JayB

Keynes yes - Hayek no. If you read "The Road to Serfdom" cover to cover and regret having done so I'll buy the book off of you for what you paid. dunno 'bout buying it, but if you have a busted up copy you wanna pass along i'll enter into it el bano connection, which is chronically lacking a clean-up hitter If you'd read both pages before employing it as clean-up I'd consider it, but I only have a single copy. I'd honestly be pretty surprised if you had any fundamental philosophical disagreements with Hayek if you were to read any of his oeuvre.

I'll give you *two* dollars if you read it and still claim to take the Labor Theory of Value seriously.

Ditto:

The Keynes reference was kind of an inside joke. See below: [video:youtube]d0nERTFo-Sk

lulz now back to the twilight mormon nutjobbery Yes - if it weren't for all of the bad press coverage and endorsement by unfashionable pundits the contents of that book would be held in much higher esteem these days.

Keynes yes - Hayek no. If you read "The Road to Serfdom" cover to cover and regret having done so I'll buy the book off of you for what you paid.

Fixed that for ya.

See above.

Indeed, the sale spike is linked to Beck's pushing it on his propaganda show. It must make JayB all warm inside to know that Beck's viewers, people with the average acumen of a tea pot, will read that book. What's the saying? Never judge a book by its coverage. Probably also tempered by someone's admonition about getting too optimistic about the effects that a book can have on its readers: "If an ass peers into it you can't expect an apostle to stare out"

Guess who? http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books?ie=UTF8&ref_=pd_dp_ts_b_1

First, I certainly don't take anything coming out of the free-marketeering Tax Foundation at face value, so any analysis coming from them is suspect. Second, the budget shortfall is mainly due to tax revenues being down more than 20% since the financial crash (data not shown at your link). Note that is down 21% for a national average. Nobody can absorb a 21% cut in revenue without incurring a large budget deficit. Third, the proof is in the pudding so to speak: the state of Texas has cut all social spending for years yet it has essentially the same budget deficit as California. Texas has nothing more to cut except for the prison budget. Is that because of social spending too? 1. It's not an opinion piece. It's a data table. If you have better data, post it. 2. The table is current through 2010. You are confusing real tax revenues with projections. Revenues have increased throughout the financial crisis. Spending growth has outpaced revenue growth. 3. Texas has deficit for FY 2010 that amounts to 7% of the budget. They had no deficit for 2009. California has a long history of budget shortfalls, and this years stands at ~25%. This difference is reflected in the states' respective credit ratings. They are not in the same boat.

OH YEAH, NEW LINGO!!! PUT THAT SHIT ON THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTES INTERWEBS, MAN!! YOU'LL BE A STAR! CALL SARAH PALIN AND NEWT, THIS ONE'S HOT OFF THE GRIDDLE! Yeah, JayB, just what the fuck is THAT supposed to mean.. See below: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,694263,00.html

OH YEAH, NEW LINGO!!! PUT THAT SHIT ON THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTES INTERWEBS, MAN!! YOU'LL BE A STAR! CALL SARAH PALIN AND NEWT, THIS ONE'S HOT OFF THE GRIDDLE! Yeah, JayB, just what the fuck is THAT supposed to mean? I guess access to public health care makes one a pussy or something. Let's start another war. It's all about priorities, not entitlement. That's so much Right Wing Bullshit. Agreed. It's all about priorities. Expect massive cuts in the level of services that people on medicaid receive, the delivery of key services like education, law enforcement, etc, etc, etc before public sector employees agree to pay a cent more for their health care or agree to an ounce of pension reform. This is happening here real-time at the state and local level, and the pattern is consistent across the entire Western world, with the exception of Ireland. There they've cut compensation, elsewhere they'll be forced to cut employment because the public employee unions would rather cull their own and impose needless hardship on the public than accept any reductions in pay and benefits. If you are a public sector employee what - precisely - about funding your own retirement through a defined contribution plan, and financing the same share of your health care expenses as the average private sector employee is so awful that it warrants cutting or eliminating essential services for the public in order to stave it off. Why would you rather see your fellow employees laid off than accept these terms?

the substance of JayB's rant is "but they're broker" He is wrong about that too. First, China isn't bankrolling Europe and there are the same fears of insolvency about the US (essentially, the entire OECD is at risk). The perceived difference is also moot as shown by their slashing the public sector here too. Just consider what's going on in California: the major causes of the crisis are the same as Greece (revenue shortfall due to regressive tax policies/widespread tax evasion and deficits made a lot worse by the recession/depression) and the solutions are the same (cutting wages and public sector jobs), but especially no more taxes for the wealthy. Tax revenue in California has been increasing in both absolute and per-capita terms for over 30 years, and the value of taxes paid relative to income has increased from 10.1 to 10.5% over that time. http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/443.html The people that find themselves in the top 1% income range in California pay 45-50% of all income taxes collected there. So. The effective tax rate is basically unchanged. The government has more money on an absolute and per-capita basis than it do 30 years ago. The state wasn't teetering on the edge of insolvency then. It is now. The problem isn't less money, its higher spending.

IMO it's because he knows that neoliberals are winning and he is dancing on our collective grave (he has no problem with that kind of collectivism). Wrong anaology. Greece is what lies at the bottom of the grave that the western entitlement state has dug for itself. There is no escape for Greece. I'm merely suggesting that we might want to stop digging before we join them there.

Spending in excess of revenues is responsible for the debt. They can borrow more because they make more money and have a greater stock of capital. This has been the case since before the word "capitalism" was coined and has less to do with the merits of the modern welfare state than it does the particular historical evolution of each state. If higher public sector spending was the key determinant of economic growth, East Germany would have been bailing out West Germany. No one with real savings to lend to borrowers via the bond market cares about how much a country spends on public services so long as their economic output is sufficient to fund the said spending and pay back the money they've borrowed. When that is no longer the case, eventually no one will be willing to lend them money to pay for their social services. Greece has reached that point. When and if Northern European countries reach a critical debt-to-GDP threshold, the same thing will happen. The threshold will probably be higher for Germany, because people with money to lend are of the opinion that Germans are more likely to have the will and the means to honor their debts than Greeks, Spaniards, the Portuguese, etc. This - as has manifested in public sector payroll and other cuts in Ireland - is why Ireland can still borrow from the market at reasonable rates and Greece can't, despite the fact that their fiscal positions are both dire.

Regressivecorporocratwarmongershillneocon HATE MANUAL!!!!!!

The real criminals here are people who generate real savings by consuming less than they produce and refuse to loan it to countries that have little or no hope of repaying it. It's not clear who is worse, these criminals or the neocon regressive warmongers who claim that the interest rate a country pays to borrow money has to be less than the rate at which that country's economy grows or it's literally impossible for them to reduce their debt load. What nonsense! There's an entire branch of progressive mathematics - which the regressive shills in the corporocrat media have attempted to squelch - in which literally thousands of sociology professors have used propositions from Bruno Latour, Jaceques Lacan, and others to *prove* that 2% compound growth will always generate an absolute value greater than 5+% compound interest, no matter how large the initial value of the debt is relative to GDP. Thanks to neocon goons like Mareen Dowd and Frank Rich and their crusade to prop up the dying neoliberal agenda and prevent its inevitable collapse, the ignorant sheeple spoon fed propaganda from math textbooks, financial calculators, and regressive functions embedded in Excel spreadsheets and actuarial tables, will continue to believe the lies that these instruments of the corporate machine feed them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/europe/23europe.html?hp "Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits PARIS — Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II. Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism. Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union. But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead. With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions. “We’re now in rescue mode,” said Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister. “But we need to transition to the reform mode very soon. The ‘reform deficit’ is the real problem,” he said, pointing to the need for structural change. The reaction so far to government efforts to cut spending has been pessimism and anger, with an understanding that the current system is unsustainable. In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.... The easy days are over for countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but for us, too,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French lawyer who did a study of Europe in the global economy for the French government. “A lot of Europeans would not like the issue cast in these terms, but that is the storm we’re facing. We can no longer afford the old social model, and there is a real need for structural reform.” Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I think you're likely to see the Euro in its current form collapse. Greece had to con their way in and now that they've had to be honest its obvious that there is major problems. I think it's certainly possible. In the long terms things would be much better for everyone if they allowed things to work out the old fashioned way. Any creditors dumb enough to lend money to the Greeks at low interest rates would have to take it in the shorts during a major restructuring of the debt. There's no reason why creditors should get taxpayer money to exempt them from the consequences of their choices. You make a risky loan, you take the pain when it can't be repaid. I think this would also make it easier for the Greeks to swallow the structural reforms that'd be necessary to give their corrupt, inefficient, squalid economy half a chance to turn around, or at least stagger forwards for a while. A final benefit of this is that it would make investors in other Euro bonds with more assurance that they'd only lose their shirts if the entity they loaned money to went under, as opposed to investors in Norway seeing the value of their assets getting hosed by bailout driven inflation.

If there's any connection there at all, it's much more likely a consequence of Rand reading Mises and by extension Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, etc than the converse.

Bingo. As long as doing nothing is less costly than all of the death and destruction that would result from war with the North, that's exactly what South Korea will do. I think that both sides understand this and behave accordingly.

All this from someone who still persists in believing that the SS "Trust Fund" is composed of something other than special purpose Treasuries that will have to be funded out of general revenues when SS spending exceeds inflows and the SSA has to redeem them to cover the difference. The net economic output of the US is not sufficient to cover all of the claims that state, local, and federal governments have issued against it alone, let alone in conjunction with private debt. The only possible outcomes when there aren't enough real resources to fund current consumption are default, devaluation, or massive decreases in current spending. A partial, de-facto default via devaluation is the most likely of these three. IMO the fundamental solvency issues at play here are far more serious and worrisome than anything associated with the housing bubble and its inevitable collapse. The expansion of public debt can only exceed the expansion of output for so long before the chickens come home to roost, and they've just landed in Greece. My sense is that the southern Euros will give up their entitlements when they're pried out of their cold, dead hands and we'll see the whole thing go down in flames (most likely via inflation) before seeing any structural reforms sufficient to keep the thing afloat.

Clearly the answer is to outlaw all lending immediately.

...you had it too good so far; now, just bend over". Yup.