Anonymous asked: Who is your favorite left wing commentator, blogger, or YouTube person?
I like the YouTuber spawktalk and the blogger Lord Keynes (who runs the Social Democracy in the 21st Century blog). I also like some agorists and mutualists, though they are “left wing” in an entirely different sense to social democrats. Benjamin Tucker is fantastic.
But these people are all economically leftist. I am not a fan of any cultural leftists.
This is lovely
Anonymous asked: So people will be humanists if they don't believe their actions won't have consequences in the afterlife? ;P
YOLO therefore humanism.
Anonymous asked: What are your thoughts/criticism on Austrian capital theory in the Hayekian tradition of Roger Garrison, Lawrence White etc? What are the main differences between that and the Chicago school on the subject?
There was a debate between Frank Knight and Friedrich Hayek on this topic in the 30s. Knight’s view was that the roundaboutness of the production process was irrelevant to the determination of the interest rate. I need to do some reading on this, but I am more sympathetic to Knight’s view than Hayek.
Knight was an early Chicagoite (though he was unlike later Chicagoites in his rejection of positivism) so the Chicago School shares his view. Also, Nick Rowe (a Chicagoite blogger) did an interesting post on capital theory here.
Anonymous asked: What is the purpose in running a deficit exactly and does that mean that the government is insolvent?
A deficit is the excess of expenditure over revenue, government spending minus tax revenue (G-T). That can be taken over any time period, but it is normally a year. The annual deficit is therefore the additional debt that is added-on for that year. A deficit means government debt is increasing, but it doesn’t mean it’s insolvent. The government is insolvent when it’s total debt is so large that interest payments exceed its tax revenue.
The justification is normally that it boosts aggregate demand, since government spending is a component of aggregate demand.
theshotgunrhetoric asked: Do you believe the debate over whether money originated via the state (chartalism) or as an emergent response to the double-coincidence of wants is relevant?
It seems pretty irrelevant. There are historical examples of a privately produced money supply, e.g. free banking in Scotland in the 18th century. I’m pretty sure that a stateless free market would produce a money supply.
Regardless, I don’t find the arguments of chartalists or David Graeber very convincing.
View high resolution
I can’t believe NERV bought Tumblr.
Now they’ll close Shinji’s blog and force him to get in the fucking robot
You Can (Not) Reblog
(via ionosphere-negate)
Anonymous asked: What do you think about the corporate shareholder model, how the state intervenes in them (presumably) for the worse, and how a free market would change it (presumably) for the better? Would they even exist or be as prevalent as they are today or do you think some other model (syndicalism, Konkinian contractualism, something else) would emerge and become the new norm once people are given full economic freedom?
I dunno. Adam Smith gave arguments that corporations had a poor incentive structure and so would be driven out of business, but we now know that for a number of reasons corporations seem to work.
Smith’s argument was that since a shareholder had such a small share in the business they would be rationally ignorant in the running of the business and at shareholders’ meetings, so the managers would be free to mismanage the business.
However what Smith didn’t consider was takeovers. If a firm has a good product but is mismanaged and so share prices are low (because profits and dividends are low), a single wealthy capitalist could buy a majority of the shares, fire the managers and replace them with responsible ones to make a big profit. The threat of such takeovers keeps the CEOs and managers in line.
I certainly think that firms are made artificially large by state interventions, for example, consider how the state taxes transactions between firms but not within them, raising the natural economies of scale. Thought it’s not unheard of for intervention to make firms artificially small (e.g. trains in the UK, where regulations have prevented vertical integration and caused transactions costs to mushroom).
