Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Economy

  • The Derponomicon: Part 2

    "Please kill me," the book of the dead wailed.
    I’ll swallow your derp!

    On the name Derponomicon: it is a combination of derp and the Greek words nomos (law) and ikona (image). Thus, the name may be translated as “an image of the laws of the dumb.”

    A few years ago, I compiled The Derponomicon from a series of dialogs with a prog who was by far the most infuriatingly stupid person I have ever known. His responses are below. I did not correct his typos.

    In this excerpt, his topic was the following quote from Augustine of Hippo:

    “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.’”

    As far at the Augustine of Hippo quote, it is most certainly in reference to a mideval kingdom system of government. Equating a mideval kingdoms system of government to the modern day US government is once again, like comparing apples and hippos. In modern day US, tax dollars pay for roads, bridges, air traffic safety, clean air, clean water, inspected food, the military, satellites, the infrastructure of plumbing/electric/utilities/etc. we all enjoy, and about a zillion other things. In a kingdom, the people were lucky to get a water source. You literally cannot exist in modern society without taking advantage of what society (I.e. The government) provides. When you step on a sidewalk, or use electricity, or drive on a street in a car that isn’t exploding, etc. You are taking advantage of what the government provided to you.

    Ignorance of history, a conflation of society with govt, and an argument from ignorance.

    A response to my favorite Sowell quote:

    “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

    -Thomas Sowell

    On the Thomas Sowell quote, As I have mentioned before, he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd, which really says a lot about who he speaks to. Of course the lesson of economics is a finite amount of everything, otherwise no one would need to buy it. But that general statement isn’t new casserole true. The first lesson of economics is laziness. People will pay for anything that requires the least amount of work. When people are given the choice between growing their own food for free in their backyard, or buying food at a restaurant or a prepared meal, what will most people choose? When given the choice between paying for produce and meat and making food yourself, and ordering a pizza, what will most people choose? MOST aspects of our economy are built on taking advantage of people’s laziness. People are willing to pay for any product or service that will make their life easier. So generally speaking there is pretty much an unlimited amount of goods and services that Americans are willing to buy if they can afford it, from a service that cleans up dog shit in your yard, to custom hats for your baby. So in America that rule doesn’t really apply. What does however have a finite amount to go around is wealth, and the more wealth we hand up to the top percentages, who know how to manipulate and hide it, in the most literal way takes from everyone else. There are only so many slices of the pie to go around, and when the richest people get the most pieces of pie, that leaves nothing but a slice and some crumbs for everyone else to fight over.

    More baseless smears, more deflection, more yammering that the economy is a zero-sum game. The denial of scarcity is the cherry on top.

  • Another Day, Another IP Think-Piece. We’re Such Party Animals Here At Glibertarians.com!

    Greetings!

    Some time ago, I brought you a piece the primary function of which was to provide a free resource to understand the radical notion, largely held only in libertarian circles, that IP laws are not compatible with libertarian principles. You can find a link to that earlier piece here.

    I’d like to direct you now to a piece that I perhaps should have led off with. It is still by Stephan Kinsella, a Houston, TX patent attorney*, Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers and Director, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (c4sif.org). However, it is a smaller, more condensed version of his primary argument, and is rife with excellent citations and thorough notes that any budding libertarian or anarchist theorist will find invaluable.

    Those aren't creations of the mind, they're creations of a fucking factory. What are you, Q?
    There aren’t many useful pictures that come up when you search “Intellectual Property Images”

    In the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution of the view of self-ownership and how property rights are inherent to this concept. He then goes on to reiterate how IP laws contradict those property rights, which argument those of you who read Against Intellectual Property will already be familiar with.

    The portion that I think our small army of arm-chair commenter-philosophers will find most interesting and conducive to discussion is the latter part of the article. Mr. Kinsella discusses what an IP regime might look like in a stateless society. This directly addresses those who dismiss an idea as being too radical, or unworkable, if no direct formulation is provided of how the idea might play out in a practical fashion.

    When downloaded, the PDF shows a length of 44 pages, but due to the voluminous notes, there is really only about 25 or so pages of narrative text. You can read it over your lunch break! Assuming you work for a weak-kneed progressive who actually allows you to not be working for a precious few minutes in order to eat. No true libertarian master would ever permit such indulgence among his (and I do exclusively use the male pronoun when discussing both libertarians, and business owners) chattel.

     

    *Don’t we have a commenter who is also an attorney in Houston? If you disagree with Mr. Kinsella’s positions, you should meet him for lunch and fight to the death. It’s the only way to prove which one is right.

  • Fair Share

    Of course cats are grumpy... they are nature's perfect killers but we keep picking them up and kissing them.
    Stick it to the fat cats, man.

    Winston Churchill said that a nation that tries to tax itself into prosperity is like a man trying to fly by standing in a bucket and pulling the handle. These sort of statements show why he never gained a reputation for wit and remained a minor British politician.

    Wealth is like a pie and everyone deserves a slice. Right now, a few rich people get most of it and everyone else gets what’s left. Some only get crumbs. The pie needs to be sliced more fairly. There is only so much money out there, so no one can get richer unless someone else gets poorer. This is why our bank accounts get smaller anytime someone wins the lottery. Right-wing nut jobs will tell you that poverty is caused by poor decisions and bad luck, but the truth is it is rich people who push down the poor. Life is better in countries like China and Cuba where the government takes control. That way the common people, not the rich, are in charge. Or just look at Zimbabwe, Africa’s most prosperous country. There, the government went even further. It printed lots of money and gave it to the poor, and everyone became rich because money is the same as wealth.

    Taxing the rich is good for everybody. That’s why the most prosperous period in US history was the 1930s when the top tax rate was 77%. This why the period of FDR’s presidency is called The Great Prosperity. If the government needs more money, it should just raise taxes. The rich people will grumble, but they will pay up because rich people never, ever try to avoid paying taxes by earning less or hiding their money overseas. Also, every time the government raises taxes, the extra money is used to pay down the debt, which reduces the amount of money the government needs to create. This is why everything is cheaper now than 100 years ago and why old people always talk about how a dollar used to be worth a lot less.

    Anyone who disagrees just doesn’t understand economics.

  • The Origin of Poverty and Prosperity

    Let's be honest... the tentacles between the eyes is basically an elephant trunk.
    The benevolent octopus of capitalism reaches out to comfort all.

    Poverty is the default state. It requires no explanation for its origin.

    Prosperity comes from improvements to the means of production. Those improvements require capital, which accumulates through savings. Savings are the result of under-consumption. To put it another way, if nobody saves, there is nothing to borrow or spend on improvements.

    When people are able to save, produce, and trade freely, prosperity tends to come automatically. Unfortunately, the free market has many opponents. There are two main groups. One is groups seeking to stifle competition, such as established businesses, cartels, and labor unions. The other is control freaks upset that people are buying what they want instead of what the control freaks want. The amount of power these groups have set the limit on how prosperous a community can be.

    Instead of letting the market create prosperity automatically, these groups stall the process with absurd, self-serving rules and then demand that the government step in to stimulate the economy when stagnation results. A good example of one such rule was a former law which outlawed the sale of margarine colored to look like butter. Dairy farmers complained this was “unfair” competition, and so demanded a law to stifle their competitors. Some states even passed requiring margarine to be dyed pink to make it less appealing. A margarine dye law stayed on the books in Quebec until 2008. Margarine was invented in 1871.

    The stagnation that results from the accumulation of stupid laws creates pressure for a central bank and periodic attempts to “jump-start” the economy, usually by expanding credit artificially and/or increasing government spending. These credit expansions create a temporary boom followed by an inevitable bust.

    The best way to understand this is to imagine a restaurant owner in a small town. One week, the circus comes and he has many new customers. For some reason, he doesn’t notice they are all clowns and lion tamers. He decides to open another restaurant to handle all the new business. But soon the circus leaves town, and he is forced close the second restaurant. In this example, it is all the fault of the restaurant owner’s poor judgment.

    In another case, bad weather can cause farmers to lose money. But if every farmer in a country has a bad harvest for years on end, it is unlikely that the weather is the culprit. The farms of the USSR had been some of the world’s most productive for centuries. Yet as soon as the communists took over they proceeded to have 70 years of bad harvests, which the communists blamed on the weather. A common joke in the USSR was that if communists took over the Sahara, in a year, there would be a shortage of sand.

    It is the same in a recession when thousands of businesses of all kinds lose money at the same time. The question becomes: why did all these different businesses make the same mistake at the same time? Why did so many people choose to start or expand businesses doomed to fail? The answer is that credit was expanded artificially by a central bank.

    Poverty and economic crises are man-made. When the Roman emperors wanted more money without raising taxes or cutting spending, they issued coins with less silver. But since the new coins were worth less, prices rose. The Emperor Diocletian tried to stop inflation by fixing prices. A Roman historian at the time observed he might as well have commanded the wind not to blow.

    Just as inflation has been blamed on everything except an increase in the amount of money, economic crises have blamed on everything except credit expansions by central banks. The worst economic crisis in history happened a mere 13 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank.

    The idea that printing money, expanding credit by fiat, or increasing government spending will somehow magically lead to prosperity is no different than trying to drink yourself sober or put out a fire with gasoline.

    It is high time for the proponents of flat earth economics to relent and repent.

    Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

    This is known as “bad luck.”

    ― Robert A. Heinlein

  • Raise the Minimum Wage & End Robot Unemployment

    This robot killed thousands of humans in the Emoji Wars and was paid a non-living wage. Now he is penniless and works as a night guard in a toy store for room and board. His name is Gilbert.

    America’s robot unemployment rate is a national disgrace. All across the country, robot engineers sit idle and schematics languish on drawing boards. And why? Because robots are priced out of the market by cut-rate human labor. All this in spite of the presence of millions of dull, repetitive, low-skill jobs which are perfect for robots.

    Yes, robophobia runs rampant–it’s the last acceptable form of discrimination. It’s time to move forward and strike a blow for machine rights. By raising the minimum wage, we can ensure that robots and humans will compete on an even playing field.

    Moreover, more robots mean jobs for engineers & technicians. Moving to a robot-based economy will revitalize America’s manufacturing base. Imagine going through a drive-thru and being served a perfectly cooked hamburger from a gleaming robot with “MADE IN THE USA” proudly stamped on its metal chest. Picture factories in cities like Cleveland and Detroit bustling once more as they churn out robots. Think of all the happy teenagers and college students liberated from the drudgery of summer jobs.

    Other nations like Japan have embraced robots. And Japan’s economy has been in a non-stop boom ever since. All thanks to the magic of high labor costs and robots.

    In the US, robots have largely replaced humans on customer service hotlines, much to everyone’s delight. I know I get a thrill up my spine whenever I hear the robot voice say “for English, press 1”. And I never have to repeat myself to a robot the way I do with people. They get it right the first time, every time. Honestly, who prefers talking to a person over a machine?

    Raise the minimum wage–it’s good for robots, good for business, and good for America.

  • The Legend of Saint Ronald

    One of my guilty pleasures is listening to Hate Radio during drivetime (and being stuck in the Chicago area, that’s a lot of time for remarkably short distances). In theory, I should be laughing equally at the remarkable stupidity of both brands of Hate Radio, but I have to admit that, at least here, Team Red seems to field radio hosts that are… well…. dull. The Team Blue Hate Radio is funnier, much less focus on the personality cult of the host and much more actual unhinged ranting.

    In any case, the Team Blue Hate Radio guy in the morning seems to obsess a lot about Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics, especially how this drives today’s events. Now, despite the fact that Reagan left office almost 30 years ago, apparently everything, EVERYTHING, that’s wrong with our economy devolves back to him and his policies, the Universal Cause. Apparently, he destroyed the middle class through tax cuts, slashes in government spending, reduction of government size, and dramatic scaling back of entitlements. Lots of dark references to “trickle down” and “gutting of social programs to put money in the pockets of the wealthy.”

    On the flip side, Reagan has been all but canonized by Team Red for all these same reasons- the man who slew the dragon of big government and reified the conservatism of forebears like Barry Goldwater. One would think that this should make him into a hero for libertarians: let us conveniently forget the ramping of the Drug War, the institution of urine collection, the expansion of the carceral state, the prosecution of media dealing with sex- all can be forgiven because of the economics, right? Team Red Hate Radio may be boring, but they never miss an opportunity to long for the fiscally conservative days of the pre-Alzheimer’s Gipper.

    Since both Teams and their respective Hate Radio chimps seem to agree that Reagan was the Great Small Government Conservative, let’s look at the data, since in our modern world, we have the ability to make charts and graphs at will with just the click of the mouse. And here, thanks to the radio guy rants, I’ll look at taxes and spending only, putting aside that mysteriously disappearing middle class. One of the common tropes, Red and Blue, is that “Reagan cut taxes.” This statement assumes that the listener is too stupid to know the difference between taxes and tax rates.

    Here’s a graph of government revenues over time:

    Not a map of the Matterhorn

    Wow, look at how that went spiraling down in 1981-1989! Errrr… looking at all revenue must be a mistake, since there are revenue sources other than taxes. Where’s that tax graph?  Oh, here it is!

    Oh, that’s much better

    Clearly, Saint Ronald slashed taxes because… oh, wait. Never mind. It must have been the entitlement taxes he slashed. I’m sure I have that graph around here…

    Whew, that’s even better!

    That’s a dramatic Reagan-era tax cut, isn’t it? Ignore the sound of the narrative collapse, who are you gonna believe, a somewhat retarded radio guy or your lying eyes?

    Well, of course all of this money we took in reduced the debt, right? Because of all that spending reduction by the Team Red Saint. Here’s proof:

    Wayne Gretzky would be proud

    Clearly, those conservatives did a great job of watching the public purse. Well, of course, that inflection point in the debt rise has to be attributed to defense, because spending on social programs was cut unmercifully by those green-eyeshades Reaganites. Any moron can see that:

    Fuck the poor! Fuck ’em I say!

    Now that’s what I call spending cuts. Look at how precipitously welfare spending declined.

    Clearly Team Red and Team Blue are both right- here’s a guy who galloped into battle with Leviathan and slew it, putting to rest permanently the idea of Big Government and unrestrained spending and growth of the state. I’m glad that the Hate Radio guys educated me so well.

  • Do you really think we are going to pay for it?

    Hold on, Mom. I’ll be there as fast as I can.

    It has been said that the Y generation is the most selfish generation there ever was. The “Selfie” generation. Yet, this is one generation that is growing up to face one of the most burdensome public debt in history.

    A few years ago, after she watched some sad sob story on some Canadian Bs Channel, my mother (boomer born in the 50’s) complained to me that old people were left alone and that none of their many children ever came to see them in their old people’s home. Now I do love my mom very much (she can still drain the life out of you with her first world problems), but yet my first thought was “Well… maybe they deserved it. Maybe they screwed up their children so bad that those children don’t care about them anymore.”

    I kind of had the same thought yesterday when I watched this clip from Molyneux.

    He makes references about Y generations kids still living in their parent’s basement, and that the reason they are stuck in their parents’s basement is because their parents had the good life while shoveling public debt down to their kids. Now their kids are stuck with the bill and can’t afford a basement by themselves anymore.

    It led me to go back to my days working in finance and check how was the dear Regime des Rentes du Quebec going. (Quebec Social Security fund if you’d prefer).

    Sad to see. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for all Social Security types of regimes around the Western World. Those Social Security schemes are going dry as we speak.

    Denouncing this as a Ponzi Scheme is no news to any of the people hanging around here. I am well aware that you won’t need any new fainting couches.

    But, knowing all we know about the snowflake generation, do the boomers still think that the Y generation, their kids, that always bring the tab to them, won’t bring the tab to them once the funds run off? Do you really think the Y are going to pay for it? The X might, but if the Y won’t, no one else will. What will you do then, at 80?

    Now it’s the thing that makes me wonder the most about all the public debt accumulation. The boomers seem to think the younger generations will subsidize their lifestyle forever. I’m just a late X, early Y, and I have agreed in my life to play the card I was dealt with, but I can tell you one thing, I don’t think the Y will.

  • Tuesday Night Links

    • Howard Root, founder and CEO of Vascular Solutions, was found not guilty on federal charges spearheaded by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Yes, that Sally Yates. The actions of the federal government under her control were described by one juror as “nothing short of criminal”.

      By the gram? That’s how you know it’s bad for you.

     

    • Kerrygold butter, one of the premier dairy products on the market, cannot be sold in Wisconsin. I’m sure there are perfectly legitimate and logical reasons to protecting consumers from a noted dairy established in 1961, and protecting the Wisconsin dairy farm lobbying interests had nothing to do with it.

     

    • Daniel Crowninshield was sentenced to 41 months in prison for “unlawfully manufacturing firearms”. Special Agent in Charge Jill A. Snyder, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said that Crowninshield “owned and operated a machine shop where he allowed customers with unknown backgrounds to use his machinery to unlawfully manufacture firearms for profit. That activity posed a very dangerous threat to the safety of our communities.”

     

     

     

    H/t Pope Jimbo

  • Journeys Of Entrepreneurship

    Back in 2010 I took a massive left turn at Albuquerque looking for Pismo beach and instead started a business completely out of my area of expertise.

    Up to that point, it had been a strange journey, but ever since I was a young lad I wanted to be in ‘business’ just like my pappy. Entrepreneurship was perfect for me for two reasons: the autonomy it accorded, and for a guy with ADHD and (other non-specified issues as my wife likes to remind me) that was gold. I forget the other reason.

    Oh yeah, I hated answering to people.

    Anyway.

    Alas, with with a newborn attaching its parasitical self to my hip the pressure was on to settle on something.

    Growing up, my father always tried to steer us away from business. He just felt that the aggravation and stress of dealing with debt, the public and employees was too much. Immigrants preferred telling their kids to go work for a company and get secured pension benefits. Hoping for stability was only natural given the amount of uncertainty they lived through. They wanted to keep their children shielded from such stress.

    However, and most of all, dealing with the government was a job onto itself. He always said don’t ever think you can outsmart the government. They will always win in the end so shut up and pay your taxes. Save yourself a headache down the road.

    Sound advice that we most definitely adhere to.

    We didn’t see all the ups and downs he was referring to – often in quite dramatic and crusty delivery.  It made for interesting dinner table one-way talk. You haven’t lived until you witnessed a man deliver an anti-government soliloquy over a plate of veal scaloppine alla Marsala, Sambuca black and cigarettes, while my mother oblivious to everything kept asking if we wanted more whatever endless stream of food she made for the night. My mother was Kitchen Caligula.

    All we saw was a man who provided, through his trade as a tailor, a nice upper-middle class living in the suburbs, thus allowing me the latitude to, well, use Roosevelt Franklin as my avatar. Like most immigrants (those dirty sons of bitches), he came from nothing with scant knowledge of English or French.

    So I wanted that; or something close to it anyway.

    All this to say, I ended up in private daycare by pure luck. I figured what the heck? Get the right people in place and up, up and away!

    And so I thought.

    This is where my real exploration into the nether-world of government regulations, business debt and entrepreneurial acumen began.

    Early on, I got in over my head and had to pull a Duddy Kravitz my way into making sure I had sufficient capital. When I applied for my permit I had to go meet two bureaucrats to make sure I was worthy. All I kept thinking, as they inundated me with paper work, was how useless it all was. One of the woman, probably noticing my irritation, decided to tell me in a more intimate moment in French, ‘I know it’s a lot. But it has to be done. You look at places like Africa…’

    I could scarcely believe my ears. In fact, given I have poor hearing, I didn’t want to believe what she said but the person I was with (a Filipino consultant. I know this story is writing itself) confirmed it.

    The bureaucracy, ladies and gentleman, is the only line of civilization dividing us from Somalia.

    Apparently.

    Alas, I had to go through the motions, sign on the dotted lines and keep my eye on the prize. The stress was through the roof. I talked to quite a few people willing to lend their insights. One person said something that was interesting:

    “People only see the end result and judge you on that. They don’t see the journey it took to get there. If you get there, it’ll be all the more gratifying.” Just like we couldn’t understand (and let’s face it, some people probably don’t even care) what my father went through. We just saw the result.

    Seeing it in this way skews a person’s perception about successful people. Hence, the ‘the owner does nothing all day! He’d be out of business if not for me!”

    I think his comment couldn’t have been truer. Which is why, I think, it’s easy for people to demand the government view businesses with skepticism if not as a source for cash to pay for ‘social needs’. What do they care, right? It’s not their business – don’t excuse the pun.

    I’ve always felt schools should teach business or entrepreneurship, if anything to enlighten students on what business owners face; that they won’t fall prey to superficial cliches and empty slogans about ‘paying your fair share’ and ‘you’re not a good business if you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage’. In other words, not to be finance and business illiterates.

    It’s not fool-proof, since people do weird things. Case in point, the province of Alberta – Oil Country – voted for the NDP; the very party that views oil and gas with suspicion. Or the weird case of small business owners who sometimes vote for the NDP or Liberals. Or doctors who support universal health care which effectively leaves their labor in the hands of bureaucrats. It’s a head scratcher for sure.

    Small business owners are going to tire of being demonized in North America. The former leader of a provincial party here asserted ‘public daycare offers better services than private ones’ which is simply not the case and was a rather irresponsible declaration to make in public. But how to respond instead of the usual letter-to-the-editor or calling a political representative’s office?

    Here in Canada, through the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, business owners finally have a voice and fighting chance to question or challenge onerous government regulations and taxes.

    As a whole, I like to think the fire and brimstone pseudo-populist rhetoric from the likes of Sanders, Warren and Obama will backfire because they’re a stale and stagnant remnant of a dying progressive moment.

    They’re part of an unproductive class looking to rape the productive to further their progressive agenda.

    Despite what they might think, saying ‘you didn’t build that’ is not a an act of encouragement signalling people go out and build their own dreams. You’re coyly implying through such poppycock rhetoric, people serve the state. It’s thanks to the benevolent state we have the opportunity to be able to start and succeed at business.

    It takes a village and all that.

    Yet, while they ludicrously take indirect credit for your success because ‘roads’, they weren’t there when businesses struggled to make payroll or rent.

    All they know is to drive some sort of class warfare wedge waving fists claiming to ‘fight for the people’. Whomever fits the definition of ‘people’ because it sure isn’t me and others like me they’re ‘fighting’ for.

    It’s the reality of things. That person I spoke to was right. No one gives a shit about the process and they prove it in the way they talk about you.

    And that’s that.

    I don’t know. The calculation always seem pretty straightforward to me. No entrepreneurship, no cash flow to pay for ‘free shit’.

    Such is the reality.

    It may not be Pismo Beach, but it’ll do.

     

     

     

     

  • Sunday Links

    NEEDZ MOAR SELF DRIVING CAR!
    I got nothin’ ….so have a generic libertarian image

    You want content?!  Are you daft?  But since it appears we have gained a lot of people, and SP labored long and hard to upgrade this place…

    A CONSPIRACY OF PRIVILEGE, SQUASHED!!!

    Residents of the East Coast express dismay at AGW evidence.

    Ungood, plus ungood, or double plus ungood?

    Afghanistan continues its disintegration.