01
Aug
2015
Potpourri
==> This podcast was not nearly as sultry as the image suggests.
==> Ron Paul responds to Paul Krugman’s “Old Man and the CPI.” (My own post coming soon…)
==> Tom Woods interviews Carlos Morales, a former Child Protective Services (CPS) worker. This is really good stuff for filling in a big hole in libertarian theory. There are people who are fine even with privatized courts and tanks but wonder, “What do we do about abusive parents in a free society?” This interview doesn’t provide the whole answer, but it shows that, “Just have the State fix it” doesn’t work here either.
==> I can’t remember if I already linked this, but Bob Higgs singled out Dan Sanchez’s essay on the State and war in his talk at the Mises Institute.
I deal with exactly that parenting question in my forthcoming book Bob. It’s a version of the Nirvana fallacy. We certainly have “parenting failure” all the time, but that doesn’t mean ipso facto that the state will do better. It’s comparative institutional analysis all the way down. Plus, we have to talk about the role played by non-market institutions of civil society here: how can houses of worship, extended family, charities, other volunteer organizations, or friends/neighbors help parents who are struggling? They will be in a much better position to understand the problems and know what to do, not to mention have stronger incentives to do it right, than will the state.
Book comes out September 10. Table of contents here: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/hayeks-modern-family-/?K=9781137448224 20% off for AMazon Prime at Amazon.
Private and safe vetted AnCap neighborhoods with private streets and schools and no druggies or thuggies would be a perfect place to raise children. I suspect the main reason people oppose AnCap is because they just don’t care about THE CHILDREN. Heartless people.
Is Krugman not smart enough to understand the Austrian argument that new credit money may not appear in the CPI in the short run and that its most pernicious impact is through the price distortions in the capital structure and through unsustainable bubbles? Or is he just dishonest? If we’re so wrong, why won’t he engage our actual positions?
Keynesians understand that market manipulations can impact structure, they just think it matters. Aggregation is what matters. Notice how in this example, the capital structure is shifted to producing ice cream flavors that nobody wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCtgiVYradg
We could attempt to engage Krugman’s positions, just as soon as he holds one position long enough.
I keep asking, “What exactly do you mean by austerity?”
But he won’t say.
In lieu of understanding that new funny money will most likely go into asset bubbles and price distortions in the capital structure, Krugman is calling us a bunch of racists. But he did post my comment:
“[T]hey surely think of it as a plot to take away their completely earned gains and give them to THOSE PEOPLE”. As someone two years older than Krugman and who had a low draft number (and who has been an Austrian since 1973), THOSE PEOPLE have always been the military industrial complex and the 1%. This has been THE central Ron Paul theme for over four decades. Krugman should take note.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/the-old-man-and-the-cpi/
That was also the inadvertent point of Daniel Kuehn’s paper on 1920 and the Austrians.
Almost like some spooky Cantillon effect:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-03/fed-finally-figures-out-soaring-student-debt-reason-exploding-college-costs