[blackshoe]

Don't know Gee, and Rothbard's dead. I do think his The Case Against the Fed was a little over the top, at least without more evidence than I saw in it. So far, his Man, Economy, and State doesn't seem very far from what I understand of von Mises' Human Action, which I'm also reading.

[jdeegan]

 blackshoe, on 2011-November-28, 16:50, said:

Don't know Gee, and Rothbard's dead. I do think his The Case Against the Fed was a little over the top, at least without more evidence than I saw in it. So far, his Man, Economy, and State doesn't seem very far from what I understand of von Mises' Human Action, which I'm also reading.

von Mises, Schumpeter and Milton Friedman are excellent. Rothbard was traumatized because his parents were communists (for them it was only that they were anti-Tsar and anti-pogrom). Raised in this environment, he evidently picked up on The Road to Serfdom as an intellectual way out. It seems to have worked for him, but it made him a terrible economist. Personally, I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, but you gotta have law and order.

[blackshoe]

Seems to me what you "gotta have" is respect for your fellow citizens and respect for their rights. "Law and order" for its own sake is a dangerous road.

[phil_20686]

Just seems to me that libertarians live in a Utopian fantasy. One of my favorite political insights is that, `If people behave perfectly, all forms of government are equal', and its collorary `the purpose of government is deal with the fact that people act badly`.

Any system based on people behaving well is doomed to failure in the real world, because there are always some people who won't, and then there are more people, who will refuse to participate because other people are taking advantage of the system. If you start by assuming that in the absence of corrective measures people will spontaneously behave well then:

(1) Divorce legislation starts to look pretty unnecessary.
(2) Might as well dismantle the criminal justice system since there won't be any criminals.
(3) National defence looks pointless since war seems impossible if everyone behaves perfectly.


etc etc. In fact, pretty much no regulation is necessary if people will spontaneously behave well and resolve their disputes in an honorable fashion. And then no government would be needed either.

In short, if you beleive that "spontaneous volunteer organisations of free individuals" will be, on the whole, beneficent and generous then I have a bridge I can sell you. In fact, I have a bridge and a pony.

[hrothgar]

 phil_20686, on 2011-November-29, 07:44, said:

In short, if you beleive that "spontaneous volunteer organisations of free individuals" will be, on the whole, beneficent and generous then I have a bridge I can sell you. In fact, I have a bridge and a pony.

Anyone else remember the old Saturday Night sketch where "Steve Forbes" was explaining that with the glorious new flat tax everyone would get their own pony?

[phil_20686]

 hrothgar, on 2011-November-29, 07:58, said:

Anyone else remember the old Saturday Night sketch where "Steve Forbes" was explaining that with the glorious new flat tax everyone would get their own pony?

No, I was thinking of this:http://examinedlife....shes_were_.html.

[PassedOut]

 phil_20686, on 2011-November-29, 08:53, said:

No, I was thinking of this:http://examinedlife....shes_were_.html.

Good piece.

[hrothgar]

 phil_20686, on 2011-November-29, 08:53, said:

No, I was thinking of this:http://examinedlife....shes_were_.html.

Good reference. Well worth reading...
FWIW, I believe that the popularity of the entire Libertarian / Pony meme can be traced back to said SNL sketch

It was brilliant. Sadly, I can't find it on YouTube

[Gerben42]

 phil_20686, on 2011-November-26, 20:49, said:

(1) I really don't understand you here. Why is importing innovation in medicine any different from importing innovation in technology, which I do every time I buy an apple computer? All else being equal innovation should be proportional to population. The only reason the UK would be responsible for less innovation is because we treat less, so less money for drugs companies. OTOH, it does align incentives better. As I understand it the UK has one truly global pharma: GSK. Medicine is not defense technology, there really seems to be no reason at all why I would wish to favour home grown companies over foreign ones when it comes to buying drugs?

(2) I was really thinking of passenger rail. A modern railway system should be competitive with flying for journeys of 2 hours or less by plane. The good bits of continental Europe manage that, Japan manages that easily. America doesnt even seem to have passenger rail, except for a little in the north east which is considered slow and unreliable. To put it in perspectives, the total number of passenger kilometres travelled per year in the US is less than swizterland, a country around 1% your size. Per head of population your rail usage is the lowest of any industrialised country. Your freight does seem to be quite good though, from a global standpoint.

I had the opportunity to take US rail from LA to Santa Barbara. It took a long time but it was a nice ride. Anyway, I guess California would benefit from a railway from LA to SF that takes, say, two and a half hours, rather than taking more than that time to Santa Barbara instead. Given the strict security measures for flying, you won't be faster by plane.

[S2000magic]

 Gerben42, on 2011-November-29, 11:12, said:

I had the opportunity to take US rail from LA to Santa Barbara. It took a long time but it was a nice ride. Anyway, I guess California would benefit from a railway from LA to SF that takes, say, two and a half hours, rather than taking more than that time to Santa Barbara instead. Given the strict security measures for flying, you won't be faster by plane.

I would like to think that a high-speed train between LA and SF would be a good infrastructure investment, but, having lived in CA for my entire life (well, except for 1½ years in NW New Jersey that I'm still trying to forget), I can say with some certainty that they won't get the ridership to justify it. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, in my opinion), Californians don't seem particularly interested in mass transit apart from airplanes.

[phil_20686]

 S2000magic, on 2011-November-29, 11:59, said:

I would like to think that a high-speed train between LA and SF would be a good infrastructure investment, but, having lived in CA for my entire life (well, except for 1½ years in NW New Jersey that I'm still trying to forget), I can say with some certainty that they won't get the ridership to justify it. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, in my opinion), Californians don't seem particularly interested in mass transit apart from airplanes.

People often say this, but its well established than once a major infrastructure project is completely residential patterns chance and people move so that they will use it. Roads create their own traffic and all that.

[whereagles]

One currency would require one government, one culture, one nation. At the present stage, it cannot be done.

An example of what might go wrong is the eurozone at the moment

[S2000magic]

 phil_20686, on 2011-November-29, 12:10, said:

People often say this, but its well established than once a major infrastructure project is completely residential patterns chance and people move so that they will use it. Roads create their own traffic and all that.

Frankly, if they build the high-speed rail (and they're quite gung-ho about it), I hope that people do move and change. You're right historically, but Californians have proven to be a stubborn lot wrt mass transit.

[jdeegan]

 blackshoe, on 2011-November-28, 19:57, said:

Seems to me what you "gotta have" is respect for your fellow citizens and respect for their rights. "Law and order" for its own sake is a dangerous road.

A number of my ancestors were frontier sheriffs. Evidently it was pretty much like the mythology of the old west relates. Bringing law and order was the bringing of civilization. As you might imagine, people who chose to migrate to the edge of the world did not in any way cotton to an oppressive degree of law and order. Distaste for that was why they were where they were in the first place.

[kenberg]

This thread has meandered a bit, as well it might since the premise of one world currency seems (to me) extremely far-fetched. The current problems of the Euro have been mentioned but perhaps there is another example. Back a while exchange rates were set by law or treaty or something. At any rate they were fixed. In many ways, this amounts to one currency. Maybe it was called a buck here, a quid there, but if the ratio was fixed then paying in Francs, Pounds or Dollars really was no different than paying in ones or fives. Except, of course, that the fixed rates got badly out of whack with reality and so got redrawn. One currency would have the problems of the fixed exchange rate without the option of fixing the inevitable troubles. Doesn't sound right to me.


By the way, from the quoted article above, I nominate "I think Matthew Yglesias' response to Josh Chafetz' exercise in wishful thinking was about right, even if Brad DeLong's is more nuanced" for the title of "The first sentence of an article that is most likely to discourage readers from going on to the second sentence".

[phil_20686]

 kenberg, on 2011-November-30, 07:30, said:

This thread has meandered a bit, as well it might since the premise of one world currency seems (to me) extremely far-fetched. The current problems of the Euro have been mentioned but perhaps there is another example. Back a while exchange rates were set by law or treaty or something. At any rate they were fixed. In many ways, this amounts to one currency. Maybe it was called a buck here, a quid there, but if the ratio was fixed then paying in Francs, Pounds or Dollars really was no different than paying in ones or fives. Except, of course, that the fixed rates got badly out of whack with reality and so got redrawn. One currency would have the problems of the fixed exchange rate without the option of fixing the inevitable troubles. Doesn't sound right to me.

Its not quite true, you are thinking basically of the bretton woods agreement I think. THere is a famous trilemma. You can do two of three things in an economy, free capital flows, fixed exchange rate, fixed (controlled) interest rate
The bretton woods treaty worked great until people started liberalising capital flows, then it started to get out of whack. In the end we chose to freely float exchange rates whereas in the past we had controlled capital flows. You can read about it here http://en.wikipedia....ossible_trinity.

This was a result of a changing economic consensus that balance of payments didn't matter, and would be countered by exchange rates. Unfortunately, this has not proved to be the case. I think a more thourough analysis would show that free movement of labour would add a fourth piece to this trilemma, and might let you do all three, as seems to happen in US states. OTOH, fiscal transfers complicate matters too.