AynCrap

Oh my god, you like, don't know how wrong I am right now! HOW MUCH FREEDOM? Freedom is the condition or situation in which a moral agent, or person, can act upon themselves and their environment without being prevented by outside factors. Different people enjoy different degrees of freedom for many reasons, but to simplify a little, people's own time and property are respected to different degrees depending on the country they're in, the social caste they belong to, and whether they are doing time in prison, on death row, or are a powerful bureaucrat or politician. How much freedom is too much, and how much is too little? The Liberal tradition gives us a nifty logic from which to defend this crazy thing called Liberty against the Divine Right of Kings . Too little freedom might be the condition of, say, a worker in North Korea having to submit to forceful re-education, or a Chinese farmer having to give up their land since they are afforded no private property r

Is it so wrong? Really? Just humour me, dudes and dudettes. I am an Austrian. I am a Libertarian. I am an Austro-Libertarian. I'm evidently also a hypocrite, as I've used most of these words without capitals in past posts. Oops. I've made Austrian economics my home because it accords better with certain concerns of mine; why have a subjective theory of value and then lump desires and capacities into aggregates? Why declare that economic facts can be gleaned from the movements of particular markets at particular times in the past? Rothbard sums up the problem with both phenomena in a way that no mainstream economist ever would, since to do so would be to admit that there are entire fields of modern economics that are, at best, pointless, and at worst, harmful. NOT MAINSTREAM? Why is Austrian economics not mainstream? It rejects the efficacy of aggregates and mathematical formulae to arrive at economic truths. According to the Austrian worldview,

I may be incorrect, bucko. The Adam Smith Institute's Julian Morris is kinda barking up the wrong tree here . What policies produce the greatest or least of an aggregate of whatever factor is a far less important yardstick than morality. It is immoral to talk down to adults as though they are children. And legislation governing behaviour, or advertising, or packaging, or anything that connects parties in voluntary exchange is immoral precisely because it is an exercise in talking down to people. That is to say, it is paternalistic. I already have one dad. I do not need another.

I reserve the right to be wrong. Go there . A neat demonstration that financial regulation creates, rather than prevents, banking crises. Soon I will do a post comparing central banking to free banking, but you can kinda see where my case will be leading in this ASI post anyway!

I reverse the right to be wrong. Yes I did spell it that way. Help me... The national economy... the global economy. Hmmm. Economics is the study of production and exchange between people against the background of scarcity of resources and scarcity of time. But even so, does that really require that we personify the sum of all the economic actions taking place within a geographical area over a period of time? Is the 'economy' we get out of this any more real than taking two random surveys of people to see who believes in fairies, then comparing the two and deciding whether belief in fairies is increasing or decreasing? Who's to say... well, besides Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard and so on. AN ECONOMY Measuring an economy as an entity in its own right is a practice which found mainstream favour in the 20th Century, especially with the 1936 publication of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money . W