11 More Hard Facts About The Housing Recovery [View article]
Capitalism is the economic expression of freedom from tyranny. Socialism, fascism, racism, and mobism are all on the looterism end of the economic spectrum. A populace can be a collective around any of these ideas. If they collectively believe in freedom from tyranny, then every individual will be free to store their own labor (capital is stored labor). If they choose not to share then that's their business. The benefit from this is that capital is far more powerful at wiping out poverty than charity.
Capital provides the ditch digger a backhoe. Capital provides the sick research into medicine that creates cures. Capital basically gives us the time necessary to study the earth and find even better ways to use it so that the costs of production are constantly falling, but in order to do this capital must be safe from looters.
Using gov to justify looting in the name of "compassion" is a sure fire way to create austerity and create poverty. You may like to pat yourself on the back for how noble you think you are, but people can't eat arrogance. This is why Europe is struggling to deliver on their promises of compassion, why the Soviet union is gone after failing to deliver on theirs, and why Cuba and N Korea are seas of poverty with a wealthy elite, ruling class that gets richer while the rest get poorer.
Just because you make speeches and declare yourself compassionate because you hate the effects of gravity and all the pain it creates when people fall down, doesn't mean you can pass a law to repeal it or get everyone to collectively not believe in it and make it go away. The universe is run by some very real laws, and you can either accept that (reason) and build a ever growing society that gets richer at an exponential pace, or you can deny it and demand you have wealth right now, which means you and everyone you convince to believe this will live in poverty now and into the future as long as you cling to a fanatical position.
The voluntary transactions between any two private citizens is personal.
The only point at which gov may step in is when transactions begin to cause harm. Then gov process can begin, starting with the presumption of innocence. Then evidence must be presented, and the evidence must show damages. This process must be proscribed by a legislative body, and the legislative body must not pass this job off to an executive.
Over time people learn the full cost of voluntary transactions, and then they can deduce which ones work and which ones don't.
Legislators love to pass this responsibility off to unelected regulators who then become judge, jury, and executioner. Now the legislator has something to sell. Just pay me to write the rules that allow the regulator to make doing business so expensive, that a smaller player can't compete. Presto, the people who just argued for regulators, just created the scenario where they will be decrying the "in bed" nature of politicians and big business.
You will find there is a difference between what you want gov to do, and what it actually can do. Good intentions are not substitutes for what really be done to bring the intentions to pass. So just saying we need regulators to stop business from making mistakes, doesn't mean that that is what is going to happen. Without the proper process, all you do is add fuel to the fire for what leads to business mistakes.
The problem with poor process and an improper division of power, is that without such, regulators won't just induce malinvestment. They will induce everyone to make the same malinvestment.
Funny how the same people claim there is a right to privacy, suddenly want everyone's personal information exposed, because "its the law".
The FDIC enters banks whenever they want to, to examine their books. That's why its know as a call report, the call you for it.
The bank hasn't been convicted of a crime, nor is there even probable cause to assume a crime has been committed. They just want to check to make sure you are doing a good job.
Again, if they know what a good job is, then they should quit the gov and go start banks that will do a better job than all of the other banks and get all the customers. This is the same logic for the Patriot Act. Check on people before something goes wrong. Which is a violation of rights, and just creates the economics for power to be abused.
Force and fraud are involuntary transactions, that means one person is harmed for the benefit of another. A voluntary transactions is an attempt to make both lives better. You can never regulate that to even make sure you improve the odds. If you could, no nation on earth would have any poor people.
Again, gov can regulate with regards to force and fraud, because the populace can give the gov a grant of force. The gov can't regulate with regards to voluntary transactions based on free association in such a way to make sure no such interactions ever result in failure. Think about that. If gov employees could guarantee that investments never go bad, then they should be able to institute perfect rules from the beginning. In that case the, since we've always had regulators and have always had problems, they clearly can't deliver on their promise of no bad investments.
This is not true of laws against force and fraud. Gov can clearly do what it claims, in convicting people based on the rules of evidence found in the process designed to limit that force. What this also suggests is that instead of having taxes collected to fund police, it may be better to make police private. How many times have people called the police only to be told, "We're to busy for that"? If they are being paid by the caller, they would be on their way the same way a home security system provider responds to complaints.
Gov regulators don't operate this way. The come into your property and search your information before you have even been accused of a crime. They impose penalties without a court, and if you do go to court and win, guess who gets to still come in and check things out? Of course, this time they are angry. They can cause you to have so many costs if they target you, that they can shut you down even if you win in court.
In other words they get to spy on you. Just like the Patriot Act. We punish the innocent with such practices, and subsidize the guilty. Because if you are spending resources on both the guilty and the innocent, you won't have as much as you could have on the guilty.
If the bill of rights and the presumption of innocence are going to be discarded for the sake of "regulating" business (private, voluntary associations as opposed to fraud), then the standard needs to be perfection to mitigate the risk of the dangers you unleash by doing that.
Are you suggesting that there are limits to what regulators can do?
By the way, a straw man is when I say, "you hate all regulations", when what I really said was, "I think there are limits to what regulators can do".
Exploring what the limits of regulators can do, be it marriage or a bank (which is just another form of association) is completely legitimate. You just don't want to answer it because you know the answer hurts your position.
Its a simple principal. Look at the movie Castaway. A single island inhabitant has the ultimate in trade barriers, yet the lack of people with which to trade creates a very austere lifestyle. You can only consume what you can produce, and since you have to do everything yourself, there just isn't time to make lots of different things. Life gets so austere, even though you own all the wealth, that you are ready to risk your life to go find other humans with which to trade. Such examples are the foundations of what economies are - the sum total of human action in pursuit of an ever higher standard of living as a barrier against death.
I like the "Man from La Mancha" version. "See life as it should be, rather than it is." Which was a reason to justify fantasy in the face of stark realities. However, if we allow it, the reality of what we can do by taking advantage of how nature works (production only comes from learning not coercion), can make our reality even better than our dreams.
Europe's Pain Is America's Gain, Not Bane [View article]
"just disallow imports from countries that don't meet our announced requirements." "prices rise"
That's exactly what a tariff is. There is no getting around it. It is what it is. The outcome will still be no jobs, but now everything costs more. Car factories and textile mills won't come roaring back to life. The problem isn't that other countries don't make themselves less attractive for investment, the problem is that we do it to ourselves.
We have an income tax that rewards consumption (gotta get that aggregate demand going don't you know), we have a CB that wants to create a wealth effect so people will consume (again aggregate demand), and we do fiscal stimulus to get consumers going. Then we wonder why after all this encouragement that they are buying cheap gadgets?
I'm telling you that whenever you trade, over time you will get more and have to work less. In theory you could have a completely unemployed domestic populace that has a very high standard of living. They live off capital (stored labor), that is constantly growing and providing enough to live off of. This would occur because there would be plenty of economic opportunity, and contrary to what the luddites think, robots would be welcome and so would immigrants.
Comparative advantage, ever expanding choice, and ever growing technology would provide limitless opportunities that would constantly be improving our standard of living. Just because we have allowed gov to create bad domestic economic policies, doesn't mean we should double down on that with bad foreign trade policies as well. I've read that some of our highest tariffs are on some of the worlds poorest countries.
Gov employees can't regulate with regards to voluntary transactions. That would require them to have superior market knowledge. The only way they could have that is if the public granted them thant knowldge. If the public already had that knowledge, then why would they need to give it to gov?
Think about the value special market knowledge would have. If gov employees knew how to make sure all investments made a great return, why in the world would they accept a few million from gov when they have knowledge that is worth billions or trillions.
If FDIC regulators know how to build the bank that every consumer wants, but that no banker will provide, then they could leave the FDIC, start the perfect bank, and get every bank customer in the country to patronize it. Of course they don't do this, so the only conclusion is that they don't have special market knowledge.
Free markets, markets free from force and fraud, eventually purge bad investments. Gov imposed force and fraud on markets bails out bad business. Eventually, there is so much bad business that the gov notes issued for the bailouts lose more and more of their value, which reduces their purchasing power. An expropriation tax reduces purchasing power, thus gov policies that don't raise expropriation taxes but that issue notes for bailouts is also a tax.
Dodd Frank has the same effect of raising interest rates, at the same time the Fed is trying to lower interest rates. If you don't want corrupt business practices to be rewarded, don't give the gov the power to regulate voluntary transactions. When you do, all you do is create the economics for business to buy politicians and eventually the rules will be written that crush new and smaller competition.
Again, are you seeing a growth in the number of banks, or are the larger banks getting bigger and bigger?
11 More Hard Facts About The Housing Recovery [View article]
Capital provides the ditch digger a backhoe. Capital provides the sick research into medicine that creates cures. Capital basically gives us the time necessary to study the earth and find even better ways to use it so that the costs of production are constantly falling, but in order to do this capital must be safe from looters.
Using gov to justify looting in the name of "compassion" is a sure fire way to create austerity and create poverty. You may like to pat yourself on the back for how noble you think you are, but people can't eat arrogance. This is why Europe is struggling to deliver on their promises of compassion, why the Soviet union is gone after failing to deliver on theirs, and why Cuba and N Korea are seas of poverty with a wealthy elite, ruling class that gets richer while the rest get poorer.
Just because you make speeches and declare yourself compassionate because you hate the effects of gravity and all the pain it creates when people fall down, doesn't mean you can pass a law to repeal it or get everyone to collectively not believe in it and make it go away. The universe is run by some very real laws, and you can either accept that (reason) and build a ever growing society that gets richer at an exponential pace, or you can deny it and demand you have wealth right now, which means you and everyone you convince to believe this will live in poverty now and into the future as long as you cling to a fanatical position.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The only point at which gov may step in is when transactions begin to cause harm. Then gov process can begin, starting with the presumption of innocence. Then evidence must be presented, and the evidence must show damages. This process must be proscribed by a legislative body, and the legislative body must not pass this job off to an executive.
Over time people learn the full cost of voluntary transactions, and then they can deduce which ones work and which ones don't.
Legislators love to pass this responsibility off to unelected regulators who then become judge, jury, and executioner. Now the legislator has something to sell. Just pay me to write the rules that allow the regulator to make doing business so expensive, that a smaller player can't compete. Presto, the people who just argued for regulators, just created the scenario where they will be decrying the "in bed" nature of politicians and big business.
You will find there is a difference between what you want gov to do, and what it actually can do. Good intentions are not substitutes for what really be done to bring the intentions to pass. So just saying we need regulators to stop business from making mistakes, doesn't mean that that is what is going to happen. Without the proper process, all you do is add fuel to the fire for what leads to business mistakes.
The problem with poor process and an improper division of power, is that without such, regulators won't just induce malinvestment. They will induce everyone to make the same malinvestment.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The FDIC enters banks whenever they want to, to examine their books. That's why its know as a call report, the call you for it.
The bank hasn't been convicted of a crime, nor is there even probable cause to assume a crime has been committed. They just want to check to make sure you are doing a good job.
Again, if they know what a good job is, then they should quit the gov and go start banks that will do a better job than all of the other banks and get all the customers. This is the same logic for the Patriot Act. Check on people before something goes wrong. Which is a violation of rights, and just creates the economics for power to be abused.
Force and fraud are involuntary transactions, that means one person is harmed for the benefit of another. A voluntary transactions is an attempt to make both lives better. You can never regulate that to even make sure you improve the odds. If you could, no nation on earth would have any poor people.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
Oh yeah.
http://bit.ly/JJH7WX
And when has banking never really been regulated?
http://bit.ly/JJHa4N
http://bit.ly/JJHa4R
Again, gov can regulate with regards to force and fraud, because the populace can give the gov a grant of force. The gov can't regulate with regards to voluntary transactions based on free association in such a way to make sure no such interactions ever result in failure. Think about that. If gov employees could guarantee that investments never go bad, then they should be able to institute perfect rules from the beginning. In that case the, since we've always had regulators and have always had problems, they clearly can't deliver on their promise of no bad investments.
This is not true of laws against force and fraud. Gov can clearly do what it claims, in convicting people based on the rules of evidence found in the process designed to limit that force. What this also suggests is that instead of having taxes collected to fund police, it may be better to make police private. How many times have people called the police only to be told, "We're to busy for that"? If they are being paid by the caller, they would be on their way the same way a home security system provider responds to complaints.
Gov regulators don't operate this way. The come into your property and search your information before you have even been accused of a crime. They impose penalties without a court, and if you do go to court and win, guess who gets to still come in and check things out? Of course, this time they are angry. They can cause you to have so many costs if they target you, that they can shut you down even if you win in court.
In other words they get to spy on you. Just like the Patriot Act. We punish the innocent with such practices, and subsidize the guilty. Because if you are spending resources on both the guilty and the innocent, you won't have as much as you could have on the guilty.
If the bill of rights and the presumption of innocence are going to be discarded for the sake of "regulating" business (private, voluntary associations as opposed to fraud), then the standard needs to be perfection to mitigate the risk of the dangers you unleash by doing that.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
By the way, a straw man is when I say, "you hate all regulations", when what I really said was, "I think there are limits to what regulators can do".
Exploring what the limits of regulators can do, be it marriage or a bank (which is just another form of association) is completely legitimate. You just don't want to answer it because you know the answer hurts your position.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
I know you hate regulation, but the only alternative to regulation is throwing people in jail after people get killed.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
Europe's Pain Is America's Gain, Not Bane [View article]
http://bit.ly/Ky7Edx
Its a simple principal. Look at the movie Castaway. A single island inhabitant has the ultimate in trade barriers, yet the lack of people with which to trade creates a very austere lifestyle. You can only consume what you can produce, and since you have to do everything yourself, there just isn't time to make lots of different things. Life gets so austere, even though you own all the wealth, that you are ready to risk your life to go find other humans with which to trade. Such examples are the foundations of what economies are - the sum total of human action in pursuit of an ever higher standard of living as a barrier against death.
I like the "Man from La Mancha" version. "See life as it should be, rather than it is." Which was a reason to justify fantasy in the face of stark realities. However, if we allow it, the reality of what we can do by taking advantage of how nature works (production only comes from learning not coercion), can make our reality even better than our dreams.
Europe's Pain Is America's Gain, Not Bane [View article]
That's exactly what a tariff is. There is no getting around it. It is what it is. The outcome will still be no jobs, but now everything costs more. Car factories and textile mills won't come roaring back to life. The problem isn't that other countries don't make themselves less attractive for investment, the problem is that we do it to ourselves.
We have an income tax that rewards consumption (gotta get that aggregate demand going don't you know), we have a CB that wants to create a wealth effect so people will consume (again aggregate demand), and we do fiscal stimulus to get consumers going. Then we wonder why after all this encouragement that they are buying cheap gadgets?
I'm telling you that whenever you trade, over time you will get more and have to work less. In theory you could have a completely unemployed domestic populace that has a very high standard of living. They live off capital (stored labor), that is constantly growing and providing enough to live off of. This would occur because there would be plenty of economic opportunity, and contrary to what the luddites think, robots would be welcome and so would immigrants.
Comparative advantage, ever expanding choice, and ever growing technology would provide limitless opportunities that would constantly be improving our standard of living. Just because we have allowed gov to create bad domestic economic policies, doesn't mean we should double down on that with bad foreign trade policies as well. I've read that some of our highest tariffs are on some of the worlds poorest countries.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
Think about the value special market knowledge would have. If gov employees knew how to make sure all investments made a great return, why in the world would they accept a few million from gov when they have knowledge that is worth billions or trillions.
If FDIC regulators know how to build the bank that every consumer wants, but that no banker will provide, then they could leave the FDIC, start the perfect bank, and get every bank customer in the country to patronize it. Of course they don't do this, so the only conclusion is that they don't have special market knowledge.
The Housing Recovery: An Update [View article]
Dodd Frank has the same effect of raising interest rates, at the same time the Fed is trying to lower interest rates. If you don't want corrupt business practices to be rewarded, don't give the gov the power to regulate voluntary transactions. When you do, all you do is create the economics for business to buy politicians and eventually the rules will be written that crush new and smaller competition.
Again, are you seeing a growth in the number of banks, or are the larger banks getting bigger and bigger?