I still don't understand, artificially stimulating demand is inefficient and leads to so much waste, is that not so plainly seen? Where does most of our consumption lay? Imports?

and what's with our obsession with the status quo. "Oh, DJIA is slipping, let's borrow into infinity and hopefully that solves our debt problem! Oh bush added 4 trillion? Lets do that in one term! Better yet, let's best that and add another 2T!"

So your toilet won't flush. What action do you take? How is this action related to your philosophy?

Thank you so much, This really opened my eyes.

So, let's make up a mock experiment using some made-up Best Buy corporate store. We'll say they have 20 cashiers and 20 salesmen. The company recognizes that each salesperson is technically bringing in net income for the company. However, their workload is relatively low. Many of them have more down-time than time able to work due to a lack of customers (and overstaffing). Most of the cashiers are worked beyond what they're able. Lines at this Best Buy store are thought by management to be too long, resulting in customers avoiding the store. Best Buy has two obvious options to help alleviate or solve the problem: fire some salesmen and assume customers will purchase fewer items, relieving cashiers OR retrain some salesmen to work as cashiers (keeping in mind these jobs have a lot of crossover skills).

Firing the salesmen, I'd argue, is simply giving up on the employees, and it's probably bad for the economy as a whole. By not retraining the salesmen to do something similar, you're letting them out into the wild where they now must explain termination on a resume. Should they readily find a new job (which I can assure is very difficult in a rural area), it's very possibly these people who've spent years or decades working their job will now go into a different type of job with an entirely different skill-set required. I'd argue when a company like AmEx lets go of a mass of workers like that, it's management basically just throwing their hands up and declaring "we don't know what we're doing. We don't know what to do with these people. We can't think of any way to use 'our most valuable asset' in a profitable way, and all this time, the arguments in upper-management have always been 'do we fire them, or keep them doing what they're doing?'" I can imagine a lot of scenarios where it isn't the workers' fault, but really the lazy management's inability to repurpose relatively valuable people (given they have a history with these people, they have lots of useful data).

Idunno. Lack studies to say anything authoritative, so I'm just shooting out speculation, too. It seems a little scummy to me to fire a large number of workers, though, without firing executive management. Maybe contractually give execs a special one-off monetary bonus to make the decision, but insist they can't be rehired, so they have to really think if there's absolutely no way to use these proven, skilled workers in some relevant way. Firing people just seems like a half-ass, lazy, "easy" solution. I'm really not arguing over whether or not government should be involved, though - just curious on whether or not firing "unproductive" workers is a net gain or loss for the economy once total unproductiveness in unemployment, demand decrease, and welfare are factored in. I guess, growing up, I only heard that "firing people is bad because companies make money, and they shouldn't make more money by firing people," and by the time I hit the age of reason, I was surrounded by libertarians so I've never heard any decent debates on the matter.

How many times do established users google "bitcoin"?

Maybe if you looked at the integral of search volume you could find some rough correlation, but raw search volume vs. price is pretty useless.

It might be good for the company, and in principal, it seems sound, but finding new work is generally a resource-consuming process itself (not just for the worker himself, but the economy as a whole as consumption possibly drops). Overall, it may be an economically destructive action to "give up" on employees rather than trying to "salvage" them (whether that means keeping them on-board assuming they'll be profit-makers later, or repurposing them to work in a similar role). Not taking a side either way, but it'd be interesting to read studies on the true impact of letting employees go.

“Against the backdrop of an uneven economic recovery, these restructuring initiatives are designed to make American Express more nimble, more efficient and more effective in using our resources to drive growth,” Chenault said in the statement.

greedy fucks, why not keep them employed, just a drop in the bucket to keep them employed with the profits they make.

I don't think he ever suggested they would be. Note: "there is a place for capitalism in regard to things with inherent scarcity." such as resources. For things like information, however, a gift economy would work fine.

Anarchy implies without structure - there is structure here, its simply horizontal, not vertical.

IMO capitalism has no purpose when gift culture could replace it, there is a place for capitalism in regard to things with inherent scarcity.

I don't want, and never wanted, to blame "governments".  They don't exist.  All there is, is people doing things.

I blame the belief in the virtue of a group who perpetrates organized aggression to parasitize everyone else.  People under the influence of this belief, whether members or victims of this group, are the ones who believe that governments exist.  Not me.

What you see in observable reality is nothing more than (a) a tiny minority of people telling you what to do and how much to pay so they will let you live unharmed (b) a gaggle of people who incorrectly believe that the first group are their saviors and protectors, and worship them as a result of this incorrect belief.

That is, to me, the essence of statism.  It is to recoil in horror when watching an aggressor murder another, then to watch the exact same scene with the aggressor in a blue costume, only to say "well, he had it coming".  It is to feel terrified about being robbed of half of what you have, but paying up every April 15th with an unease that is hard to explain away.  It is to talk shit about Halliburton while celebrating the paid murderers in green costumes.  It is to cry in awe as the President sheds tears for the death of 20 children, when he himself has ordered the firebombing of 2000.  It is that level of irrationallity.  That is statism.

The problem isn't "totalitarianism".  It never was, not in the slightest.  The problem really isn't "aggressive people using too much aggression".  The problem is the belief that a bunch of aggressive people are virtuous and protect you.  That very belief, that the aggressive people are authorized and righteous to use aggression, is precisely what enables the aggressive people to murder everyone else, with total impunity.

If you think for a second that you live in a human farm, where you're farmed for your labor, and suppressed if you become a problem for the farmers, then the distinction between "totalitarianism" and "democracy" becomes very easy to figure out: both are merely methods to organize the farm.

The belief that a human being is righteously authorized to murder, brutalize, or cage another human being, as punishment for peacefully resisting an order, is not a totalitarian belief -- it is a statist belief.  Democide is not caused by totalitarianism -- it is caused by statism.

Without welfare, students will have to work there way through uni, sick people will die or depend on charity donations, single mothers and the poor will end up homeless and on the street, crime will increase, and the gap between the rich and poor will become even greater.

Example for Australia:

$150,890 million - Individuals Income Tax (includes capital gains)

$121,907 million - Social Security and Welfare

$21,277 million - Defence

1. Remove income tax.
2. Remove social security and welfare.
3. Remove defence (we don't need to be fighting in any wars)
4. Bump up the corporate tax by 1% or so.
5.
6. PROFIT!