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Paul Krugman: The Global Economy

World Affairs Council: Oregon and W. W. Norton
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Chase Avatar
Chase
Posts: 9
Posted: 02.23.09, 08:37 PM
This is the most absurd theory.

Patently collectivist.

If everyone takes care of themselves, who loses out?
Answer: Government and Banks
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Enkahn Avatar
Enkahn
Posts: 2
Posted: 02.25.09, 06:28 PM
Sure, sure, I bet people like you would just love it if we all went back to the "Gilded Age" of unregulated markets, when 13 year old boys were losing hands at the steel mills during 16 hour work days, so they could make 5 bucks at the end of the week.

So what if someone dies? Whatever it takes to keep industry going, right?

Save your fairy tales for bed time, man.
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Searle88 Avatar
Searle88
Posts: 3
Posted: 02.26.09, 06:06 AM
The evolving project of Transfinancial Economics benefits both the rich, and the poor.


http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics
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scamper Avatar
scamper
Posts: 25
Posted: 03.02.09, 01:41 AM
I wonder if you think someone like Chase is a billionaire who has nothing better to do that post on this video site. Sadly, there are lot of us regular people who see the problems being created. The fact that you don't see the relationship between government overspending and bankers shows a disregard for history. It always hurts the middle class. Yes, the government will bribe the poor and enrich the bankers... and middle class will go away. You have your theory on why things are bad... we have ours.

If you're asking if bankers should be regulated? Prolly, since you give them so much power in the first place. The point you miss is that bankers should not hold the power they do. That power is only granted to them by the government (the ability to access cheap money and use fractional reserve banking).
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andrew.skretvedt Avatar
andrew.skretvedt
Posts: 2
Posted: 03.20.09, 10:30 AM
scamper: I'm currently downloading the video to take away and watch so I cannot speak to its content just yet. But, I can say that over the course of the past 12 months I've discovered the Austrian school of economic thought. Reading Murray Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking" was simply gobsmacking! And, it was a nice hook to motivate me to learn more about this line of economic thought, one paid very little attention by government and entities whose well-being is more or less tied to government (like economic policy makers/informers such as Krugman).

Your comments on regulation of banks seem reasonable and informed by common sense. I learned from Rothbard's treatise that it's been fractional-reserve banking which has served as the means to effect easy credit, and thereby generate a boom-bust cycle as market participants misread reality and struggle to make imaginary currency units, real.

In Rothbard's very lassez-faire view, an open and free market would give rise to intense competition among banks, and the resulting everpresent threat of a bank run (without any bailout or depositor safety net) would serve as an important check on the extent to which fractional-reserve banking could be practiced. It's been government policy which has served to "fetter" the market, granting or withholding special privileges in such a way as to magnify rather than check this problem.

The single greatest thing I've taken away from my newly discovered Austrian-school education has been that you cannot ever avoid the market and market forces. The market, like flowing water, always finds its way. You can manipulate the market by using government policy to alter the playing field in innumerable ways (like damming and channeling water), but the market will always find a way to work, given any set of circumstances. However, once so channeled and dammed by government policy action, you might not later like how the market worked. But in that context, it was not the market that was to blame...it was doing simply as it always must. Blame properly rests always on the government policy which "distorted" the market's action away from that which we'd expect in a fully free an unfettered setting.

Another naive belief I think many "properly" educated professional and scholarly economists and government policymakers have is this underlying notion that static equilibrium ought to prevail. Whether they realize it or not, their actions seem prompted by a desire to seek to achieve a kind of equilibrium across the whole economy. Which, when you examine the ideas closely, is static. Workers everywhere, and in all industry would have a predictable and set routine in which they wake up, make their fixed prescribed contributions, and return home again, ad infinitum.

How grotesque! If this was reality, then I would grant that government policy would, after some period of trial and error, ultimately iterate toward a perfect central management that would please everybody!

The reality is that the economy is supposed to be unstable because it's dynamic. It's dynamic because each individual encounters shifts in what they decide is valuable to them, and constantly discovers new things which they might then decide to value. As a result, industries must wax and wane, technology advances, business practices evolve, labor needs flow (like any other commodity or business process input) toward the areas where they're demanded and away from areas where they're not.

This results in the dynamism that makes life interesting. A free and unfettered marketplace, via competition and prices, naturally adapts to these continual changes and reallocates resources (capital, natural, and human) to best conform to the wants which exist, as they change. It's the most efficient mechanism we have. And if allowed to operate unfettered, achieves the greatest levels of satisfaction for the greatest number of people.

Modern American liberals don't believe any of that. How do you get perfect equality when everyone's wants and desires of are always in flux? To my mind, the first thing you'd have to do is stop change. Force the world into a static model, and then you can go about equalizing. Think about that when analyzing American-style liberal policy. I've grown an awareness that behind the entire spectrum of American-style liberal and progressive ideology is at heart first a belief that the world is static, or ought to be.
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qazooz Avatar
qazooz
Posts: 5
Posted: 03.21.09, 07:23 AM
its not that hard. bring the jobs back .invest in stuff that brings back money (new internet lines for instance) tell the falks who have theire money in the kaimans they wont be able to sell goods in the US unless they bring the money back.abolish the stupid FED system. tax all transactions 1-2% to get social security on its feet and get consumption rissing again.no more mombo jumbo stock market. no more bailouts thhe gov. should lend banks directly and abolish fractional reserve system,,,sound banking if you may say..
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Enkahn Avatar
Enkahn
Posts: 2
Posted: 04.03.09, 09:59 PM
"my newly discovered Austrian-school education"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I thought this was about credible economic theory, not some wingnut discredited school that couldn't withstand a peer review if your life depended on it.
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toasterface Avatar
toasterface
Posts: 1
Posted: 10.20.09, 02:38 PM
Make work construction jobs? Awesome! This is gonna be the best decade ever.
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