It's a lose-lose situation. Prohibiting Congress from participating in the stock market is kind of unfair, and seems like a total non-starter, honestly. They should face the same penalties as others who break the law, but jailing Congress members would not go over well. "Oh, they're just throwing anyone who disagrees with them in jail!" Come on, people already think Obama is a dictator. A video about how he banned the First Amendment was floating around my Facebook today, for example.
Basically, the gist of my argument is the inherent hypocrisy in bureaucracy
What specifically is the "inherent hypocrisy"? You have pointed out a lot of things you don't like about government (inefficiencies and insider trading specifically) but have yet to say what is hypocritical about this. Can you explain, without asking me to go to outside sources, what exactly the inherent hypocrisy is?
The US also is the most inefficient regulator of new pharmaceuticals and spends the most per capita for healthcare for a middling ranking internationally, all of which could be fixed with a few simple changes to the forms entitlements take and changes in the overall welfare system.
Yes, the proven fix is single-payer: a single, massive bureaucracy (based on real world examples) that in empiric example after empiric example provides more benefit at less cost than smaller, bureaucracies.
And all those organizations may have some bureaucracy, but they were founded with private capital, are much more transparent, have had more impact and are far more esteemed and with higher approval ratings then any government agency.
This is moving the goalposts. You were asked to provide examples or large organizations without bureaucracy, (apparently) couldn't, and now claims the above. Sorry, how an organization was founded has nothing to do with whether it has an bureaucracy or not right now. The same goes for whether it is more liked than a government organization.
Again, are you able to provide examples of large-to-massive organizations that operate efficiently without bureaucracy? It would strengthen your argument significantly, and I would be very interested because it can literally make my career (as my company has a hard-on for efficiency and eliminating waste).
And, because I would like to see where this conversation goes, I will give you this tip gratis for free: Telling people to go watch a video, listen to a podcast, or "go read up on" a general theory is not a good way to argue your point. All it does is tell people that you don't understand the subject because you are clearly not able to verbalize your own points, all you can do is refer to what other people say.
I don't understand how I'm supposed to be telling others to do homework when I posted what I was interested in discussing, with links to several synopsis and less than 5 minute videos that would be easier to convey the point than write out what others have already done. If I were being paid to be here or getting college credits, that'd be something else, but I can and have cited the briefest of sources I could find and was interested in others input.
My OP clearly states my most interested points, and what made me interested in starting this thread (it was this ad free cbs news video http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50157385n that clocks in at 4:59) and I've cited a few other sources just as background that I'll be happy to flesh out and discuss once I get some more time. I just figured offering a few books from amazon that people could peruse or read the synopsis and tell me their this. This was supposed to be a friendly discussion about a story of the day, and they're having a week long expose about similar topics on CBSNews this week, so if we can talk about this I'd be very happy.
As far as bureaucracy, every organization needs some level of management, and I am of the opinion that an organization whose bureaucracy is based on market fundamentals is inherently more efficient. Now, social security and medical care are social issues and have more to do with welfare program development, and that is where a very complicated discussion arises, which is why it has been a problem for 20 years with no real valid way to modify it due to the entitlements and 'paying in' that so many have done; I am not one who thinks it's a viable alternative to privatize social security insurance. In fact, if there's one thing the Great Recession has taught me is that larger scale insurance leverage should be backed by the government ala FDIC due to the fact that if one gets big enough, they'll gamble with the houses money irresponsibly knowing they'll be bailed out (ala AIG).
Snarky reply: Buddy, everything you say is flat out wrong. https://www.google.com/. Just go search for a few minutes and you will see. I'm not getting paid for this so I'm not interested in providing more than the briefest of sources.
Serious reply:
Comparing health insurance to any other insurance is stupid. There is a major difference between health insurance and any other insurance (quick question: how many cars do you expect to drive throughout your life? How many bodies do you expect to live in). health insurance operates in an environment where market forces do not make sense, which is why systems where they have been taken out of the health care equation consistently prove to be less costly and more efficient (on a social scale).
I am still interested in hearing about the "inherent" hypocrisy. You finally provided a quote about hypocritical liberals, but nothing about that is showing anything inherent. In fact, there is little hypocritical about the liberals you posted, as knowing the necessity of paying for something and not wanting to pay for it is not hypocritical. Calling it proof of the flaw of liberalism is false and stinks of the whole "if you want to give the gubmint more money then write them a check" nonsense republicans throw around.
I don't understand what you're arguing with me about. In case you haven't noticed, I've said I'm for single payer, and would've had that be my preferred and already made pretty much your argument about having only one body in a post. This isn't affordable care act thread part Deux, I was interested in talking about the revolving door of K street, the nepotism and machinery that occurs within, and how government officials get away with insider trading that would get any non-Congress member arrested for doing.
Congress members routinely exit office wealthier than when they went in, and beat the market by more than any index and most hedge funds, with no prior trading experience. This is the hypocrisy I was speaking of initially, and is in the other 60 minutes video I linked, and is in the book Throw them all out, which I have read, and had got some buzz and has a decent amount of data.
Really, the best way would probably begin to narrow down the conversation and define a few terms.
I don't think an bureaucracy is bad; I just feel that as one grows larger, and more powerful their are more opportunities for unethical behavior, and corruption. This goes for government and corporations, you might've noticed my dislike for Chaebol's. it's possible to resolve some of these issues, but that can be done only with transparency, and that is something I think is crucial within a well functioning bureau.
So the last part of your paragraph 1 and the entire paragraph 2 is what you meant by "inherent hypocrisy"? Good. I only had to ask twice to get you to explain what you were talking about in your own post.
Good. Now that we have solved that part of you OP lets move on to the next:
1. What exactly do you think the problem is?
2. What do you think the root cause is, and contributing causes?
3. What do you think the solution to the problem is?
4. Why do you think this is your preferred solution?
Answer those questions and you have finally made the point you should have made in your OP. Oh, and after you provide your answer to those questions, feel free to link to the specific quotes and paragraphs that influenced/determined your decision.
I didn't realize when I admit a thread was a work in progress and just wanted to point out 10 minutes of news stories I've seen recently, and planned to write and do a better job if the thread gained traction (which I will do). I also stated the points I said to you a couple times on the first page, and as far as fixing it, I've proposed a few models we could do to better incentivize. I think prohibiting members or their immediate family members from trading stock and buying any IPOs while in office could be a good start.
Sorry, you did no such thing. You posted barely a skeleton of an OP then engaged in debate and kept referring to outside sources as your entire argument. You still have not provided the last pieces needed for you to propose a complete OP, or a complete argument.
Again, all you do is direct everyone else to other places with only a general topic to go on.
Let me try this again, since this seems really, really hard for you: Please post your argument, main problem, root cause, proposed solution and reason without directing me to somewhere else to find out these things.
I'm more of the Hayekian sort of libertarian, and even he was considered too socialist to people like Ayn Rand and Friedman.
Ah, yes, the guy who believed that freedom should be defended so zealously that democratic governments who he disagreed with should be violently overthrown and replaced by military dictatorships. Because freedom means government death squads abducting, torturing, and murdering people for the heinous tyranny of voting for social democrats, or protesting working conditions, or reporting on the wonderful new government's policies regarding dissenters.
I'm more of the Hayekian sort of libertarian, and even he was considered too socialist to people like Ayn Rand and Friedman.
Ah, yes, the guy who believed that freedom should be defended so zealously that democratic governments who he disagreed with should be violently overthrown and replaced by military dictatorships. Because freedom means government death squads abducting, torturing, and murdering people for the heinous tyranny of voting for social democrats, or protesting working conditions, or reporting on the wonderful new government's policies regarding dissenters.
I'm not really well versed in his whole Chile ordeal, but I agree with a lot of his fiscal theory, if not his views on dictatorships, liberal or not.
I mean, even Ronald Reagan credited Hayek with prognosticating what would be the fall of the Iron Curtain. He was just a pragmatist, whom would've benefited greatly if he was born 20 years later, or if Keynes had been so the two could've had more influence on one another.
Going back to the original case of congress doing Insider Trading, bear in mind two things:
1 - Index Funds (and a lot of hedge funds) are passive - that is, they set their portfolio diversity when the Fund is offered to investors and then tend not to re-set those numbers even if new information (such as new laws) comes to light. I wouldn't count Index Funds as "Traders" due to this passive nature - there are pros and cons to such an approach, but one of the things it does do is minimize risk. Congresscritters, on the other hand, may contain a mix of passive and active investors.
There's often a bias when comparing passive and active investors, as active investors tend to have a "survivorship bias". That is, those active investors who do exceptionally badly tend to stop investing (either voluntarily, or involuntarily such as through bankruptcy) and remove themselves from the sampling pool - thus increasing the average returns of the remaining investor pool. If you pick a sample of congresscritters who took part in IPOs (successful or otherwise), for example, you may be missing congresscritters who sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to take part in an IPO which never even got to the proposal stage.
As an aside, most studies that try to add "drop outs" back in to active investors indicate that on average active investors don't perform any better than passive investors... except for a small cadre who DO manage to consistently beat the market (and if I recall correctly none of them were members of congress).
2 - Investors in an information-rich environment tend to perform better than investors in an information-poor environment. Rather than comparing congresscritters with ALL investors, it may be useful to exclude the Investment Firm of Bob and Carol in Rural Idaho.
tl;dr High returns doesn't necessarily mean insider trading, although it's possibly enough to warrant additional scrutiny for elected officials.
I didn't realize when I admit a thread was a work in progress and just wanted to point out 10 minutes of news stories I've seen recently, and planned to write and do a better job if the thread gained traction (which I will do). I also stated the points I said to you a couple times on the first page, and as far as fixing it, I've proposed a few models we could do to better incentivize. I think prohibiting members or their immediate family members from trading stock and buying any IPOs while in office could be a good start.
OK. So generally in D&D we like to have pretty structured topics. Sometimes other things can come up as tangents and sometimes they can evolve into the main point of the thread but still some sort of structured topic.
This roughly means two things
1) There needs to be something to actually under contention. I.E. there actually has to be some sort of contention or question. So a thread that is say "Man Geese are Geese" doesn't really go anywhere. You might get a couple "yes Geese are Geese" posts
At the moment your post has maybe one of these. There is a lot of contention but i think that is more due to confusion. There certainly is no goal.
If you want to make a post about getting people to understand libertarianism, then that is fine. You probably will not get much traction here because some members are very well versed in the subject. But whatever, we will be happy to have the discussion. So long as you are willing to actually explain things and not use videos or other peoples words to do it for you. You are coming off like the kid who walks into their Econ 101 class and thinks everything is bullshit. You can't even begin to understand more complicated systems until you have a firm grasp on the toy models and this kid is here telling me that the toy models "don't work". They're not supposed to work like that, they're balls rolling down frictionless surfaces they're there so you fucking understand Newton's laws.
If you want to make a post about how graft is bad then again, that is fine. But i doubt it will get far because no one thinks graft is good. This is drawing some of the confusion. You see, without a plan of action as to how to combat the graft, or a logical structure as to how graft occurs in some systems and not others (I.E. move to new system, reduce graft, graft is bad, therefore things are better) then you've got nothing that is under contention and people are looking to understand what it that you're saying that is supposedly the thing you're disagreeing with. Because the current consensus is that graft is bad and we want goods ways to fight it.
But if you want to have either of these discussions you need to lead with that. And you need to explain your views logically and in detail and thoroughly, just like anyone
What is "the shadow economy"? What does "Keynes' view is flawed because of the shadow economy" mean? What does "government backed crypto currency" have to do with any of that? Why would policy be easier to implement if tax evasion was easier to catch?
What does that have to do with either
A) What your quotes were about, why you posted them, what they were in response to, or a general framework for improving posts?
Whether or not you believe monetary policy works?
The shadow economy is any unreported economic activity, from cash transactions that go unreported, to barter deals, or any sort of under the table work or service. It is proven that the higher a rate of taxation, more forms of private monies arise. This is why crypto-currencies are the future, as, outside of people that decide to live a gift economy lifestyle and never use currency, every transaction is traceable, and if it was backed by the government, individuals could have to input a number (like an SSN) to authorize transactions. It would also deflate and give more accurate counts of the true money supply, and a number of other quants.
I believe in taxing risky behavior, I just feel consumption taxes and valued added taxes are the most progressive, and it also believe in clear representation of where tax money is going. The topic of monetary policy is very complicated, especially since I have a hybrid view of a few different schools, and I really believe that the reason the world is in such a slow recovery right now is our insistence on relying on supply side models, instead of putting money into the hands of the needy people that will spend it. I believe spending creates jobs, not people.
My Hayekian quotes, and cites, were just to state that I'm more of a classical libertarian with a bit more reliance on currency social science. That was one of my major arguments from the last thread was that libertarian doesn't mean exactly what most people here seem to think it does, unless one is a member of the Libertarian party and preaching non-sense.
1) the "shadow economy" is a tiny percentage of the total
2) cryptocurrency won't prevent these "private monies" (examples?) from arising
3) the physical monetary base is about 20% or so of the total base. We have a very good idea of the amount of cash in circulation, since we know the exact amounts issued and returned
4) a cryptocurrency is fundamentally based on knowing some secret number that is very hard to guess. Since you are going to need that number to use your currency... what stops you from "giving" that number to someone in exchange for undeclared goods? Alternate, simpler implementation - remove physical cash, enforce universal credit/debit systems
The shadow economy when it comes to tax evasion is also pretty much non-existent. Tax evasion in its most destructive forms is perfectly legal and out in the open. We all know where Google's profits go, because they report exactly that to the tax office.
EDIT: and in that context the problem most definitely isn't that the tax office is inefficient (though as I understand it, the IRS is heavily underfunded).
There's also the fact that Congress != the federal bureaucracy. In fact, they're in separate branches of government!
I think for certain people with a very nebulous idea of how the government actually works "bureaucracy" is actually just a slur for "parts of the government that aren't helping me or anyone I care about for whatever reason".
There's also the fact that Congress != the federal bureaucracy. In fact, they're in separate branches of government!
I think for certain people with a very nebulous idea of how the government actually works "bureaucracy" is actually just a slur for "parts of the government that aren't helping me or anyone I care about for whatever reason".
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Has anybody pointed out yet that they passed the STOCK Act last year, which made it illegal for federal elected officials to commit insider trading? It's not a perfect law but I think it demonstrates the ability for a large bureaucracy to fix even its own graft and corruption.
For another example, several years ago Republicans in Congress outlawed pork (riders attached to unrelated bills sending money to an individual Congressman's district). A lot of people considered pork to be graft and corruption and it was almost completely eliminated.
Turns out, though, that without pork it became almost impossible to negotiate with individual members over their votes. Sometimes you need a little graft to grease the wheels of a large bureaucracy.
Has anybody pointed out yet that they passed the STOCK Act last year, which made it illegal for federal elected officials to commit insider trading? It's not a perfect law but I think it demonstrates the ability for a large bureaucracy to fix even its own graft and corruption.
For another example, several years ago Republicans in Congress outlawed pork (riders attached to unrelated bills sending money to an individual Congressman's district). A lot of people considered pork to be graft and corruption and it was almost completely eliminated.
Turns out, though, that without pork it became almost impossible to negotiate with individual members over their votes. Sometimes you need a little graft to grease the wheels of a large bureaucracy.
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
Has anybody pointed out yet that they passed the STOCK Act last year, which made it illegal for federal elected officials to commit insider trading? It's not a perfect law but I think it demonstrates the ability for a large bureaucracy to fix even its own graft and corruption.
For another example, several years ago Republicans in Congress outlawed pork (riders attached to unrelated bills sending money to an individual Congressman's district). A lot of people considered pork to be graft and corruption and it was almost completely eliminated.
Turns out, though, that without pork it became almost impossible to negotiate with individual members over their votes. Sometimes you need a little graft to grease the wheels of a large bureaucracy.
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
Yeah I have to agree. It might not be the most above-board way of doing business, but it's far from corruption. Heck, near as I can tell it's more kosherised than a salesman taking a client out to lunch.
(1) it is not necessary to choose between prohibiting Congressmen from owning any stocks or bonds at all, or letting them free rein to insider-trade based on changes in government policy. The usual response to the self-evident conflict of interest, in other countries, is to require policymaking elected offices and senior civil servants to place their assets in a blind trust.
Regulation can then assure that the blind trust is suitably diversified; thanks to (heh) the Chicago economics that @MadCaddy is quite aware of, we can generally expect a blind trust to hold mostly index funds, and we would be rightly suspicious if it did not.
(2) on earmarks: duly observe that an outlook like this:
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
And again, I'm more of a Hayeking with a preference for a demand style economic model, a form of Monetary policy neither party endorses. I think the future is in crypto-currency and global finance, and the government should use it, and it could use it, if it'd do away with unneeded entitlements and forced morality, learning nothing from Prohibition, or the war on drugs, and what has happened to the legalized tobacco industry. The US also is the most inefficient regulator of new pharmaceuticals and spends the most per capita for healthcare for a middling ranking internationally, all of which could be fixed with a few simple changes to the forms entitlements take and changes in the overall welfare system.
There's a kind of libertarian who doesn't really give a damn about the content of the theories they support, but basically pursue buzzword bingo: if Wingnut A and Moonbat B both condemn something we don't like (taxes! liberals! Keynesians! Democrats!), then everything A and B say must combine to be something good.
This makes sense only if Good and Bad economic policy was neatly dichotomous, but regrettably this is not the case.
Specifically, you cannot combine the efficient markets of Chicago with Hayek, especially not on monetary policy. Hayekian cycles explicitly rely on intertemporal disequilibrium because investors cannot see the real interest rate from the nominal interest rate. Hayekian investors are, in short, systematically wrong.
Worse, neither of these are 'demand-style'. Both intrinsically imply that the action goes on in the supply side. They don't even give you any instruments to use on the demand side. Cryptocurrency doesn't give you any monetary policy levers at all! 'Demand-style' rhetoric is however popular with populist conservatives, who are painfully aware that supply-side anything sounds oddly elitist and handwavy to suspicious cultural conservatives, who never really liked the moral excesses of Wall St. to begin with, and who grew up in the Keynesian era and are nostalgic for its ideas.
I appreciate all of the discussion, and I spoke of the Stock Act as it was a rebuttal to Throw Them All Out, and last I had heard it was tabled, but it seems to have passed. I'm not familiar with it's language so would need to parse.
The reason why I use outside assets instead of writing up my own arguments is the fact that A) these are complicated issues, I'm not entrenched in my position, but have read a few books that've made me think and they're usually better written. It's not like I'm linking to reason.org or something a 5 minute video is about as long as it would take you to read me to write a more flawed synopsis, and if a 5 minute video is too high a barrier of entry for a conversation on here in it's own thread, than I am in the wrong forum.
If this thread continues, I will do the research, and fix the OP, I've admitted it was a work in progress, and said I planned to fix it, but that seems to be the preferred plan of attack now instead of any content, or addressing the points I've brought up in my additional posts.
I apologize for the poor title, but I just saw the video about nepotism on CBSNews and it made me think to ask for others opinions, and I decided to post it here. I should've titled the thread better, but it's how overly complicated systems get abused that makes me use that line.
@ronya I forgot, were you from Singapore? One thing I def agree with is their philosophy of paying their public officials extremely high salaries (especially for the size of their constituencies, were talking 7 figures for under 100k people) to cut down on corruption. That is something I agree with heavily. And about the blind trust, that is what our Presidents have to do, but not our members of Congress.
Speaking of, I've done a brief reading of the STOCk Act, and it's language seems to indicate that if family members gain inside information through osmosis, unless there's a smoking gun, there's no way to initiate an investigation or audit, right?
(1) it is not necessary to choose between prohibiting Congressmen from owning any stocks or bonds at all, or letting them free rein to insider-trade based on changes in government policy. The usual response to the self-evident conflict of interest, in other countries, is to require policymaking elected offices and senior civil servants to place their assets in a blind trust.
Regulation can then assure that the blind trust is suitably diversified; thanks to (heh) the Chicago economics that @MadCaddy is quite aware of, we can generally expect a blind trust to hold mostly index funds, and we would be rightly suspicious if it did not.
(2) on earmarks: duly observe that an outlook like this:
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
And again, I'm more of a Hayeking with a preference for a demand style economic model, a form of Monetary policy neither party endorses. I think the future is in crypto-currency and global finance, and the government should use it, and it could use it, if it'd do away with unneeded entitlements and forced morality, learning nothing from Prohibition, or the war on drugs, and what has happened to the legalized tobacco industry. The US also is the most inefficient regulator of new pharmaceuticals and spends the most per capita for healthcare for a middling ranking internationally, all of which could be fixed with a few simple changes to the forms entitlements take and changes in the overall welfare system.
There's a kind of libertarian who doesn't really give a damn about the content of the theories they support, but basically pursue buzzword bingo: if Wingnut A and Moonbat B both condemn something we don't like (taxes! liberals! Keynesians! Democrats!), then everything A and B say must combine to be something good.
This makes sense only if Good and Bad economic policy was neatly dichotomous, but regrettably this is not the case.
Specifically, you cannot combine the efficient markets of Chicago with Hayek, especially not on monetary policy. Hayekian cycles explicitly rely on intertemporal disequilibrium because investors cannot see the real interest rate from the nominal interest rate. Hayekian investors are, in short, systematically wrong.
Worse, neither of these are 'demand-style'. Both intrinsically imply that the action goes on in the supply side. They don't even give you any instruments to use on the demand side. Cryptocurrency doesn't give you any monetary policy levers at all! 'Demand-style' rhetoric is however popular with populist conservatives, who are painfully aware that supply-side anything sounds oddly elitist and handwavy to suspicious cultural conservatives, who never really liked the moral excesses of Wall St. to begin with, and who grew up in the Keynesian era and are nostalgic for its ideas.
A government backed crypto currency would be better than greenbacks because of the log. This log is what would cut down on the shadow economy, basically since it's the financial equivalent of a phone's metadata. With a crypto currency as the governments central currencies, computers could be in charge of most of the audits, and again, be inherently more efficient. I'm not saying the only currency should be bitcoin or bitcoin equivalents, I'm saying the federal government should take notes from what it's learned about the money supply, and quit making states social issues their problem, and have a single logging national currency so they can follow interstate and international commerce, even for "cash" purchases.
When I get a chance I'll write out the theory I had, but basically if it wasn't for privacy concerns, improper use of the records, a treasury controlled crypto currency would be intrinsically better for matters of taxation, knowledge of money supply and prevention of laundering, as well as put a severe hindrance on the shadow economy.
@ronya also, if you think my economic views are incoherent, you mind telling me where they fall apart exactly? And you saw me say I'd have a guaranteed welfare system (which is a Hayekian concept, which I quoted him on upthread), how is that not a demand side economic model? Where else have I contradicted myself, and things don't work as I've said?
Also, I'm not a Chicago school adherent, I'm self educated, but have the strongest agreement with most work outta Stanford's Hoover Institute, with some NYU and Chicago school theories I parse for relevant bits. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Econ talk I linked about the role of government in the utopian society.
Regarding Singapore, you should remain aware that low corruption came to Singapore (~1970s) before the high civil service pay did (~1980s). The high pay was an attempt to ensure that low corruption survived the politburo old guard being succeeded by a new generation of career policymakers, who had not had their loyalties tested during anticolonial struggle.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
@ronya
That's true. Also, the only time I'm aware of when a American starts at zero and has to prove everything is typically when the IRS audits that person or entity. They treat all deposits, unless super obvious, as income and they disallow most if not all expenses. It is up to the taxpayer to actually prove to the government their assertions.
Regarding Singapore, you should remain aware that low corruption came to Singapore (~1970s) before the high civil service pay did (~1980s). The high pay was an attempt to ensure that low corruption survived the politburo old guard being succeeded by a new generation of career policymakers, who had not had their loyalties tested during anticolonial struggle.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
I'm even more interested in hearing your idea of the role of government in the utopian society.
(1) it is not necessary to choose between prohibiting Congressmen from owning any stocks or bonds at all, or letting them free rein to insider-trade based on changes in government policy. The usual response to the self-evident conflict of interest, in other countries, is to require policymaking elected offices and senior civil servants to place their assets in a blind trust.
Regulation can then assure that the blind trust is suitably diversified; thanks to (heh) the Chicago economics that @MadCaddy is quite aware of, we can generally expect a blind trust to hold mostly index funds, and we would be rightly suspicious if it did not.
(2) on earmarks: duly observe that an outlook like this:
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
And again, I'm more of a Hayeking with a preference for a demand style economic model, a form of Monetary policy neither party endorses. I think the future is in crypto-currency and global finance, and the government should use it, and it could use it, if it'd do away with unneeded entitlements and forced morality, learning nothing from Prohibition, or the war on drugs, and what has happened to the legalized tobacco industry. The US also is the most inefficient regulator of new pharmaceuticals and spends the most per capita for healthcare for a middling ranking internationally, all of which could be fixed with a few simple changes to the forms entitlements take and changes in the overall welfare system.
There's a kind of libertarian who doesn't really give a damn about the content of the theories they support, but basically pursue buzzword bingo: if Wingnut A and Moonbat B both condemn something we don't like (taxes! liberals! Keynesians! Democrats!), then everything A and B say must combine to be something good.
This makes sense only if Good and Bad economic policy was neatly dichotomous, but regrettably this is not the case.
Specifically, you cannot combine the efficient markets of Chicago with Hayek, especially not on monetary policy. Hayekian cycles explicitly rely on intertemporal disequilibrium because investors cannot see the real interest rate from the nominal interest rate. Hayekian investors are, in short, systematically wrong.
Worse, neither of these are 'demand-style'. Both intrinsically imply that the action goes on in the supply side. They don't even give you any instruments to use on the demand side. Cryptocurrency doesn't give you any monetary policy levers at all! 'Demand-style' rhetoric is however popular with populist conservatives, who are painfully aware that supply-side anything sounds oddly elitist and handwavy to suspicious cultural conservatives, who never really liked the moral excesses of Wall St. to begin with, and who grew up in the Keynesian era and are nostalgic for its ideas.
A government backed crypto currency would be better than greenbacks because of the log. This log is what would cut down on the shadow economy, basically since it's the financial equivalent of a phone's metadata. With a crypto currency as the governments central currencies, computers could be in charge of most of the audits, and again, be inherently more efficient. I'm not saying the only currency should be bitcoin or bitcoin equivalents, I'm saying the federal government should take notes from what it's learned about the money supply, and quit making states social issues their problem, and have a single logging national currency so they can follow interstate and international commerce, even for "cash" purchases.
When I get a chance I'll write out the theory I had, but basically if it wasn't for privacy concerns, improper use of the records, a treasury controlled crypto currency would be intrinsically better for matters of taxation, knowledge of money supply and prevention of laundering, as well as put a severe hindrance on the shadow economy.
I do not think you understand cryptocurrencies, and how they differ from mere electronic fiat money.
You do seem to believe that social issues are inherently tied to internal-revenue and financial-regulatory issues in some way, but you have yet to explain this clearly.
(1) it is not necessary to choose between prohibiting Congressmen from owning any stocks or bonds at all, or letting them free rein to insider-trade based on changes in government policy. The usual response to the self-evident conflict of interest, in other countries, is to require policymaking elected offices and senior civil servants to place their assets in a blind trust.
Regulation can then assure that the blind trust is suitably diversified; thanks to (heh) the Chicago economics that @MadCaddy is quite aware of, we can generally expect a blind trust to hold mostly index funds, and we would be rightly suspicious if it did not.
(2) on earmarks: duly observe that an outlook like this:
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
And again, I'm more of a Hayeking with a preference for a demand style economic model, a form of Monetary policy neither party endorses. I think the future is in crypto-currency and global finance, and the government should use it, and it could use it, if it'd do away with unneeded entitlements and forced morality, learning nothing from Prohibition, or the war on drugs, and what has happened to the legalized tobacco industry. The US also is the most inefficient regulator of new pharmaceuticals and spends the most per capita for healthcare for a middling ranking internationally, all of which could be fixed with a few simple changes to the forms entitlements take and changes in the overall welfare system.
There's a kind of libertarian who doesn't really give a damn about the content of the theories they support, but basically pursue buzzword bingo: if Wingnut A and Moonbat B both condemn something we don't like (taxes! liberals! Keynesians! Democrats!), then everything A and B say must combine to be something good.
This makes sense only if Good and Bad economic policy was neatly dichotomous, but regrettably this is not the case.
Specifically, you cannot combine the efficient markets of Chicago with Hayek, especially not on monetary policy. Hayekian cycles explicitly rely on intertemporal disequilibrium because investors cannot see the real interest rate from the nominal interest rate. Hayekian investors are, in short, systematically wrong.
Worse, neither of these are 'demand-style'. Both intrinsically imply that the action goes on in the supply side. They don't even give you any instruments to use on the demand side. Cryptocurrency doesn't give you any monetary policy levers at all! 'Demand-style' rhetoric is however popular with populist conservatives, who are painfully aware that supply-side anything sounds oddly elitist and handwavy to suspicious cultural conservatives, who never really liked the moral excesses of Wall St. to begin with, and who grew up in the Keynesian era and are nostalgic for its ideas.
A government backed crypto currency would be better than greenbacks because of the log. This log is what would cut down on the shadow economy, basically since it's the financial equivalent of a phone's metadata. With a crypto currency as the governments central currencies, computers could be in charge of most of the audits, and again, be inherently more efficient. I'm not saying the only currency should be bitcoin or bitcoin equivalents, I'm saying the federal government should take notes from what it's learned about the money supply, and quit making states social issues their problem, and have a single logging national currency so they can follow interstate and international commerce, even for "cash" purchases.
When I get a chance I'll write out the theory I had, but basically if it wasn't for privacy concerns, improper use of the records, a treasury controlled crypto currency would be intrinsically better for matters of taxation, knowledge of money supply and prevention of laundering, as well as put a severe hindrance on the shadow economy.
I do not think you understand cryptocurrencies, and how they differ from mere electronic fiat money.
You do seem to believe that social issues are inherently tied to internal-revenue and financial-regulatory issues in some way, but you have yet to explain this clearly.
They differ from other electronic currencies by being unable to chargeback once a transaction is complete and being able to be completed with an arbitrary transaction number, but need a secure and private PIN(Like your SSN) for completion, and all of the currency is traceable to origin if an audit is necessary.
Also, unlike credit cards, there can be no fees for use other than simple electronic compliance that the government could issue as part of its welfare program. Also part of this welfare program could be allowing citizens to 'mine' for money supply if they deem that style of currency is needed, but the Fed could have complete fiat control and still have a fairer system with a crypto-currency than greenbacks as far as counterfeiting and laundering.
I don't think he does either. In fact, I would posit that whatever system he is thinking of is
1) effectively the equivalent of just having a universal debit system and not producing any more physical bills
2) can easily be gamed
or 3) is unduly burdensome to actually use
Regarding Singapore, you should remain aware that low corruption came to Singapore (~1970s) before the high civil service pay did (~1980s). The high pay was an attempt to ensure that low corruption survived the politburo old guard being succeeded by a new generation of career policymakers, who had not had their loyalties tested during anticolonial struggle.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
I'm even more interested in hearing your idea of the role of government in the utopian society.
Well, on this note. You should stop listening to EconTalk.
It's not that EconTalk is bad; it is excellent. It is that you are too credulous about its style of rhetoric. When popular science leaps from idea to idea, it is intended to give you a rough impression of the 'lay of the land', as it were. It is not built for one to start extrapolating onto the shape of the terra incognita.
When I read the EconTalk podcast transcript, I already know Russ Robert's basic sympathies and conceits, I know how Mike Munger tends to think, and I know Richard Epstein is a wingnut. I know that Roberts and Munger pride themselves on their grappling with heterodoxy, whereas Epstein and Skidelsky have an ideological axe to grind. I can see when Roberts carefully steers Skidelsky and Munger away from confronting Epstein away from his craziest ideas because, well, who likes to listen to podcasts of people disagreeing over basic facts? You can hardly show a graph over stereo.
Regarding Singapore, you should remain aware that low corruption came to Singapore (~1970s) before the high civil service pay did (~1980s). The high pay was an attempt to ensure that low corruption survived the politburo old guard being succeeded by a new generation of career policymakers, who had not had their loyalties tested during anticolonial struggle.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
I'm even more interested in hearing your idea of the role of government in the utopian society.
Well, on this note. You should stop listening to EconTalk.
It's not that EconTalk is bad; it is excellent. It is that you are too credulous about its style of rhetoric. When popular science leaps from idea to idea, it is intended to give you a rough impression of the 'lay of the land', as it were. It is not built for one to start extrapolating onto the shape of the terra incognita.
When I read the EconTalk podcast transcript, I already know Russ Robert's basic sympathies and conceits, I know how Mike Munger tends to think, and I know Richard Epstein is a wingnut. I know that Roberts and Munger pride themselves on their grappling with heterodoxy, whereas Epstein and Skidelsky have an ideological axe to grind. I can see when Roberts carefully steers Skidelsky and Munger away from confronting Epstein away from his craziest ideas because, well, who likes to listen to podcasts of people disagreeing over basic facts? You can hardly show a graph over stereo.
Please be more specific about where these issues develop and their philosophies break down, and what of Steven D. Levitt whom is another economist I think is right more often than wrong. I'd be really interested in speaking about particular theories in a non-partisan way, and just on the merits.
And again, I'm very interested in hearing your answer to the question on the role of the government in the utopian society? How much sovereignty should city states have in a world economy?
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
To be fair, I think it's quite clear now that the "dispute" over earmarks was done in bad faith as a whole (even if particular proponents were being honest in their views). The Tea Party opposition to earmarks looks to be less of a good governance issue, and more about breaking a means of control over junior members by the party leadership.
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
To be fair, I think it's quite clear now that the "dispute" over earmarks was done in bad faith as a whole (even if particular proponents were being honest in their views). The Tea Party opposition to earmarks looks to be less of a good governance issue, and more about breaking a means of control over junior members by the party leadership.
The real issue with US Politics stems from the two party system, and their convoluted and self serving rules (super-delegates *cough*) and how they've had machines in place since inception. And have mastered honest graft over the years, if Tammany Hall, Truman's state party, Cheney, Rendell and the whole turnpike fiasco have taught us nothing.
There has also been a steady decline, by percentage, of third party candidates and, especially, serving public officials since the turn of the 18th century and the Know-Nothing's first started to become a real force, and the issue of free soil, abolition, and the embargo on the slave trade further fractured the dominant parties to be more regionally aligned . This was the impetus of a lot of state party machines, ala Eunuch Thompson's New Jersey, Tammany Hall, and the influx of voters into territories every time the Issue of slavery was at issue... It's extremely complicated, which is why I usually just link sources because trying to write cliffs notes on some things is tough, and I'm not the most articulate person when it needs brevity if you all haven't noticed.
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
To be fair, I think it's quite clear now that the "dispute" over earmarks was done in bad faith as a whole (even if particular proponents were being honest in their views). The Tea Party opposition to earmarks looks to be less of a good governance issue, and more about breaking a means of control over junior members by the party leadership.
I'm not sure I agree. I doubt the Tea Party was playing any 12th dimensional chess here. More likely the reasoning was simply:
1. I want to cut government spending
2. Cutting "wasteful" spending is easier to justify
3. Earmarks are spending that benefits one (or a few) districts and not the country as a whole
4. While usually individually small, in the aggregate and over time the total spending on earmarks is more significant
5. ergo, Earmarks are wasteful spending and should be eliminated
It does make sense, it's just that the unintended consequences meant that eliminating them hobbled leadership from wrangling control over their caucus, exacerbating the crisis (that was eventually averted using... earmarks!)
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Yeah, people have been blaming earmarks for ages now. You don't need to get anymore complicated then "Government spending is wasteful and bad" to explain their removal.
Regarding Singapore, you should remain aware that low corruption came to Singapore (~1970s) before the high civil service pay did (~1980s). The high pay was an attempt to ensure that low corruption survived the politburo old guard being succeeded by a new generation of career policymakers, who had not had their loyalties tested during anticolonial struggle.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
I'm even more interested in hearing your idea of the role of government in the utopian society.
Well, on this note. You should stop listening to EconTalk.
It's not that EconTalk is bad; it is excellent. It is that you are too credulous about its style of rhetoric. When popular science leaps from idea to idea, it is intended to give you a rough impression of the 'lay of the land', as it were. It is not built for one to start extrapolating onto the shape of the terra incognita.
When I read the EconTalk podcast transcript, I already know Russ Robert's basic sympathies and conceits, I know how Mike Munger tends to think, and I know Richard Epstein is a wingnut. I know that Roberts and Munger pride themselves on their grappling with heterodoxy, whereas Epstein and Skidelsky have an ideological axe to grind. I can see when Roberts carefully steers Skidelsky and Munger away from confronting Epstein away from his craziest ideas because, well, who likes to listen to podcasts of people disagreeing over basic facts? You can hardly show a graph over stereo.
Please be more specific about where these issues develop and their philosophies break down, and what of Steven D. Levitt whom is another economist I think is right more often than wrong. I'd be really interested in speaking about particular theories in a non-partisan way, and just on the merits.
And again, I'm very interested in hearing your answer to the question on the role of the government in the utopian society? How much sovereignty should city states have in a world economy?
To be absolutely blunt, I am not sure I can usefully communicate these in a way that you will appreciate. You are, I think, most receptive to narrative rather than inconclusive survey. I have no narrative to offer.
Russ Roberts is Austrian, he's from the Boettke camp of Austrian economists at GMU. This camp has essentially two groups: a Walter Block group who spend all their time refining Austrian philosophy and essentially ignoring the mainstream, and another camp who spend all their time refining the economics against the mainstream consensus. Roberts is from the latter camp; you should know he's already well aware of how the debate is going to flow - he knows, fully well, that putting Epstein and Skidelsky together means that the non-economist Skidelsky is going to offer a naive perspective that law-and-economics Epstein can flatly reject and so he, Roberts, can hop in with a refined 1990s-GMU answer:
RR: My basic argument is that we as economists don't have the ability to precisely measure the magnitude of these things. I certainly agree with the direction Richard, but I don't think we can measure the magnitude and therefore we are story-tellers...
Which sidesteps the argument directly and so is very satisfying! But I can also tell you that he is being flatly intellectually dishonest because I know, and I know he knows, that GMU itself has evolved past this answer because of repeated bombshells like Cowen's 1997 Risk and Business Cycles and Garrison's 2000 Time and Money et cetera, where it was repeatedly demonstrated that the ABCT bandied about carelessly was flatly in contradiction of basic stylized facts of the economy. Never mind "precisely measure", the signs of alleged changes were just not reflected in the increasing amounts of data about time-structure becoming available for analysis. So you have to start grappling with the quantitative aspects. At a "story-telling" level, Austrian economics no longer falls into a neat intellectual gap left by the early-1990s monetarist disputes, it would just be wrong. That is why the school now tries to get quantitative papers out.
Munger is a political scientist who regularly crosses blogs between the Delong/Krugman/et al camp and the Cafe Hayek (i.e., Russ Roberts) group, so he knows all their talking points (and he has his own hobby-horse, which is public choice and dynamic inconsistency. That's because he does poli sci). That's why he stepped in when Epstein started reciting standard conservative rules-vs-discretion talking points, because (1) he knows that Epstein is a conservative Posner-school law and economics guy, who therefore hasn't kept up with economics of macro policy rules, and therefore (2) he knows that if Epstein pushes it, he'll lose to even the naivete that Skidelsky is pushing because you can formalize (New) Keynesian reaction into consistency-proof rules*, the Germans have even made it an actual concrete policy commitment for more than a decade, it's called "automatic stabilizers", and (3) his own scholarly work tries to refute the "rules" idea from another angle. The old "rules!!" attack that Epstein was pushing is outdated.
* automatic stabilizers conceived as a way to sidestep Kydland/Prescott dynamic inconsistency, rather than as a way to sidestep uncertainty in assessing the timing and extent of recessions
Levitt writes popsci books. You should take everything he writes with the seriousness you would take a newspaper's editorial page. This isn't a partisan critique, I should say the same of all of Krugman's non-scholarly writing as well. You do not read A Brief History of Time to learn physics.
Is the United States volunteering to stop exporting the dollar?
Internationalization of one's currency is today readily appreciated to be a liability, the problem with SDRs and the bancor is finding someone to guarantee to buy it in case of Actual Future Emergency.
With his magic heavily government controlled cryptocurrency I think it would have to, I have no idea how it would interact with foreigners holding it and transacting with it
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
To be fair, I think it's quite clear now that the "dispute" over earmarks was done in bad faith as a whole (even if particular proponents were being honest in their views). The Tea Party opposition to earmarks looks to be less of a good governance issue, and more about breaking a means of control over junior members by the party leadership.
this is true, in my opinion, but if your best argument proffered to the (allegedly) Loyal Opposition is that they're negotiating in bad faith, then the whole mechanism was a terrible idea to begin with
Is the United States volunteering to stop exporting the dollar?
Internationalization of one's currency is today readily appreciated to be a liability, the problem with SDRs and the bancor is finding someone to guarantee to buy it in case of Actual Future Emergency.
I'd like to have a conversation about the death of the manufacture, and traditional labor, to more of a services labor industry.. And how the fall of the iron curtain has created a bloat in the supply of labour that needs more demand, and the best ways to communicate it..
We'll keep this topic fresh and I'm planning on refining the OP to better reflect some of my arguments when I can dedicate the time, as I think we're starting to get somewhere constructive as I get a lot of what you're saying in your awesome post.
I'd just like to know, do you feel the Singapore style of Governance is more perfect than... US? German? UK? I'm trying to get an idea of how much involvement in personal choice you feel the government needs to be able to have.
Also, re: Bancor, are you familiar with Bretton Woods and Nixon Shock enough to talk a bit about the politics of all that? Because I feel that's the direction that conversation would head, and China's push to ease the US Treasury and Dollar as reserve currency of choice after this recent spat of brinkmanship in the house, has a lot of ties to Nixon's choice to take the US off gold immediately before anyone after the French could do the swap when the dollar was already known to be at a deficit...
That's kind of why the idea of a crypto-currency that's mineable is interesting, especially if government sponsored, since it could be kind of a new form of an old standard that lasted millenia. I'm not a gold standard nut, though, and I don't own any bitcoins, but the technology and ideas behind bitcoins is fascinating.
With his magic heavily government controlled cryptocurrency I think it would have to, I have no idea how it would interact with foreigners holding it and transacting with it
How does it work when foreigners interact with the greenback?
With his magic heavily government controlled cryptocurrency I think it would have to, I have no idea how it would interact with foreigners holding it and transacting with it
How does it work when foreigners interact with the greenback?
A foreign bank buys them, or they are exported as part of trade, and then as far as the US government is concerned that's it. You do realize that other countries use USD as their official currency too and that a very large amount of physical cash is held overseas
Posts
Sorry, you did no such thing. You posted barely a skeleton of an OP then engaged in debate and kept referring to outside sources as your entire argument. You still have not provided the last pieces needed for you to propose a complete OP, or a complete argument.
Again, all you do is direct everyone else to other places with only a general topic to go on.
Let me try this again, since this seems really, really hard for you: Please post your argument, main problem, root cause, proposed solution and reason without directing me to somewhere else to find out these things.
Then we can engage in actual discussion.
I'm not really well versed in his whole Chile ordeal, but I agree with a lot of his fiscal theory, if not his views on dictatorships, liberal or not.
I mean, even Ronald Reagan credited Hayek with prognosticating what would be the fall of the Iron Curtain. He was just a pragmatist, whom would've benefited greatly if he was born 20 years later, or if Keynes had been so the two could've had more influence on one another.
1 - Index Funds (and a lot of hedge funds) are passive - that is, they set their portfolio diversity when the Fund is offered to investors and then tend not to re-set those numbers even if new information (such as new laws) comes to light. I wouldn't count Index Funds as "Traders" due to this passive nature - there are pros and cons to such an approach, but one of the things it does do is minimize risk. Congresscritters, on the other hand, may contain a mix of passive and active investors.
There's often a bias when comparing passive and active investors, as active investors tend to have a "survivorship bias". That is, those active investors who do exceptionally badly tend to stop investing (either voluntarily, or involuntarily such as through bankruptcy) and remove themselves from the sampling pool - thus increasing the average returns of the remaining investor pool. If you pick a sample of congresscritters who took part in IPOs (successful or otherwise), for example, you may be missing congresscritters who sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to take part in an IPO which never even got to the proposal stage.
As an aside, most studies that try to add "drop outs" back in to active investors indicate that on average active investors don't perform any better than passive investors... except for a small cadre who DO manage to consistently beat the market (and if I recall correctly none of them were members of congress).
2 - Investors in an information-rich environment tend to perform better than investors in an information-poor environment. Rather than comparing congresscritters with ALL investors, it may be useful to exclude the Investment Firm of Bob and Carol in Rural Idaho.
tl;dr High returns doesn't necessarily mean insider trading, although it's possibly enough to warrant additional scrutiny for elected officials.
OK. So generally in D&D we like to have pretty structured topics. Sometimes other things can come up as tangents and sometimes they can evolve into the main point of the thread but still some sort of structured topic.
This roughly means two things
1) There needs to be something to actually under contention. I.E. there actually has to be some sort of contention or question. So a thread that is say "Man Geese are Geese" doesn't really go anywhere. You might get a couple "yes Geese are Geese" posts
2) There needs to be some sort of objective or goal for the discussion. We may be here to discuss libertarianism and efforts to dissuade libertarians from their belief structure (I.E. the thread which probably started this). I.E.
At the moment your post has maybe one of these. There is a lot of contention but i think that is more due to confusion. There certainly is no goal.
If you want to make a post about getting people to understand libertarianism, then that is fine. You probably will not get much traction here because some members are very well versed in the subject. But whatever, we will be happy to have the discussion. So long as you are willing to actually explain things and not use videos or other peoples words to do it for you. You are coming off like the kid who walks into their Econ 101 class and thinks everything is bullshit. You can't even begin to understand more complicated systems until you have a firm grasp on the toy models and this kid is here telling me that the toy models "don't work". They're not supposed to work like that, they're balls rolling down frictionless surfaces they're there so you fucking understand Newton's laws.
If you want to make a post about how graft is bad then again, that is fine. But i doubt it will get far because no one thinks graft is good. This is drawing some of the confusion. You see, without a plan of action as to how to combat the graft, or a logical structure as to how graft occurs in some systems and not others (I.E. move to new system, reduce graft, graft is bad, therefore things are better) then you've got nothing that is under contention and people are looking to understand what it that you're saying that is supposedly the thing you're disagreeing with. Because the current consensus is that graft is bad and we want goods ways to fight it.
But if you want to have either of these discussions you need to lead with that. And you need to explain your views logically and in detail and thoroughly, just like anyone
1) the "shadow economy" is a tiny percentage of the total
2) cryptocurrency won't prevent these "private monies" (examples?) from arising
3) the physical monetary base is about 20% or so of the total base. We have a very good idea of the amount of cash in circulation, since we know the exact amounts issued and returned
4) a cryptocurrency is fundamentally based on knowing some secret number that is very hard to guess. Since you are going to need that number to use your currency... what stops you from "giving" that number to someone in exchange for undeclared goods? Alternate, simpler implementation - remove physical cash, enforce universal credit/debit systems
EDIT: and in that context the problem most definitely isn't that the tax office is inefficient (though as I understand it, the IRS is heavily underfunded).
I think for certain people with a very nebulous idea of how the government actually works "bureaucracy" is actually just a slur for "parts of the government that aren't helping me or anyone I care about for whatever reason".
Which is no excuse for sloppy vocabulary.
For another example, several years ago Republicans in Congress outlawed pork (riders attached to unrelated bills sending money to an individual Congressman's district). A lot of people considered pork to be graft and corruption and it was almost completely eliminated.
Turns out, though, that without pork it became almost impossible to negotiate with individual members over their votes. Sometimes you need a little graft to grease the wheels of a large bureaucracy.
Except that earmarks, in the vast majority of cases, aren't graft. A congresscritter pushing for the federal government to give a museum in their district a $1M grant is is performing the job for which their constituency duly elected them to do.
Yeah I have to agree. It might not be the most above-board way of doing business, but it's far from corruption. Heck, near as I can tell it's more kosherised than a salesman taking a client out to lunch.
(1) it is not necessary to choose between prohibiting Congressmen from owning any stocks or bonds at all, or letting them free rein to insider-trade based on changes in government policy. The usual response to the self-evident conflict of interest, in other countries, is to require policymaking elected offices and senior civil servants to place their assets in a blind trust.
Regulation can then assure that the blind trust is suitably diversified; thanks to (heh) the Chicago economics that @MadCaddy is quite aware of, we can generally expect a blind trust to hold mostly index funds, and we would be rightly suspicious if it did not.
(2) on earmarks: duly observe that an outlook like this:
is quite coherent, but it also highlights why Americans will probably not appreciate non-geographic-seat proportional representation systems. More than a century after the Civil War, Americans are still not quite sure whether they are electing a national assembly, or electing a local representative toward a national assembly. And, as the dispute over earmarks demonstrates, you cannot comfortably compromise between both systems.
(3) this is worryingly incoherent:
There's a kind of libertarian who doesn't really give a damn about the content of the theories they support, but basically pursue buzzword bingo: if Wingnut A and Moonbat B both condemn something we don't like (taxes! liberals! Keynesians! Democrats!), then everything A and B say must combine to be something good.
This makes sense only if Good and Bad economic policy was neatly dichotomous, but regrettably this is not the case.
Specifically, you cannot combine the efficient markets of Chicago with Hayek, especially not on monetary policy. Hayekian cycles explicitly rely on intertemporal disequilibrium because investors cannot see the real interest rate from the nominal interest rate. Hayekian investors are, in short, systematically wrong.
Worse, neither of these are 'demand-style'. Both intrinsically imply that the action goes on in the supply side. They don't even give you any instruments to use on the demand side. Cryptocurrency doesn't give you any monetary policy levers at all! 'Demand-style' rhetoric is however popular with populist conservatives, who are painfully aware that supply-side anything sounds oddly elitist and handwavy to suspicious cultural conservatives, who never really liked the moral excesses of Wall St. to begin with, and who grew up in the Keynesian era and are nostalgic for its ideas.
The reason why I use outside assets instead of writing up my own arguments is the fact that A) these are complicated issues, I'm not entrenched in my position, but have read a few books that've made me think and they're usually better written. It's not like I'm linking to reason.org or something
If this thread continues, I will do the research, and fix the OP, I've admitted it was a work in progress, and said I planned to fix it, but that seems to be the preferred plan of attack now instead of any content, or addressing the points I've brought up in my additional posts.
I apologize for the poor title, but I just saw the video about nepotism on CBSNews and it made me think to ask for others opinions, and I decided to post it here. I should've titled the thread better, but it's how overly complicated systems get abused that makes me use that line.
Speaking of, I've done a brief reading of the STOCk Act, and it's language seems to indicate that if family members gain inside information through osmosis, unless there's a smoking gun, there's no way to initiate an investigation or audit, right?
A government backed crypto currency would be better than greenbacks because of the log. This log is what would cut down on the shadow economy, basically since it's the financial equivalent of a phone's metadata. With a crypto currency as the governments central currencies, computers could be in charge of most of the audits, and again, be inherently more efficient. I'm not saying the only currency should be bitcoin or bitcoin equivalents, I'm saying the federal government should take notes from what it's learned about the money supply, and quit making states social issues their problem, and have a single logging national currency so they can follow interstate and international commerce, even for "cash" purchases.
When I get a chance I'll write out the theory I had, but basically if it wasn't for privacy concerns, improper use of the records, a treasury controlled crypto currency would be intrinsically better for matters of taxation, knowledge of money supply and prevention of laundering, as well as put a severe hindrance on the shadow economy.
Speaking of the shadow economy, here's an interesting article from the Examiner:
http://www.examiner.com/article/us-underground-economy-doubles-from-2009-to-2012
Before you guys start trying to get me to define the shadow economy, here's the best paper I've read and a podcast I've listened to that originated my thoughts on the matter:
http://ftp.iza.org/dp6423.pdf
http://freakonomics.com/2012/08/30/how-deep-is-the-shadow-economy-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
Also, I'm not a Chicago school adherent, I'm self educated, but have the strongest agreement with most work outta Stanford's Hoover Institute, with some NYU and Chicago school theories I parse for relevant bits. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Econ talk I linked about the role of government in the utopian society.
It is not obvious whether high pay necessarily mitigates corruption on its own. It is difficult to pay a man so highly that he has no further use of additional money, particularly if - unlike Singapore - a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption can go unnoticed and uninvestigated.
In Singapore, public officials suspected of corruption do not have a right against search and seizure, and during trial, do not have a right to a presumption of innocence (instead, there is an explicit presumption of guilt; the defendant has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any favours accepted have a legitimate explanation). Hong Kong, the other city-state with high civil-service pay, moderates this to a presumption of fact - but likewise, the defendant must demonstrate that (on the balance of probabilities) any favours accepted were legitimate. Hong Kong also does not have to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before seizing unexplained wealth. These make it easy for the state to prosecute illicit wealth. But I trust it is obvious that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are quite dear to Americans.
That's true. Also, the only time I'm aware of when a American starts at zero and has to prove everything is typically when the IRS audits that person or entity. They treat all deposits, unless super obvious, as income and they disallow most if not all expenses. It is up to the taxpayer to actually prove to the government their assertions.
I'm even more interested in hearing your idea of the role of government in the utopian society.
I do not think you understand cryptocurrencies, and how they differ from mere electronic fiat money.
You do seem to believe that social issues are inherently tied to internal-revenue and financial-regulatory issues in some way, but you have yet to explain this clearly.
They differ from other electronic currencies by being unable to chargeback once a transaction is complete and being able to be completed with an arbitrary transaction number, but need a secure and private PIN(Like your SSN) for completion, and all of the currency is traceable to origin if an audit is necessary.
Also, unlike credit cards, there can be no fees for use other than simple electronic compliance that the government could issue as part of its welfare program. Also part of this welfare program could be allowing citizens to 'mine' for money supply if they deem that style of currency is needed, but the Fed could have complete fiat control and still have a fairer system with a crypto-currency than greenbacks as far as counterfeiting and laundering.
1) effectively the equivalent of just having a universal debit system and not producing any more physical bills
2) can easily be gamed
or 3) is unduly burdensome to actually use
Well, on this note. You should stop listening to EconTalk.
It's not that EconTalk is bad; it is excellent. It is that you are too credulous about its style of rhetoric. When popular science leaps from idea to idea, it is intended to give you a rough impression of the 'lay of the land', as it were. It is not built for one to start extrapolating onto the shape of the terra incognita.
When I read the EconTalk podcast transcript, I already know Russ Robert's basic sympathies and conceits, I know how Mike Munger tends to think, and I know Richard Epstein is a wingnut. I know that Roberts and Munger pride themselves on their grappling with heterodoxy, whereas Epstein and Skidelsky have an ideological axe to grind. I can see when Roberts carefully steers Skidelsky and Munger away from confronting Epstein away from his craziest ideas because, well, who likes to listen to podcasts of people disagreeing over basic facts? You can hardly show a graph over stereo.
Please be more specific about where these issues develop and their philosophies break down, and what of Steven D. Levitt whom is another economist I think is right more often than wrong. I'd be really interested in speaking about particular theories in a non-partisan way, and just on the merits.
And again, I'm very interested in hearing your answer to the question on the role of the government in the utopian society? How much sovereignty should city states have in a world economy?
To be fair, I think it's quite clear now that the "dispute" over earmarks was done in bad faith as a whole (even if particular proponents were being honest in their views). The Tea Party opposition to earmarks looks to be less of a good governance issue, and more about breaking a means of control over junior members by the party leadership.
The real issue with US Politics stems from the two party system, and their convoluted and self serving rules (super-delegates *cough*) and how they've had machines in place since inception. And have mastered honest graft over the years, if Tammany Hall, Truman's state party, Cheney, Rendell and the whole turnpike fiasco have taught us nothing.
There has also been a steady decline, by percentage, of third party candidates and, especially, serving public officials since the turn of the 18th century and the Know-Nothing's first started to become a real force, and the issue of free soil, abolition, and the embargo on the slave trade further fractured the dominant parties to be more regionally aligned . This was the impetus of a lot of state party machines, ala Eunuch Thompson's New Jersey, Tammany Hall, and the influx of voters into territories every time the Issue of slavery was at issue... It's extremely complicated, which is why I usually just link sources because trying to write cliffs notes on some things is tough, and I'm not the most articulate person when it needs brevity if you all haven't noticed.
I'm not sure I agree. I doubt the Tea Party was playing any 12th dimensional chess here. More likely the reasoning was simply:
1. I want to cut government spending
2. Cutting "wasteful" spending is easier to justify
3. Earmarks are spending that benefits one (or a few) districts and not the country as a whole
4. While usually individually small, in the aggregate and over time the total spending on earmarks is more significant
5. ergo, Earmarks are wasteful spending and should be eliminated
It does make sense, it's just that the unintended consequences meant that eliminating them hobbled leadership from wrangling control over their caucus, exacerbating the crisis (that was eventually averted using... earmarks!)
To be absolutely blunt, I am not sure I can usefully communicate these in a way that you will appreciate. You are, I think, most receptive to narrative rather than inconclusive survey. I have no narrative to offer.
Russ Roberts is Austrian, he's from the Boettke camp of Austrian economists at GMU. This camp has essentially two groups: a Walter Block group who spend all their time refining Austrian philosophy and essentially ignoring the mainstream, and another camp who spend all their time refining the economics against the mainstream consensus. Roberts is from the latter camp; you should know he's already well aware of how the debate is going to flow - he knows, fully well, that putting Epstein and Skidelsky together means that the non-economist Skidelsky is going to offer a naive perspective that law-and-economics Epstein can flatly reject and so he, Roberts, can hop in with a refined 1990s-GMU answer:
Which sidesteps the argument directly and so is very satisfying! But I can also tell you that he is being flatly intellectually dishonest because I know, and I know he knows, that GMU itself has evolved past this answer because of repeated bombshells like Cowen's 1997 Risk and Business Cycles and Garrison's 2000 Time and Money et cetera, where it was repeatedly demonstrated that the ABCT bandied about carelessly was flatly in contradiction of basic stylized facts of the economy. Never mind "precisely measure", the signs of alleged changes were just not reflected in the increasing amounts of data about time-structure becoming available for analysis. So you have to start grappling with the quantitative aspects. At a "story-telling" level, Austrian economics no longer falls into a neat intellectual gap left by the early-1990s monetarist disputes, it would just be wrong. That is why the school now tries to get quantitative papers out.
Munger is a political scientist who regularly crosses blogs between the Delong/Krugman/et al camp and the Cafe Hayek (i.e., Russ Roberts) group, so he knows all their talking points (and he has his own hobby-horse, which is public choice and dynamic inconsistency. That's because he does poli sci). That's why he stepped in when Epstein started reciting standard conservative rules-vs-discretion talking points, because (1) he knows that Epstein is a conservative Posner-school law and economics guy, who therefore hasn't kept up with economics of macro policy rules, and therefore (2) he knows that if Epstein pushes it, he'll lose to even the naivete that Skidelsky is pushing because you can formalize (New) Keynesian reaction into consistency-proof rules*, the Germans have even made it an actual concrete policy commitment for more than a decade, it's called "automatic stabilizers", and (3) his own scholarly work tries to refute the "rules" idea from another angle. The old "rules!!" attack that Epstein was pushing is outdated.
* automatic stabilizers conceived as a way to sidestep Kydland/Prescott dynamic inconsistency, rather than as a way to sidestep uncertainty in assessing the timing and extent of recessions
Levitt writes popsci books. You should take everything he writes with the seriousness you would take a newspaper's editorial page. This isn't a partisan critique, I should say the same of all of Krugman's non-scholarly writing as well. You do not read A Brief History of Time to learn physics.
Is the United States volunteering to stop exporting the dollar?
Internationalization of one's currency is today readily appreciated to be a liability, the problem with SDRs and the bancor is finding someone to guarantee to buy it in case of Actual Future Emergency.
this is true, in my opinion, but if your best argument proffered to the (allegedly) Loyal Opposition is that they're negotiating in bad faith, then the whole mechanism was a terrible idea to begin with
I'd like to have a conversation about the death of the manufacture, and traditional labor, to more of a services labor industry.. And how the fall of the iron curtain has created a bloat in the supply of labour that needs more demand, and the best ways to communicate it..
We'll keep this topic fresh and I'm planning on refining the OP to better reflect some of my arguments when I can dedicate the time, as I think we're starting to get somewhere constructive as I get a lot of what you're saying in your awesome post.
I'd just like to know, do you feel the Singapore style of Governance is more perfect than... US? German? UK? I'm trying to get an idea of how much involvement in personal choice you feel the government needs to be able to have.
That's kind of why the idea of a crypto-currency that's mineable is interesting, especially if government sponsored, since it could be kind of a new form of an old standard that lasted millenia. I'm not a gold standard nut, though, and I don't own any bitcoins, but the technology and ideas behind bitcoins is fascinating.
How does it work when foreigners interact with the greenback?
A foreign bank buys them, or they are exported as part of trade, and then as far as the US government is concerned that's it. You do realize that other countries use USD as their official currency too and that a very large amount of physical cash is held overseas