Lurker > red sox 777

And Motorola being taken over by Google matters. Normally, Microsoft would probably just write a check to Motorola to settle the case, but Google might want to milk it for a lot more money than Motorola would have been willing to settle for.

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It looks like the US court and the German court might end giving conflicting orders here. A nice mess for the companies to deal with.

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And Ron Paul doesn't hide that. Listen closely to what he says, does he ever promise short-term prosperity under his policies? No! Because he's as honest as politicians come. That's probably a big reason he doesn't get more support, because he doesn't promise short-term prosperity, and that's what many voters are looking for, and why Obama and Romney constantly promise it at all times.

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And you do? You have absolutely no understanding of economics and history. Which is fine, you're just a citizen. The scary part is that you have all these "experts" single-handedly running the country and the economy, and they are not the tiniest bit smarter than you. And they are trying their hardest to keep it that way by keeping you dumb so that they can continue being dumb.

Yes, I do, and I'll not take such insults from you.

RP is at least trying to educate people. It's not like people support him because of his rhetoric, because he's a great speaker, because he's not. He simply makes arguments that make sense, and explains them. I've been looking for a while for a convincing argument against his policies, and I just haven't found any. You would think that if he were so blatantly wrong, people would jump at the opportunity to point it out.

Where did I say he was wrong? He knows what he wants. I just said that most of his supporters (such as you, probably, based on what you've been saying) do not know the actual probable consequences of his policies.

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Well, Ron Paul as President with the same Congress and Supreme Court we have now wouldn't really be able to do all that much anyway.

The general idea is that a nation that elected Ron Paul as President would also necessarily be a nation who is willing to return to sound economic principles and fully understands the implications thereof.

Until the midterm elections. Then landslide wins for the other parties in Congress.

SCOTUS would let Ron Paul do whatever he wanted, it only ever rules that government is allowed or not allowed to do something. There is a strong general rule against requiring government to do anything. It's also the most conservative branch of government at the moment.

Also, I daresay most Ron Paul supporters have no idea what the implications of his policies are. They hear sound economic principles and think we're going to get more prosperity. Not surprising, because it's what every conservative politician has been telling them for 30 years- more economic freedom and we'll have more prosperity! But in RP's case, it is rather intense personal economic suffering for our generation, so that our children and grandchildren will have a brighter future. Most RP supporters do not understand this.

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And I think I've mentioned this before a long time ago, but Keynesian economics works really well in Sim City 3000. Maybe Obama should start making kids play it at school, without mentioning anything about how they should manage their city's money of course. When kids realize that they can make their cities grow faster and realize big profits quickly through massive deficit spending at the beginning of the game, they'll draw the connections to what our government is doing. I don't know if Keynesian economics still works in SimCity 4 or any later games, but if it does, those would work too for the indoctrination.

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Something I never see discussed is that politically, even if Ron Paul became president, he would lose all his popularity very quickly. After the first year of deep recession, the American public, which is notoriously impatient and demands instant results, would flip on him. Ron Paul could not be seen as a hero except by history.

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Yup, every single success you had in the last 3 years and 3 months should be attributed to one man only. And it's not you. It's President Obama. Every failure you've had for the last 11 years and 3 months likewise should be attributed to one man only. President Bush.

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Keynesianism had been abandoned for a pretty long time before 2008. Our problem before that wasn't with the economic theory, it was with the government that couldn't help but spend money. All those wars, as you said.

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And come on, are you looking at the facts or just repeating talking points?

There has been a huge difference in money creation since 2008- the money supply has roughly doubled since then. Quantitative easing is a new thing started after the crisis began. And even on the (official, as in non-Fed) side of things, our deficits in 2002 were nothing like our deficits since 2008. We had a surplus in 2000, remember. Even if you're looking at private credit, that bubble didn't really take hold until the 2005-7 period. Our country's financial position in 2002 was in no way comparable to now.

Part of the reason the country was willing to go along with the Iraq war was that the US wasn't in a bad position financially.

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We really don't have the money today. There's a reason why gold has gone up so much in the past 10 years.

And the politicians were saying that we had plenty of money 10 years ago. That's how they could justify going to war- we've got plenty of money, let's spend it!

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Except we don't actually have enough money to pay off our debts anymore. We did 10 years ago, so that's what the politicians were saying then, but we've already spent it all as of now.

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Basically:

Most politicians: We don't have enough money to pay off our debts, but our children and grandchildren will, so let's make them pay it.

Ron Paul: Instead of foisting our bad debt on our children and grandchildren, let's default right now.

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Current debt will have to be repaid, which will be hard, though possible if federal money going overseas is used to bailout the students, but future debts will actually be reasonable and there will not be this snowballing anymore.

There's a lot more debt with homeowners and businesses than with students. And more than any of those with banks. The government is already in the processing of bailing out bad debts; it doesn't have enough money to do so, so it's resorted to activities similar to printing money.

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Economics yes, business no. And Steve Forbes might be advocating for Ron Paul because it's the right thing to do, not because it benefits him personally. It benefits the country in the long run.

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It doesn't help him now, it may help in down the line.

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Depends on what the gold standard is established at. The more money printing we have before going on the gold standard, the higher the dollar value will be.

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Lots of people like Ron Paul's policy, but no one wants to suffer personally to see it happen. And just about everyone would suffer personally in the short run.

Workers- will see their (nominal) wages go down.
Exporters- will find their products at a disadvantage in foreign markets with a stronger dollar.
Anyone with debt (in the US, that means mostly homeowners, businesses, and students)- real interest will be higher without inflation, or with deflation.
Top 1%- will see stock prices fall across the board.
Banks- no more bailouts.
Precious metals investors- Without inflation, metals prices collapse.

So who benefits? Bondholders, people with a lot of cash sitting around, and then the much bigger groups: the next generation, and the generation after that.

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It's the first step, and a pretty big one considering how important schools are. Schools are where children spend about 25% of their waking hours from age 6 to 18, where they learn about what kind of country they live in. The lesson they're getting right now is that the rules are arbitrary and capricious, they have no say in the rules, and they'd better bow down before them if they don't want to face massive, disproportionate, punishment.

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It's already happening in the US. How many innocent schoolchildren have been expelled already for bringing a plastic knife to school to use at lunch?

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The GOP can't do that. If Obama follows through and actually recalls the troops, he'll win in a landslide.

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I'm surprised the Republicans in Congress are supporting keeping student loan interest rates low. Thought they would go with the Tea Party "college is useless" mantra, except, of course, for the top 1%'s own kids, in which case nothing less a top flight education will do.

Then again, maybe they have to take marching orders from the banksters who have dictated that interest rates must be low, to facilitate the great printing money, which will bring us the glorious inflation, which will send the stock markets up.

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Muffin, George Zimmerman has managed to raise 200k for his defense already. Whether he's convicted or not, he'll get a lot of money out of this.

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Romney's got the nomination locked up. He'll have a majority of the delegates. Ron Paul is in it to make a point at this point, not to win.

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$1000 is pushing too far, I think. Maybe for the PS5, if we get another few rounds of QE before then.

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We need $120 games to match that $720 console price.

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Nintendo can't just abandon the casuals (er....more properly non-gamers, not casuals) either; they made up too big a share of Wii sales.

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I feel Nintendo can't go over $400 without alienating the casuals. Maybe a $350 launch.

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Nah, the market will just be bigger than last generation. Wii U can surpass Wii even with a lower market share.

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The only reason people engage in fractional reserve banking is because the government guarantees the banks deposits.

Fractional reserve banking was alive and well before 1929. 5000 banks went bust in the US in the Great Depression, the government didn't guarantee deposits.

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Because property does not exist but for a system of laws. The laws say what the property is and who owns it. And our laws say the government gets a portion of everyone's. When evaluating the merit of a system of laws, you have to look at efficiency, not morality, because there is no natural order of property, without law.

Think about what would happen if there were no law- then people would really be robbing people on the street, no? And it would be perfectly legal, so there doesn't seem to be a case for saying that people actually own what they purport to own.

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Incidentally, how would those trials work? Would other Obama voters be eligible to serve on the jury? Good luck convicting anybody in New York City or San Francisco....

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But but.....President Nixon had a Committee to Re-Elect the President! (CREEP). Speaking of which, I need to find some time to go visit the Nixon Library in Orange County. California produced both Nixon and Reagan, how did it become a blue state?

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It's pretty likely he'll get 49%+ of the vote, so will we have to put half the country on trial for treason?

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Well, the point is that Austrian economics isn't really adding anything of value to your personal judgments. Those judgments could still be great or horrible or anywhere in between. With a math-based theory of economics, it tells your something your personal judgments didn't already tell you. You don't have to listen to it 100%, or even at all. But it gives you more information to work with.

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How is "everyone should be left to conduct free and fair trade without the threat of violence" the same argument as "violence should be used to make sure everyone has the same amount of stuff"?

You just said that fractional reserve banking should be banned by force because it is immoral. So that some people would get more stuff, and other people would get less stuff. I don't see the difference.

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And they make the wrong one. What's your point, that moral arguments are wrong because there are two sides to them? It's a moral argument to say that murder is wrong. That argument doesn't become invalid because murderers disagree, does it?

I think you're making the exact same argument as the Communists. Where's the difference? I don't see a second side here.

Because the fed has artificially propped up stocks. In any case, Austrian theory does not favor gold as an investment. Under Austrian theory, gold should do nothing at all but retain its purchase power. It is a medium of exchange that cannot be manipulated, and nothing more

Well, that's the thing about the market, you can be right, emphatically right, while the market is emphatically wrong, but until the market admits that you are right, you are still wrong.

Also, the Fed hasn't been propping up stocks for decades. Just the past few years. And QE helps gold more than stocks, because gold is as pure an inflation play as any.

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The real problem with the lack of math is that it allows the theory to make blanket prescriptions like "buy gold all the time" or "cut taxes all the time." You can say that that's not what the theory says, but to the extent that people deviate from that, they have to use their own judgments, since there's no math to provide guidance. But then, if they're using their own judgments, then the theory is not adding any value.

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Well, that's like saying that NOT stealing your neighbors stuff isn't profitable. Technically correct, but missing the point entirely.

That sounds an awful lot like a moral argument. The same argument the Communists use for why the government should redistribute wealth.

In any case, it's entirely possible that the Austrians will eventually be vindicated. If enough banks were to go belly up as to bankrupt the FDIC, we'd get hyperinflation, which would be just as bad for everyone as simply allowing the banks to go ahead and fail.

Maybe, but other economic theories could also see this coming. And if you've been holding gold instead of stocks for a few decades, remember, your position is a lot worse right now.



Physics is just a finite set of theories, right? Theories can be described perfectly in words and symbols, so they are just strings (sets of characters, like a sentence or formula), right? So just enumerate every single possible set of theories (I can explain to you how this is done in detail), and theoretically, ONE of those sets will be our current modern quantum physics, MINUS the basic axioms that makes it work mathematically. So if we just randomly picked one of those sets and it happened to be this particular set, we would have a physics that works 95% of the time but isn't supported by math.

But that set of theories probably wouldn't work, because the axioms that make it work mathematically could be the same ones that make it work empirically. Or, you'd be left with the empty set.

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So Austrian theory isn't profitable then, and that's why banks don't employ it. Unless you mean that it produces profits by not screwing other people out of their money. But that is the same as getting them more money at your expense. Which is getting them, other players in the free marketplace, an advantage. Which is precisely the meaning of playing with a disadvantage.

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And if they disagree?


Of course people can disagree, but the disagreements tend to happen in a free market in the areas where people do not know the answer, so an advantage is really hard to come by.

By your theory, all Chicago school economists should be fantastically wealthy, all Keynesian should be doing pretty good, and all Austrians should be doing horribly and losing their shirts.

Remind me who predicted the housing bubble again?

Yes, that seems accurate. Probably 99% of Wall Street subscribes to those two or similar theories. There's a reason why there are no major banks that employ Austrian theory.

Also, predicting a bubble doesn't mean much by itself. If you predict a bubble every year, for example, you're guaranteed to hit eventually.

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Being able to predict the general market direction would still make you millions.

If you could correctly time the market, even with no shorting, if you just put all your money in an S&P index fund during months when it went up, and all your money in a regular savings account during months when it went down, you'd be amazingly wealthy and have ridiculous returns.

Yeah, but other people still know what you know, even for general market movements. It's not like there's a group of professors with a secret theory that they've not published. Wall Street is well aware of what all the leading economic theories predict.

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Also, I suspect it would be very easy for any of the economists at the Fed to make a ton of money in the stock market right now, based on legal insider trading. Not that that shows the merit of their economics work. But I wouldn't be too surprised if a few years down the line we started seeing former Federal Reserve economists on the rich lists.

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Because no one can attain even a 1% advantage in the stock market (beyond the natural advantage you get for being willing to take on risk), or at least we can't prove that anyone can. There's actually been a lot of attempts to disprove the efficient market hypothesis by proving that someone has better than a 0% advantage, and it still hasn't been demonstrated. Of course, that they have no advantage also hasn't been demonstrated.

The 60%, 55%, etc. figures aren't for the stock market, but for economic questions in general. Remember, you compete against others in the stock market, so if they know what you know, you have no advantage.

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It's a bad question, because there couldn't be a physics not supported by math that works 95% of the time. As a science, economics is probably around where physics was in the 16th century- because it is based on people, who are hard to model mathematically.

If random guessing works 50% of the time, then modern economics (think Chicago school) works perhaps 60% of the time. Lord Keynes's theory worked perhaps 55% of the time. Austrian economics is probably pretty close to random guessing. Of course, in the stock market, if you play with even a 1% advantage, you'll become very rich very fast.

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We do have AIs running Wall Street now. And we still need people just as we need people in physics, chemistry, computer science, etc.

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The mathematical and empirical study of something.

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Though the policies implemented by our politicians usually are not what is recommended by any school of economics. The big push for a freer market in the past 30 years has had a lot of success with tax cuts, and very little with anything else that makes a market freer.

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