Should I even bother responding to this? It's basically an ad hominem, i.e. "You just think this because you're a member of the bourgeois." What's next? Are you going to deny me a job in the Ministry of Lampshades because I wasn't a peasant farmer before the revolution?
It's called cutting through the bullshit. Your statement that next I'm going to deny you a job because blah blah blah is obviously just as much of a personal attack, so cut the bullshit.
For the record, I never said you were wrong because you are pushing your ideology. Actually, it is incidental whether you are right or wrong, but the fact remains you are pushing a Libertarian ideology. I can tell because I'm not goddamn blind, and I know what the ideology looks like. If I were up here talking about labour value and control of the means of production, it would not be unreasonable for you to suggest that I am a Marxist, and that arguments against Marxism would then apply to me.
I'm not even arguing that your conclusions are wrong, I have argued, at length, that your conclusions are simply unreliable and that it is because your analytic is not founded on reality. That's a perfectly legitimate argument.
So, by your standard, no one should have anything to say about the economy. Or does that just apply to libertarians, because you don't like their ideas?
If you know your fallacies, how are you not aware that this is just poisoning the well? I don't like your ideas because they aren't founded on fact, which is entirely reasonable.
My point was actually just that the economy is really goddamn complicated. In the words of a market analyst: "economics is the science of telling you tomorrow why the prediction I made yesterday did not come true today." You really just have to listen to someone who works with the economy for a living to understand that it is really goddamn complicated. There is no magic bullet which will fix it, and it is very difficult to predict with accuracy, although it is a little easier to analyze in hindsight. Furthermore, the causes for things are often very complex and difficult to determine. The idea that all problems could be produced by one cause and fixed by one cause, without evidence, is a massive suspension of disbelief.
The idea that you
just know what would happen if the economy were radically changed is silly. While everything the Libertarian outlook describes as a result of the free market is logically consistent, there is no saying it would actually function the way it is described. There is no necessary link between people's real actions and the supposed outcome, there is only a story of how you think millions of people you do not know would decide to behave under a system of untested constraints.
It seems like you are the one letting ideology cloud your judgement. You claimed a free market brought about the economic downturn. I corrected you by pointing out how the entire money and banking system of the United States and other countries is run by government-chartered central banks with a legal priviledge to create money out of thin air (essentially counterfeiting).
If we're counting fallacies, that's tu quo que, so you're now leading me by three to one. My point was that the most readily available cause was competition among brokers and investors driving down lending standards because of the perception that the current trend in housing would continue forever. Why is it I think that is the cause? I think it was something about how the people responsible
said that was why they did it. There was a good NPR special where they interviewed some fairly influential bankers, as well as brokers and borrowers, about their motivations, and all of them were very forthcoming. I have heard people responsible, who were in the thick of it, actually say these things.
The accusation that the government contributed through some Rube Goldberg machine of economics may indeed be true, but it is probably a better starting place to consider the immediately available facts of why the people involved made the choices they made. Competition was a major driving force in reduced lending standards, in free market economics, competition is supposedly a stabilizing factor. I was pointing out that competition can actually be a destabilizing factor, and furthermore there is no reason to assume that it is only destabilizing under government management of the economy, other than the unverified assumption that it is such.
Also, if that's counterfeiting, how does one legitimately create currency?
Then I explained how this wreaks havoc on the economy. You haven't written a single sentence to challenge anything I said. Instead, you've called me arrogant and pronounced that I'm wrong, as if your saying so makes it so.
In addition to calling you arrogant, I have also actually written quite a lot about how you are wrong. You are choosing to look over all of that and talk only about how I said bad things about you, but you also said bad things about me, so I figure we are even now. How about the rest of everything I wrote?
I mean, ultimately, if you are going to say this is the way things are, cough up some evidence. If you could provide an example of a successful Libertarian economic system, that would be awesome.
Player
Poll
