Irish Liberty Forum

I’ve just published an article on Mises.org entitled:

The Death of the Celtic Tiger
http://mises.org/story/3773

Celtic Circus Tiger: The Irish jump through the hoop for their master

There are a number of ways to make blog traffic statistics more impressive. On a slow day I often logout of my WordPress account, access the Liberty Forum homepage and click “refresh” over and over again to beef up the numbers.

I didn’t have to do that today. My post Trolling For Statism: How Not To Argue With Libertarians was featured on strike-the-root.com. Also featured on that excellent website were the posts Which Party Causes All The Wars? and False and True Connections Between Libertarianism and Conservatism.

I’m also happy to announce that the Irish Liberty Forum passed 20,000 blog views today. Keep it up guys!

The first 10 people to click this link win a pdf of David Friedman’s “The Machinery of Freedom”.

Those who missed out can find a copy here.

I’m currently reading “For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilisation” by Charles Adams and I came across a fascinating description of tax theory during the time of Louis 16th in France. I quote:

Economists in the ancien régime believed that the best medicine to cure poverty was heavy taxation. Indeed, the poorer a region was the heavier it should be taxed. Increased taxation, said these experts, would increase productivity and benefit everyone; consequently, taxes were the appropriate tool to combat poverty.

The poor were like grass– the more they were cut down, the stronger they would become.

Adams is definitely not a libertarian but here he lays out the retarded philosophy that has plagued man since time immemorial, that taxes are a good thing.

Incidentally, the only way to avoid taxes was to become a nobleman by issue of the King or work for the State. Noblemen despised work, as all good aristocrats do. I find this outlook on life compelling when one considers the lens from which Marx, the wealthy landed aristocrat, looked at the world and how much he despised and refused to work for a living, thinking it was beneath him. As has been pointed out before, the intellectuals of today have a lot in common with the aristocracy of 300 years ago: they love the State for the privileges it grants them but they also despise work.

I’ll revisit this in another post once I’ve finished the book but Adams demonstrates how the feudal system resulted from the savage taxation from Emperor Commodus to the collapse of Rome in which farmers preferred to become chattel slaves to the local biggest landowner (who was normally exempt from tax and was granted his land as a political favour) than actually pay the taxes and starve. Parents used to sell their children as slaves just to pay the tax collectors.

This interview really settles the whole is Ron Paul a minarchist or not debate for me.

Question: Dr. Paul, what do you say to people who advocate self-government and who don’t simply want to return to the Constitution?

Dr. Paul: Great, that’s fine, I think that’s really what my goal is. Isn’t it interesting that if you have a government they’ll want us all to be socialistic and use us, but they’ll never let an enclave to become libertarian but if we lived in a libertarian society we would have no qualms if people wanted to live socialistically?

I have almost finished reading Walter Block’s epic treatise The Privatisation of Roads and Highways. It has been a fascinating read that has answered many of the questions I had about how a free society would deal with the insurmountable challenge of private road ownership. Here I will do my best at channelling David Gordon, and summarise the book.

Summary

The central pillar of the book is extremely straightforward:

What reasons are there for advocating the free-market approach for the highway industry? First and foremost is the fact that the present government ownership and management has failed. The death toll, the suffocation during urban rush hours, and the poor state of repair of the highway stock are all eloquent testimony to the lack of success which has marked the reign of government control. [p. 12]

Block argues correctly that the government, lacking the profit and loss mechanism, can never be fully motivated to alleviate the problems on our roads. The government will never be financially punished for poor management decisions. It cannot go bankrupt like a private business owner can. Therefore, the chief cause of all misery on our roads is due to government ownership of roads. Block goes on:

Now consider the case where a restaurant goes out of business. The proximate causes are badly cooked and cold food, surly service, dirty conditions, lack of personal safety, poor decor, etc. But the ultimate responsibility, surely, lies with management. It and it alone failed to hire good cooks, to ensure that the waitresses, busboys, cleaners, bouncers, interior decorators, exterior architects, etc., did their assigned tasks in a satisfactory way. [p. 186]

The restaurant analogy is one of the recurring motifs of Block’s book. It is an excellent illustration of Block’s secondary point: proximate vs. ultimate causes. Block argues that instead of focussing on the ultimate cause of road fatalities – government manangement of roads – economists have been too concerned with the proximate causes – drink driving, speed and driver error. The solution to the road problem is the to allow the same market system that provides us with computers, cars and houses to provide our roads.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Graham & Brian, I’m gonna try and attatch a script that will add various buttons to the bottom of this post. Here goes:

On further reflection it appears I’m incompetent at adding links and codes that link to the post in question.

Ok, now I appear to get the gist of this. I have managed to get the “Share and Save” button to link back to one particular post. As far as i know, WordPress does not allow automatic share button additions to blogs. So we have to do it manually each time.

Here’s what to do if you want to add the button to your posts…
1. publish your newly written post
1.1 highlight and copy the button in this post
2. click “Edit” in your newly written post
2.1 paste the button at the bottom of newly written post
3. go to HTML view
4. in place of POSTTITLE, write the title of your post eg. “It’s Just Harmless Counterfeiting”
5. in the place of http://irishliberty.wordpress.com/, paste the link of your post eg. http://irishliberty.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/its-just-harmless-counterfeiting/

Then you will have a button that will allow people to share the post on 2 dozen sharing sites. I don’t an easier way to do it though.

What do we think of this?

Look at these faceless spineless bean-counting government bureaucrats, how pathetic they are…….

Let the free-market regulate itself. Only the free-market can regulate the free-market. Its too complex and dynamic for the slow bureaucracy and heavy hand of government.

The world has gone mad. Up is down, right is left and black is white. Reason has left the human race and if man has lost his powers of reason he is no longer human.

A good friend of liberty wrote recently of how even world socialists presented to us by the US media are aghast at the communist policies currently being implemented by the United States government. I have decided to expand upon what he wrote to me. This is a compilation of previous posts on Chavez and Rogers that now includes Putin.

Here are three world figures, two from governments and one entrepreneur, who decry the Communism of Obama.
- Socialist President Hugo Chavez
- Former Russian President and KGB Chief Director Vladimir Putin
- Jim Rogers, co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund and CEO of James Beeland Rogers Holdings

Chavez

They have criticised me, especially in the US, for nationalising a great (telecom) company, CANTV, that didn’t even cost $1.5bn,

Chavez said at a ceremony that included representatives of US oil company Chevron.

“The US has spent $900bn, four times what the Venezuela produces in a year, to try to boost the troubled finance system and housing market,”

Chavez said.

US takeovers dwarf my nationalisations: Venezuela’s Chavez

Putin
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the former Russian President was advising the U.S. on the dangers of the state and the importance of non-intervention. We are living in strange times. Putin says amazingly:

The entire economic growth system, where one regional centre prints money without respite and consumes material wealth, while another regional centre manufactures inexpensive goods and saves money printed by other governments, has suffered a major setback.

Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake.

True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.”

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

In our opinion, we must first atone for the past and open our cards, so to speak.

This means we must assess the real situation and write off all hopeless debts and “bad” assets.

True, this will be an extremely painful and unpleasant process. Far from everyone can accept such measures, fearing for their capitalisation, bonuses or reputation. However, we would “conserve” and prolong the crisis, unless we clean up our balance sheets. I believe financial authorities must work out the required mechanism for writing off debts that corresponds to today’s needs.

Second. Apart from cleaning up our balance sheets, it is high time we got rid of virtual money, exaggerated reports and dubious ratings. We must not harbour any illusions while assessing the state of the global economy and the real corporate standing, even if such assessments are made by major auditors and analysts.

In effect, our proposal implies that the audit, accounting and ratings system reform must be based on a reversion to the fundamental asset value concept. In other words, assessments of each individual business must be based on its ability to generate added value, rather than on subjective concepts. In our opinion, the economy of the future must become an economy of real values. How to achieve this is not so clear-cut. Let us think about it together.

Third. Excessive dependence on a single reserve currency is dangerous for the global economy. Consequently, it would be sensible to encourage the objective process of creating several strong reserve currencies in the future. It is high time we launched a detailed discussion of methods to facilitate a smooth and irreversible switchover to the new model.

Fourth. Most nations convert their international reserves into foreign currencies and must therefore be convinced that they are reliable. Those issuing reserve and accounting currencies are objectively interested in their use by other states.

Putin’s Davos Speech

Such a speech sounds more like Ron Paul than any other politician I’ve ever heard! Putin has shot up my favourite politicians list for the simple fact he said those words, whether he believes them or not is another question. I can’t believe he mentioned competing currencies for the ‘world reserve currency’!!!!

Rogers
The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe.

America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,

Rogers said.

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

In summary, the US is:

- dwarfing the socialism of Venezuala,
- too interventionist for the taste of Russia’s PM,
- more communist than China (Jim Rogers).

Ludwig von Mises’ pioneering work The Theory of Money and Credit was published in 1912. In it, Mises integrated maroeconomics and microeconomics, presented an imperfect but sound theory of money, applied the principles of marginal utility to money, formulated his regression theorem and presented the first rendering of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

Not bad.

Unfortunately upon its’ publication the German language edition recieved a lack-lustre review from one John Maynard Keynes, then editor of the Cambridge Economic Journal:

He reviewed Mises’s book,giving it short shrift. The book, he wrote condescendingly, had “considerable merit” and was “enlightened,” and its author was definitely “widely read,” but Keynes expressed his disappointment that the book was neither “construc tive” nor “original” [Source (pdf, p. 11)]

That’s a pretty harsh review. But here’s the clincher: Keynes later admitted he was not proficient in German!

Keynes impishly admitted that “in German, I can only clearly understand what I already know—sothat new ideas are apt to be veiled from me by the difficulties of the language” [Source (pdf, p. 12)]

Almost a century later, and one U.C. Berkeley Professor named Bradford DeLong has just attempted his own critique of Money and Credit. Let’s see what he has to say about it:

My view is that Money and Credit is very readable–compulsively readable, in fact: I have just spent two and a half hours telling myself “it’s OK; I will just read one more page…”. But it is only readable in a rhetorical-excess-train-wreck mode, for it is also totally bats— insane.

I recommend starting at page 416: read through the defenses of the gold standard as the only monetary system consistent with representative government, the attacks on Keynes, the attacks on the New Deal, the attacks on the United Nations, the blaming of all unemployment on labor unions–or on governments–the attacks on private-sector fractional-reserve banking, and stop with the attacks on all other believers in the gold standard not named “von Mises”,… [Source]

And it goes on. If anyone is confused at the Keynes and New Deal references, DeLong was quoting from the 1944 addition to the book, not the 1912 original.

What’s more tragic is that when Robert P. Murphy was alerted to this post, he quickly reacted with a comment of his own. It was proptly deleted by Professor DeLong. One enterprising young man has gone on to pen a scathing, profanity-free response to the slander.

This incident, like countless others, exemplifies how opponents of sound economics often resort to slander, ad hominem and straw man arguments when they fail to argue against it with reason.

Tu Ne Cede Malis.