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Old 10-28-2005, 11:17 AM
tylerdurden tylerdurden is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2004
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Default Re: Bush appoints Bernake Chairmen of the Federal Reserve

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Almost every economist accepts at this point that government institutions such as national currencies, as well as others such as property rights,

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If by "national currencies" you mean "fiat currencies" then you can't have both national currencies and property rights. The entire idea of national currencie is based upon the explicit violation of property rights.

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have historically reduced transaction costs and paved the way for more efficient and faster growing economies and that these institutions are essential components of contemporary economies.

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More efficient... for the politically-connected. And faster growing... when they aren't receeding.

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My sense is that you don't know enough about the discipline of economics to even realize this. The fact that you think markets will reach the optimal solution here by themselves anyway also shows that you don't understand in a larger sense what “the market” means to most economists, in terms of its functioning, capabilities and limitations. Basically, you don’t seem to understand the idea of a collective action problem, the idea of a non-cooperative game, or the general idea of a suboptimal equilibrium. The social world is a lot more complicated than you think.

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There's a lot of self-righteous bluster here but no actual argument. "It won't work because things are more complicated than I think you think they are" is not very convincing.

Regardless of what "most economists" think "the market" is, the fact is that unhindered markets DO reach optimal solutions, and there's no evidence that money is magically exempt from the forces that make this so. Conjure all the "non-cooperative game" and "sub-optimal equilibrium" boogeymen you want - all you're left with is a sophisticated argument for oppression.

You asked for a "contemporary viability of a system of exchange beyond the level of local economies that is not government sponsored or supported." Gold was that system until WWI. Governments may have had their individual names for currency, but if a Dollar, a Franc, and a Pound are all defined as a given weight of gold, they are all the same for practical purposes. Gold was the international standard for trade, and no one government established that - the market forced governments to accept it.

Once governments overinflated during WWI, they had to choose between bankruptcy and abandonment of the gold standard. The results of this have been "stability" for the governments established at the time but unprecedented financial turmoil. Financial ponzi schemes such as the "gold-exchange standard", its spiritual successor, the Bretton Woods agreement, and the disasterous Smithsonian agreement did nothing but create ever-more elaborate methods of wreaking havoc.

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At some point everybody must make a decision about whether it is more important to them to be right or to be righteous. Choosing the former has its rewards, but it generally entails abandoning the inherent satisfaction many people derive from extremist positions, not matter what type of extremism, since they are generally not viable once you actually dig into the empirical world.

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How is freedom more "extremist" than coercion?
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