smittyoneeach's Journal: Economic illiteracy hurts

A fine piece by Williamson:
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/376445/print

You could read the text...

[damn_registrars]

... or just give us links to other people assaulting it because it doesn't fit their worldview. The option you went with is clear.

Of course, you still could go back and read the text, but like so many other pieces that you take pride in not reading - while assaulting regardless - I don't expect that you will.

Distributism vs Capitalism

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Communism has failed in Russia, and what replaced it was distributism [blogspot.com]. I have to wonder if in a weird, completely insane and counterintuitive way, Karl Marx became Reinhard Marx, figuratively and out of necessity- private property finds a way to exist, and if you deprive people of food enough, they'll find a way to create it themselves. Still, thanks for the link for my most recent edit to that.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Communism failed because Saint Albert of Gore was full of hooey when he spoke of the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption [nytimes.com]. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was foolishness, just as the National Socialist German Workers Party was foolishness, just like every other attempt to bring "social justice" through external means (Epistle to the Romans).

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

And yet, the end result was subsidiarity- people raising their own food, and being largely autonomous within themselves.

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[smittyoneeach]

If we're comfortable rolling back the clock to the Middle Ages, and joining Amish communities, then fine.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'm comfortable with that idea. Or at least, that ideal.

A question for the Libertarians out there

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Can you spot the Zero Sum Game Fallacy in this essay?

Maybe I only can because I'm a distributist who does believe inefficiency for the sake of community building and reducing idleness is a good thing, but when the author claims "Producing that for which there is no demand is not genuine economic activity; it is performance art. As an economic matter, writing a man a check for that sort of job is indistinguishable from simply sending him a welfare check; the difference is that it inconveniences the beneficia

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

By the same token, writing legislation that triggers hiring because the law is so jacked up is also not genuine economic activity, but that is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org] under which so much idiocy today is undertaken.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Broken window parable doesn't apply to intentionally consumable goods like a home garden- only to durable.

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[smittyoneeach]

I am having trouble making the leap from a home garden to management jobs.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Management job? Why does everybody need a management job?

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[smittyoneeach]

Because it's the Information Age; only peasants do real work [blueletterbible.org].

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[Austrian Anarchy]

As an economic matter, writing a man a check for that sort of job is indistinguishable from simply sending him a welfare check; the difference is that it inconveniences the beneficiary (which WFB endorsed on moral grounds) and — the always-unspoken corollary —

If a private person is writing his own check to to the old guy at the corner of his property who whittles the same figurine every day, that is one thing. If the guy tossing out the checks is the mayor doing it with funds collected at gu

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

He's often said he's for higher taxes on his own class. The problem is what he wants the government to do with those taxes.

Piketty's Charge

[PopeRatzo]

I'm now about 2/3 the way through Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century and what I've read so far does not resemble the things that are being written about it in the political media. The business media and neo-liberal sources like the National Review have been particularly guilty of misrepresenting the book as some call for a 21st century Marxist revolution. It's nothing of the sort.

In fact, Piketty seems to be saying that the mechanisms of open, capitalist economies are without peer in terms of

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

It's been so long since any point of view besides the Cato Institute conventional wisdom has been allowed into mainstream discussion, that the mere description of the problem causes convulsive anger among the old Reagan believers, and that's probably why you're seeing such prodigious pissing and moaning from people who mainly end up demonstrating their unwillingness to even read Piketty's book.

I'm probably going to have to break down and get it, but not right away; my print backlog is majestic in scope.