Free-marketers are utopian optimists about the market and technological progress, but apocalyptic pessimists about social and political action.
Unsurprisingly, many free-market economic models leave out society and government entirely, as though they were epiphenomenal and derivative.
Also unsurprisingly, free-market economists analyze society and government as though they were markets — most egregiously Becker on the family, but also a lot of public choice theory.
And still unsurprisingly, a lot of freemarketers wish that government, and to a lesser extent society, would just go away, since what they really are is just defective, distorted, inefficient markets. (Though the wiser ones acknowledge that in this fallen world these archaic survivals retain some residual function.)
However, whenever the market fails freemarketers blame individual or group psychology, society, or the state. (To my knowledge, free-market economists do not blame the family for anything, but if more of them were gay or single I bet they would.)
Trollblog 
October 21, 2009 at 8:12 am
I am a free-marketer. Whatever I produce I should be able, of course, to exchange for anything I need at a free, open market, without any outside interference.
It’s not about the markets, it’s all about the concept of property. Property and power.
October 21, 2009 at 3:52 pm
You’re not a free-marketer, ABB1. You’re a general-purpose ad-hoc troll striking targets of opportunity.
You don’t become a free marketer just by going to the store and buying things. It’s a lot harder than that.
October 21, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I can’t decide if I should feel offended or flattered.
Anyway, it sounds like you want to talk here about managed capitalism, curbing the excesses, etc. Fair enough, go on, don’t mind me.
October 21, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I think your adoption of “free-marketer” to describe this phenomenon is unfortunate for much the same reason that using the word “socialist” to describe US liberals is unfortunate. It’s not exactly wrong, but it rhetorically divides the pie in such a way as to give the liberals the much smaller half.
What you’re talking about is “free-market absolutists” or “libertarian nitwits” or whatever.
I choose to identify myself as a supporter of market solutions, defined broadly. For global warming, a carbon tax is a market solution, as is cap-and-trade, and I’d support either.
The fact that I favor the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and nationalized health insurance doesn’t mean I’m a socialist. It just means I’m not a free market absolutist.
October 21, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Sometimes I say “free market ideologue”.
October 21, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Sorry, but is this even controversial; I mean among this particular audience, here in this blog; who are you going to be arguing against here?
If you want me to troll as a “free market ideologue”, I’d be happy too. I know the script…
October 21, 2009 at 8:50 pm
How many people realize just why free-market ideologues didn’t blame the family for the financial collapse, along with The State, individual and group psychology, and Society?
October 22, 2009 at 7:26 am
We don’t blame the organized religion either. Any voluntary contract is fine with us, especially when it has the side-effect of private individuals taking care of unproductive members of the society (children, elderly, sick), without bothering the rest of us.
October 22, 2009 at 11:53 am
We would hate for you qr your kind ever to be bothered, ABB1.
October 22, 2009 at 1:28 pm
A distinction should probably be made between those who really believe the free market theology and those who cynically exploit it while enjoying the biggest public handouts in history*, i.e. the Holy Forever War and the bailouts. I think it useful if only for establishing precedence come the revolution.
*By “history” I mean the partially-remembered half-truths that make me feel triumphal and superior, rather than any sort of objective version thereof we might establish. Thus, the handouts may not be unprecedented.
October 22, 2009 at 3:50 pm
It’s the all-powerful corrupt government entities, like the federal reserve, and their manipulations with their fiat money that create bubbles and cause the need for bailouts in the first place.
The economy (and especially its financial system) is all politicized (all with the “best intentions” of course) and rotten through and through.
Not to mention that with the right monetary system the government wouldn’t have had enough gold to institute any significant bailout anyway.
Not that it would’ve been necessary, mind you. You would’ve still called your banker by his first name and sat next to him in church.
October 22, 2009 at 4:14 pm
ABB1 a gold bug? Well, he is Swiss.
Have you ever heard of the 19th century? During the gold-standard era there were lots of bubbles and crashes.
But I know that until anarchy is achieved, everything will be the government’s fault, just because it still exists.
Small town bankers around here still are part of the community, but at crunch time they have to choose whether to go broke with their debtors or to foreclose and get rich. I just talked to the granddaughter of a creditor here who lost his fortune during the depression while the other big local creditor got rich and left town. Not a panacea.
October 22, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Everybody knows that the depression was caused by tariffs, see the Smoot-Hawley act.
And then, of course, aggravated, prolonged, extended, and finally turned into a real disaster by hectic, reckless, and unnatural policies of the Roosevelt administration; without them everything would’ve come back to normal in a few months. And a little shock in the system has never hurt anybody; it’s healthy.
And your small-town banker would’ve never lent you a half mil with no money down and your 50K/yr income. He would’ve made sure there is no chance of a foreclose before lending.
October 22, 2009 at 4:39 pm
“Everyone knows” is not an argument. And you still haven’t heard of the 19th century, apparently.
And your small-town banker would’ve never lent you a half mil with no money down and your 50K/yr income. He would’ve made sure there is no chance of a foreclose before lending.
You are an utter moron. Farm-country banks went out of business by the thousand during the depression. They weren’t lending to your caricature borrower, they were lending to farmers during the depression. You’re making an imaginary hypothetical out of an actual, one which I happen to know a little about.
October 22, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Everybody knows that the depression was caused by tariffs, see the Smoot-Hawley act.
Seriously, no. It ought to be cause for reflection that so many of the things that you know for certain are plainly false.
October 22, 2009 at 6:10 pm
No, you are a moron. What does it have to do with the depression anyway?
And what – you didn’t have an activist enough government during the depression? What is your point? You’re making my point: powerful activist government -> corruption, political patronage, cronyism, distortion of the natural market forces -> consolidation -> local businesses (including local banks) out of business -> too-big-to-fall banking (and other business) monsters in a happy symbiosis with a bloated government -> the present day picture.
There’s nothing imaginary hypothetical about it, this is how this society evolved, or, rather, degenerated.
October 22, 2009 at 6:17 pm
In fact, it all started with the worst American criminal ever: Abraham Lincoln, and his audacious federal power grab that ruined everything – that was the turning point. To destroy the union in order to save the union.
October 22, 2009 at 6:43 pm
What you said about the bankers was hypothetical, and flatly wrong.
If I already believed what you believe, I’d believe what you’re saying. But that’s all assertion.
October 22, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Are you saying that the proposition that small local businesses (including banks) are more bespoke, cautious, flexible, and all-out more rational than giant faceless corporation requires some special proof, evidence? Is that it?
October 22, 2009 at 7:54 pm
He would’ve made sure there is no chance of a foreclose before lending.
That’s fairyland, and not possible for anyone. And in any case, there are problems with tighter money too, which seems to be your proposal.
October 23, 2009 at 12:19 am
Hey, Emerson! Do you know any good recent books that are critical of capitalism and/or anarcho/freemarket-capitalism?
Totally agree with you here though. I don’t know why free market capitalists or rather libertarians, are so aggressively individualistic that they seem to abhor social responsibility and justice. Bewildering when you find this kind of attitude among the lower classes, not so when you find them among the wealthier ones. I don’t see how this mode of economy improves life (let businesses do whatever they want!) or increases economic growth (which might as well be a euphemism for growth for corporations, not the lower-income people who work for them); it’s more like the philosophy of CEOs.
October 23, 2009 at 7:11 am
“Social responsibility and justice” – what a crock. You crack me up. You’re like a con-man, of rather a brainwashed cult member under the spell of a con-man, waiting for that beautiful comet to come by and pick you up.
I’m no CEO, but in 2001 I paid (or, rather, your purveyors of “social responsibility and justice” extorted from me) over $100K in federal taxes. My hard-earned money immediately went to blow up large holes in Afghan desert (with an occasional wedding evaporated), and to electrocute genitals of random peasants. Nice going, justice. Way to go, social responsibility.
Oh, and that CEO you love to hate is now the Senator you love; he is also your favorite Congressman in the near future. What a joke.
And what is this “social responsibility” of yours, anyway? How can there be “social responsibility” without individual responsibility? “Society” is not a person, it’s a vague abstract concept, that you liberal zombies anthropomorphize and pretend it means something. It means nothing.
And what is this “justice” you speak of – taking money from me and giving it to your corrupt overlords, to spend on whatever helps them hang on to power? Oh, man, you are deranged.
Snap out of it, man, see the real world.
October 23, 2009 at 10:52 am
So besides making assertion, you’re good at making money and paying taxes? That’s really admirable.
With that much money, you could expatriate and go work somewhere else.
October 23, 2009 at 11:51 am
Well, that was a one-off, consequence of the infamous dot-com bubble, created by the corrupt government. Which is (paying so much taxes, that is) feels especially unpleasant, because it probably won’t happen again.
Anyway, never mind what I am, mind what I say.
October 23, 2009 at 12:41 pm
This is actually a good place to note that the Ron Paul populists of today are the diametrical opposite of the Populist populists of 1890 onwards. The Populists were mostly Greenbackers (= fiat-currency advocates)*, whereas the Ron Paul people are goldbugs. This isn’t a nuance, either, currency questions are / were of central importance for both groups.
Looking at the angry anti-liberal demographic, they all are fanatical constitutionalists and traditionalists, but they draw on contrary parts of the tradition. The big business militarist authoritarians (e.g. Scalia) are federalists or Hamiltonians. Most of the others are Jeffersonians of a sort, but a lot of them are drifting all the way over to anti-Federalism, which they think of as constitutionalism but which is really anti-constitutionalism. A fair proportion can switch from Scalia to Ron Paul in the middle of a sentence.
Besides fiat currency, the Populists also advocated a lot of government intervention in the economy, and they were skeptical of proceduralism and constitutionalism.
*Some were also (or instead) free silver inflationists, but the best of them knew that free silver was a shuck. In 1896 silver Democrats succeeded in capturing the party and it never recovered.
October 23, 2009 at 1:29 pm
It is an unimportant nuance, to me at least. There’s nothing wrong with fiat currency per se, except that it allows currency machinations that ruin the economy.
You can have fiat currency all you want; what you shouldn’t have is fiat manipulations of it, especially the secret, conspiratorial, unchecked, unaudited kind of manipulations, which is exactly what the US central bank does. A handful of people controlling the whole 12 trillion-dollar/yr economy; and not just to steer it a bit, but pretty much total control, total power. And these people aren’t even elected (not that it matters much). Talk about Iranian mullahs and their tyrannical rule…
And never mind their unofficial discussions where everything probably gets decided anyway – even their official meetings are kept secret for 5 years. Is this insane or what. How can this be acceptable to anybody?
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=10&year=2009&base_name=washington_post_misses_again_i
October 24, 2009 at 7:56 pm
[…] in Ron-Paulism Here. I’m kinda proud of it. So far, at least. There are 26 comments at this point. This entry […]
October 24, 2009 at 8:00 pm
[…] in Ron-Paulism Here. I’m kinda proud of it. So far, at least. There are 26 comments at this point. This entry […]
October 25, 2009 at 3:55 pm
“You can have fiat currency all you want; what you shouldn’t have is fiat manipulations of it, especially the secret, conspiratorial, unchecked, unaudited kind of manipulations, which is exactly what the US central bank does. A handful of people controlling the whole 12 trillion-dollar/yr economy; and not just to steer it a bit, but pretty much total control, total power.”
Are you sure that’s a problem for you, abb1? All modern liberal social-contract regimes have a central bank (or very powerful treasury department) – it’s one of the earliest and most central institutions that every modern state puts into place. It’s a direct implication of Machiavelli – if your state is going to have a large standing army composed of full-time native volunteers (the first task of the modern state) as Machiavelli both advocates for and himself indeed organized for Florence, then you need an institution which can efficiently gather taxes and direct them into the army. I.E., you must have a treasury department or central bank.
Without the central bank and treasury department, modern states are impossible. That’s not as much a problem for me, since I oppose the modern state in it’s totality, but it is a much more serious problem for you.
October 25, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I oppose the centralized state too. But, for the sake of argument, couldn’t they collect some sort of taxes and maintain the army without being able to print paper money any time they feel like it? How did the Romans manage?
October 26, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The Paul-bots and Von Mises-types’ criticisms of “fiat-currency” and monetarists works mainly as a deception. They want a gold standard, AND they want some quasi-monarchist, land-baron society to go along with it–they’re not arguing for overthrowing capitalism, but overthrowing all government intervention in hopes of stabilizing their investments or something, and perhaps creating a class of serfs to work their estates. Some naive liberals (or anarchists, perhaps) mistake the Von-Misesians as libertarian leftists, when in effect they are more like right-wing Randians.
Apart from marxism or anarcho-freaks, the only legitimate attacks on monetarism came from the social credit types–and their thinking was more in line with Aristotelian-republican tradition (and slightly machiavellian–even Nick M. opposed usury). Ezra Pound realized that. Implementation via Il Duce though was a byatch.
October 26, 2009 at 3:40 pm
“But, for the sake of argument, couldn’t they collect some sort of taxes and maintain the army without being able to print paper money any time they feel like it? How did the Romans manage?”
The Romans managed by a vast bureaucracy, the center of which was the central treasury. Besides the Roman military and the rural patricians, the treasury was the greatest center of power in Rome. It’s true that the treasury didn’t print paper money, but it did closely regulate the Roman economy (particularly by the third century and afterwards).
October 26, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Yes, but it wasn’t a “Treasury” in the modern sense: more like they had the authority to collect taxes AND any goods needed to supply the military, and keep the patrician class in power. Though it’s somewhat similar to modern USA; about half of Fed taxes go to the DoD–and let’s not forget Obama has earmarked more shekels for defense spending than even Bushco did. Most college-boy leftists have no idea how much money is involved in aircraft carrier building, or F-18s, missile defense, etc
Marx…or Mussolini
October 26, 2009 at 4:39 pm
And to debase thew currency.
October 26, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I don’t see why the gold standard should become an idee fixe here. Currency manipulation is just one tool; sure, it’s been extensively used recently to protect parasitic oligarchs and their liberal do-gooder accomplices, but it’s only one tool.
October 26, 2009 at 8:25 pm
horatiox –
yes, I assume that you’re trying to say that total DoD spending including the “offbudget” warring items ($188B in FY08 for a total of $801B) is actually slightly more than 50% of federal (non-insurance) tax revenues ($1590B in FY08). Do you really think people who don’t know this would behave differently if they did?
DoD is about a third of federal spending too if you again take SS and Medicare out of the denominator.
I know of no surveys or testing regarding gross quantitative budget knowledge among college boy leftists – I’d be very interested in any (e.g. are college boy leftists significantly more or less knowledgeable that female postgrad rightists or age-unspecified transgendered Marxists? Null hypothesis and/or Sturgeon’s Law probably applies).
I know you’re responding to burritoboy, but it still seems like a nonsequitur unless you have data to compare our present budget to the fraction of the Roman budget that went to the military (versus e.g. the dole or “annona”, the construction budget, the spectacle budget, … obviously these fractions would change greatly with the era).
October 26, 2009 at 8:52 pm
—Let’s have Greenwald–PC, DNC-approved, or was for a while– do the fact checking (and there are other sources, including the govt.data itself)
from 2/09:
“”””How do The Washington Post and the war theorist Kagan justify repeatedly accusing Obama of “order[ing] a 10 percent cut in defense spending for the coming fiscal year” when, in fact, Obama wants to spend $40 billion more this year than was spent last year on defense spending? It’s because Obama’s 2010 budget (just like Bush’s) calls for slightly less in defense spending than military officials unrealistically and strategically demanded…
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/03/kagan/index.html
—Your ad homs are unneeded. I did not mean to engage in some compare-contrast with B-boy re Pax Romana, and US–except to point out that the patrician class used the powers of the treasury, the Army and in a sense the centralized Roman senate to protect their interests.
A Brutus–or Napoleon– may claim he wants reform,etc. as he liquidates the old guard, but history shows that Brutus’s, more often than not, tend to advance their own class interests (or personal interests) while playing the part of reformer.
—-DoD spending does not include all military spending, btw–. Even the boring Mr Wiki offers some interesting factoids on military spending, outside the DoD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
October 26, 2009 at 9:54 pm
“Yes, but it wasn’t a “Treasury” in the modern sense: more like they had the authority to collect taxes AND any goods needed to supply the military”
No, especially by the third century, the powers of the treasury were extremely extensive, including managing the tax code (and tax collection of course), the pension plans for the military, managing the state owned property (which was vast and included state-owned mines, forests and other industries) directly, managing the budgets of the other government departments, executing the economic regulations and numerous other powers.
And as Emerson mentioned, the Roman treasury debased the currency repeatedly.
October 26, 2009 at 10:25 pm
That’s fairly late in the Empire, isn’t it– so as a generalization, that doesn’t quite hold. The Republic and “golden age”, Augustus etc. did not have that sort of bureaucracy in place. (and I did not deny that the treasury debased the currency. I’m not defending the state–you are). Anyway the army did seize goods, food, livestock, etc. when necessary.
Even the social credit types—and shall we say rational blackshorts— did not argue for a return to Marcus Aurelius or something. They wanted controls on banking and monetarism. They supported agrarian policies; fiat currency was to be controlled, but my reading suggests they were not in favor of the gold standard. Maybe a grain standard. Or iron standard. Or wine standard. Possibly a poetry, or hot italian mamacita standard.
October 27, 2009 at 1:26 am
The populists actually did propose a wheat- and-cotton-based currency.
October 27, 2009 at 5:02 pm
“That’s fairly late in the Empire, isn’t it”
Yes, but the treasury had been steadily increasing it’s power for centuries. Even in the early Empire, the treasury still had a majority of the powers I listed above. The largest difference is that there was less economic regulation in the early Empire, so the treasury had fewer powers over the private economy.
October 27, 2009 at 5:08 pm
“(and I did not deny that the treasury debased the currency. I’m not defending the state–you are)”
I’m saying that if you want a modern state – ANY type of modern state – it’s going to have a powerful, central bank or treasury. (Communist states had powerful central banks or treasuries just like capitalist states do. In fact, the central planning organs of communist states were MORE powerful and arguably more elitist than the central banks of the capitalist states. Monarchies within modernity – for example, the German Reich or Czarist Russia also had powerful central banks or treasuries).
October 27, 2009 at 6:18 pm
The Bolsheviks seized control of the czarist “state bank”, and basically ended all private banking as well–credit was nationalized. So it wasn’t a bank in traditional sense–not capitalist for one, the bank did not own anything. I don’t quite recall all the details of the currency issue, but workers were probably issued food and other supplies at first; later they worked out the money problems–the state issued tickets or something which comrades exchange for beets, bread, clothes, vodka, ammo, contraceptives, etc.
October 27, 2009 at 7:44 pm
They had two kinds of currency – cash money (nalichnie) and virtual, play-money for the state enterprises to pay to each other (beznalichnie). It was like that forever. Two budgets, two sets of books.
Towards the end, during the perestroika, they suddenly allowed the enterprises to cash their play-money, to pay it to individuals as cash-money.
It could be argued that it was exactly what caused the collapse a couple of years later, and the raise of the oligarchs.
October 27, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Abb1 is correct to remind me that the capital allocation functionality within the Soviet Union (as one example of a communist country)was not primarily done through any bank. It was, however, actually done (insofar as it ever happened in real life) through the central economic planning institutions of the state. I.E. the economic life of the Soviet Union was controlled by elitist, non-democratic, secretive institutions. Not that differently from all other modern states.
October 27, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I like having you guys here when you’re playing nice. Seriously.
October 27, 2009 at 10:34 pm
There were various alternatives to the ruble after 1917, including rationing cards, and direct bartering, though they kept some currency. The proles used the cards to obtain necessaries, bread, meat–that was still the case, I believe, throughout WWII. The currency mentioned by Abby returned during the cold war era, and later. The Marxist plan was to eliminate money however.
October 28, 2009 at 4:26 pm
There was a lot rationing even in the later years (70s, 80s). Cars, of course – to buy a car you’d have to get on a waiting list at work and wait for a few years. Condos – waiting list for a decade, at least. Food, meat especially, was distributed at a workplace; you’d have to pay for it, of course, but prices were so low that it didn’t matter.
When I was a small child (early 60s), I remember going with my grandmother to some local distribution center where they would give us a kilo of wheat flour per head once a month. That was probably the last effect of the immediate post-war period, or maybe a consequence of Khrushchev’s love affair with corn. Corn – The Queen Of Fields.
October 28, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Switzerland was Communist?
October 28, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I think he meant Minnesota. Midwestern stalcheks, everywhere.
Many of the problems with USSR ag. were due to Stalin’s attachment to Lysenkoism, arguably. The EU and other country’s bans on GMOs (genetically modified organisms, crops, fruits, etc) seems nearly Lysenkoish
October 28, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Switzerland was Communist?
Switzerland was anarchist; at least this area, Jura-Leman. But that was a long time ago.
October 29, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Didn’t you scrawl something on Lysenkoism on your old site, JE? Most academic marxists and PoMos continue to ignore Lysenskoism, a somewhat interesting aspect of the USSR. I suggest Lysenkosism demonstrates what happens when ideology runs into science, more or less. The bolsheviks insisted on dialectical, pre-Darwinian views–nature reveals contradictions, comrade!. They nearly all opposed the “new science” of Darwin and Mendelian genetics (actually one Bolshevik positivist, Bogdanov, may have protested Lysenko–he was killed by Stalin’s orders in 20s).
Via his mystery science of “hybridism” Lysenko promised miraculous grain yields–which never materialized–that went on for decades, and led to massive shortages, and starvation (as it did with the maoists).
During the 30s and 40s any scientists or agriculturists who objected to the official Lysenko-line were arrested, usually sent off to the gulag, at times killed. The problems of Lysenskoism seems to imply at least one game for Team Darwin, and western science (in the Darwin vs Marx chessmatch)–that’s not to bless US ag. policies, which are nothin’ but predatory finance capitalism, including the “buy our GMOs, or starve” game.
October 29, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Lysenkovshina is a natural Stalinist phenomenon. It was going on for what – 20-25 years?
Monsanto’s “Terminator”, Perdue, Tyson, all that monstrosity – that’s an American phenomenon. Ongoing.
Kolkhoz – Soviet, United Fruit – American.
April 2, 2012 at 7:45 pm
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