other technological revolutions modern industry has seen. Can you find one that resulted in one seventh of the country just sitting on their hands strictly because they had nothing to contribute (and not because government "safety nets" paid them to do so)?

You're probably right. For example: Even though you can buy a Thinkpad directly from Lenovo, Best Buy still exists.

There are some interesting comments in here about how tough the struggle is for car dealerships, but I don't think that necessarily justifies their existence or mitigates the point of this article.

If what the dealerships do is valuable enough to the customer, they would exist even without the ban on direct sales. But I think we can all intuit that if the ban were lifted, buying a car would be a very different (and better) experience.

Oh not this again. First of all, Friedman advocated a negative income tax as a replacement to the ad-hoc mess of redistributive taxes, grants and welfare programs that exist now. Add a UBI to food stamps, unemployment benefits, farm subsidies, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the problems only get worse.

Second, this doomsday scenario of 50 million people waking up one day to discover there isn't a single thing in the world they can do to feed themselves is such hyperbolic nonsense you might as well be asking how opponents of a UBI plan to deal with a meteor demolishing Texas. Economies change. Sometimes a profession becomes obsolete. The people involved in it go elsewhere and on the whole everyone gets richer. It may sound unpleasant but it's only the same thing mankind has done a thousand times over already with great success. Unless you're mad about the fact that you don't have to milk your own cows anymore. This supposed choice between killing, jailing, or subsidizing millions of people is a false dichotomy that would sound like a joke to me if so many weren't sincerely buying into it. The other and far more reasonable option is to let free human beings navigate a changing world by adapting in the way each of them sees fit. They do it all the time. They don't need some savior swooping in with armloads of other people's money.

Please elaborate. Is that a reason to dismiss the argument? Is it not obvious that tax payers are naturally at odds with tax eaters?

Is it not an option to just stop visiting these sites?

I suppose they should be commended for the effort, but the other issue is that the experimental group is unlikely to represent what things would be like under a truly universal basic income. Incentives throughout the economy will shift and cause reactions none of us can predict, except in very broad strokes. For example, €1000/mo for a tiny experimental group will probably not have the same buying power as the same amount given to millions.

The Friedman negative income tax would surely be better than the complicated patchwork of taxes and welfare programs modern countries have today, if only for its simplicity.

I would not mind seeing an experiment in putting everyone on a BI and then taxing at a flat rate like that. What makes the welfare we know so terrible is that for all its good intentions, it works out to a system that pays people to do those things that keep them poor in the first place.

Economic experiments can never really have a control group, so what the Dutch government learns from this will depend greatly on the theory they already have when interpreting the data.

At least they have avoided giving it an Orwellian name including the phrase "free trade". Free trade can be described in a few sentences. These voluminous inter-governmental managed trade agreements are just protectionism by another name.

> You've built up this imaginary view of the world where every woman is just waiting to catch you out.

You've really got to stop doing that. I've already explained this isn't about women in particular. This is about a culture of guilty-until-proven-innocent in cases where one is being charged with having thoughts or intentions that offend the purveyors of grievance culture. A good example is this very conversation. Your tactic here, over and over again, has been to try and put me on the defensive, as if I have to prove I'm not a sexist.

Just stop it. This is a poisonous way to talk to people. You're only sowing division.

> Treating that person the same as anyone else is your group is what is appropriate.

Are you sure? It seems quite likely to me that this sensitive person would lodge exactly the same complaint for totally different behavior. "They didn't roll out the red carpet for me, what a bunch of hostile stunted brogrammers."

The person driving a wedge between females and tech is not the males in tech, it's the people spreading this paranoia. It's the people telling women that every man who codes needs to be reeducated before the field is safe for her to enter.

The reason stuff like this scares me is not that I'm accustomed to acting like a troll and don't want to stop. It's because I have spent decades treating everyone I meet with respect, and I now feel I could be punished for a crime I didn't commit at any moment. A good reputation takes a lifetime to build, and in this environment it can be undermined in moments. Now that we seem to be surrounded by people on high alert for signs of thoughtcrime, this asset -- my reputation -- which I've spent a lifetime building is on very thin ice just because my race and sex and politics and gender choices don't intersect with any politically correct victim groups. I don't like it, and I'm not going to just shrink back in fear and say nothing about it.

> This is an example of a problem where you think you're being helpful but all you're doing is separating someone from the group and probably harassing them.

Choosing to interpret clumsiness as "abuse" is EXACTLY the problem he's describing. If "jumping over each other to help her" is inappropriate, then someone needs to describe what is appropriate when the group is trying to go out of their way to welcome someone who isn't the group's usual demographic. It is not OK to label everything they do as abusive without explaining what your standard for good behavior would be.

> Were you doing it because you were nice or because it was a woman and you hoped to get something in return?

And then you accuse him of viewing all women with suspicion. Do you not see the hypocrisy?

> Your whole post is about how sneaky and devious you see women as and how you fear for your safety due to these traits.

Again, stupendously wrong. I think you're twisting his words this way on purpose and it turns my stomach that people are getting away with this.

He's not complaining about "women" being "devious." He's complaining about the poisonous and paranoid culture that is created when certain groups have carte blanche to hang the scarlet letter of "Harassment" on you for God-only-knows what reason.

There is no question we should treat people with respect. But whether they belong to some minority, or some supposedly aggrieved group, DOES NOT MATTER. A person is a person. Isn't that the goal of "equality"?

If there's a way you need other people to act in order for you to feel comfortable, fine, you have every right to tell people what those boundaries of yours are. At the same time though, your comfort zone does not automatically obligate everyone around you to change.

Sure, that's pretty much my point. It's all about the incentives. When the job description and rewards say "take people's stuff," then that's what they'll do.

I'd argue that the profit motive is fine, private security works without this problem. The issue with asset forfeiture laws is that they create an incentive to violate the fourth amendment. The funny thing about this New Mexico law -- all it does is echo the Constitution. It shouldn't be necessary.

Exactly. If economic growth was just like microbe growth in a petri dish, sure, a simple equation would suffice. But people choose and act based on their own thoughts, opinions, and goals, and they are always readjusting to new input and information. Economics can tell us reliably that if you add supply, you press the price downward. What economics can't tell you is what crazy and amazing things the humans will do in response to that.