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Showing posts from November, 2016

Masticating on McKay Part One - Limited Liability

As all three of you know Iain McKay , librarian of the workers' revolution and keeper of the one truth , is my favourite person ever. Several of his pieces are published on libcom.org so I couldn't help but browse. This will be a series with this top bit repeated through each post. Sorry for that. I'm unresponsive to my public :p ~~~ In a piece called The Grand Bluff: Private profits, social risks our truth-teller gives a quick history of limited liability and why it's a bad thing; namely that it decreases owners' exposure to the risks the businesses they own take on. Correct! Limited liability is one state-granted monopoly privilege (along with organisational legal personhood, patents, and copyrights) that pretty much all anti-statists oppose. By describing the situation from the perspective of risk McKay even gets the reason why it's economically problematic right. Inevitably, however, there are some things I must complain about; there wouldn'

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen

Bourgeois Dignity review by Lengthyounarther

Lengthyounarther reviewed Bourgeois Dignity by Dierdre McCloskey. Now I want to read that damned book even more! In the course of his review I heard only two real criticisms of McCloskey's scholarship, one about environmentalism in Sweden and one about the degree to which her thesis about ideals that legitimate commerce actually holds. Overall he is very positive about the book; In the closing few minutes Lengthy gets on to current thinking on anthropology re food supply, population growth and the quantity and diversity of nutrition. I was delighted to hear this because I'm intensely curious about the history of farming and private property .