does the government have too much control over the economy?

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So the people working at a factory don't make anything? It is the idle rich, the investor class, that often does little useful work.

And the concept of natural rights is, to quote Jeremy Bentham, nonsense of stilts. The notion is a form of naive, culture-centric moral naturalism with religious and feudal origins.

I see somebody has been reading too much Ayn Rand.

If anything, the government doesn't have enough control. If the Democrats were in the White House, they would have clamped down on subprime mortgages, and possibly put price ceilings on certain housing markets.

Yes, that is theoretically true. But in practice, the shareholders tend to be many, unorganized and uniformed. The market will eventually adjust share prices (and penalize the shareholders), while the insiders retire in comfort. When a person owns a mutual fund, they generally go on autopilot and do butkus. In theory, shareholders are owners and decision makers. In practice, large scale capitalism alienates shareholders from information, ability and responsibility.




Not arguing that a company that pays executives millions while paying most workers minimum wage are violating anyone's 'freedom' as you conceive of it. Merely that it isn't right.

Not sure that price controls on house prices would have been put in place. But outlawing certain types of predatory lending would have been a good idea.

Wasn't that last line actually in the Communist Manifesto.

There's much more to economies than labor. You need ideas, and an efficient allocation of resources, and that's where the managerial class comes in. But this is just a matter of semantics and valuation: in real life, the market assigns worth.



We're running into axioms here. Let's see if your "is's" can topple my "oughts".
As a rule, I am opposed to the idea that "rights" are produced be societies, because this is completely contrary to the notion of "rights" in the first place.


Why would you? Because you treat America as a group rather than as a collection of individuals? If associations of people choose to rebuild New Orleans, that's good. But if they don't, that's life.
Nevermind the fact that while the working class actually contribute to the economy, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the truly poor actually consume more than they produce (how much of my money goes into Newark each year ).

On a technical note, America may have a huge economy, but it's actually only #4 in GDP per capita...

Governments must be able to intervene to keep the economy from crumbling, and they must also ensure that everyone can make a living should they so desire and be in due health, and otherwise give them support or community service jobs.

Social Darwinism FTL.

There is the neoclassical model, it is the one accepted by almost all expert economists. Let's look at things from that perspective instead of invoking some other super-special model.


Actually military and environmental externalities are the only legitimate externalities mentioned that I can think of out of that entire list. Social externalities are too subjective for me to be concerned about and are based upon culture from all I can think of, and economic externalities are the sum total of what we speak of when we speak of economics, and finally generations are dealt with by investments for the future and thus it is foolish to talk about them.

Ok, that isn't the question because you are making a strawman as no actual economist claims that these things are perfectly true, they claim that they are either tautologically true or reasonable approximations of what is true.


Bah, most of the detractors of mainstream economics really don't study it enough. The starting assumptions are placed at the level of being nearly axioms and when they can be seen as wrong then it is investigated as noted with behavioral economics and informational economics. Not only that, but given that we have left-wingers attacking economics, a field that still has a mainstream leaning left, it seems sort of like ideological cannibalism to me.


They invest. That is a loss of resources towards a social good for exchange, and given that they can only make money off of good investments means that they must either sacrifice more or put effort towards managing society.

Bah, all things are a nonsense of stilts and everyone's ideas of morality are BS in the light of any rationalistic look on phenomena.

Not necessarily, the shareholders only really have to decide to keep or drop the share for the system to still work.


But, I don't see why it must be called wrong either. The fact that all parties agree to this seems to indicate that everyone there has considered it right.

Ok, I was gone for a while, I think I got everything.

They don't always though.

Sometimes the workers have no other choice but to settle into a low-income job. I don't call that wilfully agreeing. Rather "work or live in worse conditions". In a way that might satisfy your views more... a secure and relatively comfortable populace reduces crime rates. There will still be the greedy and plain nasty/psychotic, but far fewer people will resort to theft, illegal drugs, and violence.
Chief executives being paid large salaries, is all good and well. But when just as hard-working people at the bottom can hardly support their family on a subsistence income, that is bound to cause problems.

Ok, that isn't the question because you are making a strawman as no actual economist claims that these things are perfectly true, they claim that they are either tautologically true or reasonable approximations of what is true. [/quote]

Tautologically true?? You mean, they say it is true because they say it is true? That seems to be an admission that one of their fundamental principles is a fabrication. Reasonable approximation? By what subjective definition of reasonable?

The depletion of soil fertility is another example of how the blind hand of the market may paint us all into a corner - as population continues to grow, soil continues to erode, organic matter and essential cations are depleted, areas under irrigation continue to accumulate salts to the point where crop growth is limited. I see no evidence that markets are anticipating the problems that may result from shifting to a subsoil economy, as Greece and Rome did after they washed most of their good soil into the Mediterranean.

When I was growing up, the classical economic ideal was that the oceans' bounty was limitless. Then overharvesting of major fisheries led to collapses, drove most East coast fishermen out of work, and made cod a luxury food. The truth is that without regulation to prevent the excesses of the invisible hands, it would make perfect economic sense for whaler's to hunt whales into extinction - they have loans to pay on the boats, they are carrying a payroll, might as well get whatever they can, if they don't scoop it up, someone else would. Goodbye, resource!

Yes. I think someone is confusing coercion with consent. No one asked if the workers would like to have fewer benefits; no one asked them if they would donate some of their benefits to a needy CEO. This is simply a case of a logical veneer being painted over the "Greed is Good" philosophy. Greed might be good for a few people, but is caustic for the larger group around them. Of course, the fact that the little people get less and less is merely a 'subjective' loss, one that cannot be given serious consideration by the great minds of our times. They must want to be poor.

Yeah, I see what you mean. But the subprime crisis resulted from people with bad credit making yet another impulse buy.

After I graduate, I am going to save some money so I can get prime rates.

No, it isn't. They say it is true because they can define the terms such that it must practically be true. You really aren't recognizing my statement there. Also, if we take your latter argument then we must start arguing with all sciences as all sciences use approximations for estimation, and to go the postmodern approach to this is a waste of time. Reasonable approximation really is a matter of what we know to approximate and how we do so, as I stated, more modern models can attempt to include psychology and information issues.


How is that the market? Most nations have heavily subsidized farming and this will impact a more efficient use of resources.

Ok? Whales are an issue of a the problem of the commons. Nobody can really own whales as they can own other resources, otherwise the whales might be rationed over time with some concerned parties perhaps even keeping some whales alive for longer periods of time possibly for the utility created by an existing whale.

I really don't see how your examples really impact neoclassical economics at all, as we have a condition without a working market and given without thought as to what is known about working markets for dealing with future concerns or regards for the effects of unnecessary subsidies and another condition of insufficient property rights allocation and perhaps even impossible property rights allocation and thus a classic problem of the commons, which all economists already know about. I mean, I really don't see any good disproof of neoclassical economic theory or adaptations from that theory.

The current path of economic growth is not sustainable. Unless strict regulations are put into place, natural resources will run out and there will be an economic implosion of tremendous proportions. I think that much is obvious.
It makes perfect sense to restrict the extraction of limited resources. That choice will be off the market and there will be limited growth within that sector, but at the same time it is for the good of the planet and of future generations. A line must be drawn.

Also, efficient use of resources is not everything. Far from it. Sometimes efficiency must be sacrificed for stability and other important factors.

That is hard to indicate, Malthusians of all forms have been arguing that things will go to heck for a long period of time, and yet things have continually gotten better for most of the world. The real issue has nothing to do with economic growth, but rather technological growth because reclaiming resources and switching to other resources or methods can both be very viable options.

Nope, it is arbitrary and ret*ds possible growth in reclamation of resources or changes in production to use different resources or things of that nature. The only times I would say that restrictions are necessary are in clear cases of externalities or insufficient property rights. Lines do not have to be drawn.

Efficient use of resources is very important. Efficiency is tied to our current welfare and our future welfare as efficient use of resources will both provide for current needs and push for growth, and even efficient regard for future uses of resources based upon the nature of futures markets and such. This push for stability and other factors will often ret*d progress and lead to a worse world given the importance of creative destruction in our current welfare. Also, efficiency will have some regard for stability and other values as well, as unstable systems and other flawed systems will reduce the efficiency.

When resources can be reclaimed/recycled properly, yes, restricting resource extraction will be unneccessary. But at the same time, poachers will hunt animals to extinction, and it is folly not to stop them from wiping species off the face of the planet. In all foresight, species MUST be preserved. They will be extremely valuable in the future. It is obvious to anyone with foresight that the value of preservation outweighs the value of short to medium term economic growth.

And that efficiency should not be put before humanity.