Iraq and al Qaeda not linked (Pentagon)

Guerilla:

Since for the second time you won't reveal your educational or work background with regard to discussing complex macro economic issues, I'd rather not go on.

You are more of a "preacher" of a certain school of thought, rather than someone with a rigorous background on the topic.

Keep repeating the same thing endlessly within a forum where virtually every other member doesn't have background on a topic that most would humbly defer on, and you'll probably get some believers. Most with common sense will keep their distance.

I choose to keep my distance from a "preacher" of a certain economic theory who refuses to give credibility to his understanding of a complex theory.

On top of that, someone who treats the very slight and controlled increase in prices over the 1980's, 1990's and early 2000's as a DISASTER, even as the economy grew significantly and every significant economist and business person applauded the impact of low inflation as a success, is someone who in my mind, I would distance myself from.

 

What more credibility can I give than my arguments being right and my predictions bearing fruit? It's very disappointing that you have lowered the discussion to being about me, rather than the issues. That you won't make an argument for your position, but you will try to undermine the discussion by attacking my credibility.

That might work for the Bush administration, dirty tricks and all, but the argument remains and you are intentionally declining to finish it.

That's exactly why I gave you no answer. If I am an uneducated fool, or a hyper-educated genius, does nothing to validate or invalidate my positions. It's the same sort of collectivist thought that once said that not all men are equal, that blacks are inferior to whites, or that women were incapable of being independent and equal members of society. The difference between an aristocracy and a peasant class.

By virtue of station, breeding, means or education, someone is better than someone else.

Perhaps one day, you'll start to see people as individuals, not as groups or classes.

I don't know if other people find this as disturbing as I do, but you are continuing to make Ad Hominem attacks, but now employing unsourced exaggeration.

The increase in prices caused by monetary inflation was not slight, unless you are using a very generous definition of the term. That said, it was also not a disaster. It may be a disaster, if the dollar crashes and we have to collapse the entitlement state promised to the Baby Boomers due to insolvency.

Experts like Alan Greenspan, the guru, the man who oversaw the massive monetization of debt, and inflation, is now running around the world, telling anyone that will listen that America is insolvent, and should collapse for our own good.

A word to the wise. Just because someone is an expert, doesn't mean they are telling the truth, or acting in the interest of the many.

After all, 7 years in, GWB is an expert on being the President, is he not? And no one believes a word that comes out of his mouth, or feels his motive is in the best interest of anyone outside of his corporate handlers...

I'm still interested in discussing the morality of gold, inflation caused by increases of the money supply, and a philosophy of personal liberty, any time you would like.

Maybe we can even keep it civil (and not make it personal).

 

TK, sorry for abusing your thread. But then, it really became all about how much "hate America" rhetoric GTech could spread anyways.

@ Earl + KalvinB

This morning I awoke to the good fortune of an excellent article posting at LewRockwell about Privatized Roads. I thought both of you Gentlemen might be interested with enriching your day by checking it out.

The Hidden Costs of Road Socialism
http://www.lewrockwell.com/crovelli/crovelli12.html

and it links to an excellent article I just discovered, by Thomas DiLorenzo (who for the benefit of those who need to know the credentials of the author, is a professor of Economics).

The article is about 19th Century private turnpikes.
http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/internal.pdf

Hope you enjoy this!

 

Theory dream boy. Its typical of a theorist who has no experience, or a political junkie who only espouses one theory and can't be bothered by the realities of life to publish such tripe.

The article from Rockwell is an editorialized piece of opinion without hard facts.

But of course because you like that theory you think the article is terrific. You have little awareness of reality.

The article about 18th and 19th century life is quaint. You idealize that period before the world got more complex.

Hard facts for you, dream boy. In the 20th century there were all of 2 toll roads built in the US.

One almost went bankrupt immediately. Investor equity was completely lost. Actual volume of traffic was about 25% of predicted traffic at a predicted price of $1.75/trip in 1995. After going reneogiating debt and lowering tolls to $1.00 traffic increased almost three fold.....still dramatically less than the original estimate and at 60% of the cost.

The road was the Dulles Greenway in Virginia.

The 2nd tollroad built in the US connects two Southern California cities in Orange County covers all of 10 miles and sits right in the middle of a publicly owned freeway. The freeway sits under huge congestion and the toll road increased fares 7 times in a 5 year period between 1997 and 2002. As of 2002 I believe fees were about $8.00 for the ten mile drive.

The Orange County toll road took advantage of weak local govt finances at the time of construction and negotiated that the freeway can't be expanded till 2035.

One toll road allows for a monopolistic situation wherein the toll operator has been free to continuously raise prices. The second toll road financially failed immediately.

Fortunately for drivers, toll roads don't require lots of maintenance most of the time. But over the years they will need maintenance and repair. A toll road that is failing financially simply won't make the repairs.


Back to the highly editorialized Rockwell piece. I'm not surprised you thought it was great. No facts, all opinions. That is your cup of tea. Ah....Rockwell, he was the guy that published the weak economic article using two not directly related items, added them together to create an artificial calculation and then compared that to gdp suggesting that gdp was less than that which it actually represented. Another example of weak thinking.

I guess you belong there dream boy, in the land of weak idealistic unrealistic thinking.

Actually there are complex financing models for pricing that might be achieved that might work in some cases for toll roads.

The complex pricing models typically fail when estimates fall out of context with "majority assumptions". That is why hedge funds fail in times of financial stress.

Dream solutions have pros and cons. Reality has pros and cons. Dream boy, you haven't matured enough to see that.

There is an interesting economic experiment/explosion occurring in Russia. Its not exactly your ideal but it speaks to issues that reflect total dependance on the market.

In a few short years, Russia has an enormous number of billionaires who have taken control of formerly public businesses. The state is still strong and the state essentially allows these relatively small number of wealthy individuals to survive...so long as they stay in good graces with the govt.

The total move to a market unconstrained by any sources creates little or ever bigger monopolistic situations that strain the conditions of the majority of the population.

If and when economic sh!t hits the fan the majority of the population gets seriously disgusted and tends to rebell.

your concepts ultimately call for that type of environment.

The history of the US, especially after the Great Depression was to allow govt to step in to protect the livelyhood of the majority, especially when conditions are so bad and so removed from control of the individual that they can't cope.

That is where modern American liberalism stems from

The trick over time is to balance free markets with protections.

Your solutions, dream boy would be to remove all protections and allow the very wealthiest to ultimately feed on the majority.

Meanwhile if you need hard facts let me know, instead of publishing editorial peaces like that opinion piece from Rockwell or that nice little history from the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

I see you're not ready to abandon the Ad Hominem attacks.

Btw, you called me dream boy 5 times. I feel obliged to inform you, it's not that you're probably too old, but I'm not gay. So thanks anyways.

I never said it wasn't. But what did you think about removing the 4 way stops Pretty good idea huh?

Ah yes, the secret "complexity" of the macro. The mysticism of the economic "experts"! So how exactly, is it more complex? What challenges are different from then and now?

Private roads don't have to be toll roads. I mean, you did read the article about private turnpikes, yes?

And the qty of toll roads as an argument against them is a logical fallacy. You're trying to use negative proof. The absence of toll roads by itself is not proof of the failure of toll roads.

Btw, Rockwell didn't publish the economic article you can't understand. The one you keep repeating uses unrelated items. So please, relax.

Lol. You're gunna have to do better than name calling Earl. I can get responses like this from any 3 year old, or GTech.

Actually, hedge funds tend to fail under times of stress because they are over-leveraged. It's a consequence of an industry where fund managers only "get paid" when they realize large profits. My bank manager and I had this discussion about the toxic SIVs. The bank knew they were potentially bad and risky, but they had to compete with other banks that were holding the bad paper, because the investment business is driven by returns, not security, service, or long term performance. Everything is quarterly returns.

This seems like an unnecessary and self-loathing personal attack. Wouldn't you agree?

Uhm, no. You keep confusing managed markets with free markets. Free markets are unfettered. Russia does not have a free market.

This is fascism. The collusion of business and government to the disadvantage of competition, and the exploitation of the tax base.

A free market is self-policing Earl. In order for a monopoly condition to exist, consumers would likely be benefitting from the lowest possible price (no competition), the best possible service (no competition) and the latest innovations (no competition). Failure to provide one or more of these 3 factors, would create an opening for a competitor.

I think a failure in our discussions is that you are not familiar with the theory of a free market. So we end up crossing our wires. You call me dream boy, I blush like a schoolgirl, then you angrily label ideals as weakness.

What are they going to rebel against? The market is free. They are welcome to shop elsewhere, and entrepreneurs are welcome to start new enterprises and compete. Rebelling against say, Microshaft would entail using Linux. A free market alternative. Or perhaps going to Apple.

It's a big topic, so I'll have to cut it short, but suffice it to say, in a free market, you're unrestrained. You have no chains to struggle within and no jailer to rebel against.

A free market, yes. A rebellion against the government? No.

That's one way of putting it. But the government, is the people. And the resources of the government, are the confiscated wealth of the people. So the government really cannot do any more than what the people could do themselves.

By it's very nature, particularly in a large bureaucracy, government is inefficient because of all of the overhead costs, the tendency to reward failure with larger budgets, and the politicizing of everything of value.

The government can't manufacture new wealth or prosperity. True or False?

Perhaps you should step through the Early 1900s politically and economically, to understand exactly what brought on the Depression. There were panics in the previous century, but we had a more mature mentality about economic recovery, so they rarely lasted very long.

Suffice it to say, I don't think anyone can make a serious case of the failure of sound money (gold) or a free market (capitalism) for the Depression. One could easily make a case for inflationary monetary policy and interventionist economic policy.

(sic) Modern liberalism is just watered down socialism. It's end goal is quasi-communism, but it's just as likely in the wrong hands to turn into fascism. Which is what we have today. A fascist corporatacracy. Politically connected corporations dictate policy and receive the lions share of no bid contracts. Politicians like Obama, Clinton, et al are bought and paid for by Wall Street and other corporate financiers that pay both sides during the election runups.

Military spending that is out of control, with little or no accountability. Foreign aid (includes the cost of subsidizing the defense of south Korea, Japan, Germany, England etc, etc, etc) that would cure homelessness, poverty, medical care, and education for every American. But the poor and disadvantaged don't have lobbyists in Washington like the countries we send aid to, or the military industrial complex.

This is enabled by a state that is powerful enough to tax and monetize the balance of the debt spending. A government that runs ponzi tax schemes like SS, then loots the funds knowing that insolvency is the end result, and constituents will be left hung out to dry.

Kinda ironic that Haliburton of all companies would get the contract to build domestic detention centers. After all, they are helping create the potential for their future use.

But I digress, and you think the government should actually perform more like a corporation.

A market is not free if there are "protections". The only protection required is enforcement of law. If consumers and workers are protected by law from violence, theft, coercion, and their privacy and property is protected, they don't need any further protection, do they?

So-called "protections" are regulation. Regulation limits competition, or creates artificial competition (for the sake of competition) at the expense of the consumer. If I have the choice not to buy something, or to buy something somewhere else, what do I need protection from? I'm free!

You bring this up a lot. Doom and gloom, anti-capitalistic rhetoric.

How about you give me a FREE MARKET scenario where this would occur?

History, it's inconvenient for you in our discussions.

Please don't be bitter that this country was built on private roads, and when public road projects were started, they failed so miserably that all but (I think) 3 states changed their constitutions to prevent such subsidized public works in the future.

What luck that the article linking to the study was posted today. I hope you gained some value from reading up on the history of private roads in America.