It's been a while since I've been logged in.  I've been doing a lot of reading while I've been gone.

Here's my new show: New Deal Renaissance.  Episode 12. 

We cover Malthusian ideologies from the Population Bomb and Club of Rome Documents back to Malthus himself.  Then look into Ricardo (the other wing of British Imperialism) in the context of the 1830s to 1860s Rise and Fall of the Whig party.

http://www.newdealradio.com/home/2014/7/5/episode-12-antebellum-i-malthus-and-ricardo-vs-carey

Here's my blog.  Check out what I think about Fredric Bastiat's "The Law".

http://reformedlibertarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/friedrich-basiats-law-please-quit.html

Discuss.

 

http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-322-max-keiser/

Ah, glad Max Keiser is finally seeing the light about the Libertarians.

 

My god.  This is an amazing book and I'm not even 100 pages into it yet.  I can't wait to get home to continue reading it.  If the rest of the book is as good as the part I've already read then this is the book I would have written had my life taken a different path and I was 10 years older.

http://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-A-Winters/dp/0521182980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343847115&sr=8-1&keywords=oligarchy

I challenge and recommend every user on this forum to read this book.  Prior to this book I was recommending a host of other books to best illustrate my opinions on such matters as economic theory and social morality.  But this book seems to best 'get to the bottom' of what I was trying to illustrate with a myriad of other books.  Plus it's shorter and more concisely gets the point across.

The central thesis of the book is something so obvious that it has taken hundreds of hacks, scribblers and paid-off and bankrupt ideologues to confuse the people of the USA what their ancestors used to know, that being:

*  That there has always existed an oligarchical class wherever there is large discrepancies of wealth (legitimacy of that wealth notwithstanding)
*  That this group is interested above all else in growing and maintaining their wealth
*  This is the primary focus to understand the entirety of history, politics, socio-organizations and much else, as it is an ever-present force that is universal in character.  It is a universal historical consent, and therefore integral to understanding anything about history and present day events.

Nothing could, in fact, be more obvious than these basic tenets and if present and past events are viewed through this perspective it is infinitely more valuable of an analysis.  Yet through the ideology of Classical Liberalism and its most rancid and virulent present form: Libertarianism; us Westerners have been made to forget these most elementary facts.

Read this book and you'll have a greater understanding of where I'm coming from than anything I've previously cited as a thing to read.  I can already tell that this book is going to be classic - that is, if we are to have any chance at a future, then it must be.

Who's going to take up the challenge?

Is anyone aware on this forum about the promise of LFTR technology? 

http://superfuelbook.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

Go to Youtube and search LFTR.  Watch about 6 hours of the videos that are available. 

Then go to this site:

http://energyfromthorium.com/

and read as much of the documentation as you can muster.

Then come back to me and explain why the "Free Market" or "Private Enterprise" or "Free Enterprise" hasn't been able to build another one of these, after the prototype, in the past 40-ish years.

You can do that after you admit that the technology also solely exists because of Government funded research to begin with.

 

Just checking a barometer about Ron Paul.  Is the Libertarian community still fooled by Ron Paul?  Have they moved on to other demagogues to worship?  Maybe I shouldn't word the question like that.  Is Ron Paul still popular with Libertarians?

Who here as read "End the Fed" or "The Revolution: A Manifesto"?  The title of every book that Ron Paul writes should be entitled "<Title Here>: A Manifesto" because that is all that he writes.

For those who care about what I have to say about Ron Paul's latest book "End the Fed: (A Manifesto)" (parenthetically added) here is the link to my book review of "End the Fed".  Under the pen-name "John Anon".


http://www.amazon.com/End-Fed-Ron-Paul/product-reviews/0446549193/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar


Maybe it'll be the starting point for an interesting discussion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/rand-paul-endorses-mitt-romney/2012/06/07/gJQAKywTMV_blog.html

This is somewhat old news now, but does this come as a surprise to anyone here and if so, why?

I've heard of so many different types of Libertarianism and Anarcho-_______ism and I'm trying to pin each one down to a certain set of beliefs.

Does anyone know how to rigorously define these belief systems?

Revolutionaries!  Activists!  Those are fed up with being a slave! 

Listen closely for the love of all that is good!

I predicted this Bitcoin collapse a while back (you can go look and see that I was right).  It happened just like I thought it would.

This system (things modeled like Bitcoin) can't work and are as unworkable as the 'systems' that are proposed by the 'resource-based-economy' folks over at the Zeitgeist movement.  I believe I've already explained why in the long-hand version, but I'll make a quick, bullet point summary here:

1)  Bitcoins or any crypto-currency (CC) doesn’t fundamentally represent useful work.  Dollars and fractional reserve currencies have their problems in this area but by and large they do represent useful work – to the extent that they don’t is much a cause of our present economic crisis.  Earning CC for securing the network is the same as everyone printing money and saying that they are preventing counterfeiting, no labor was performed to acquire the CC and therefore it has no inherit value.  When people say that the US dollar is backed by nothing they are wrong.  It is backed by the output capacity of the USA.

2)  The amount of crypto-currency must be either issued: A) By an algorithm that only allows for a fixed allotment at certain intervals.  B)  At someone's discretion.  If it is "B" then you are back at where you started with the problem that resides in central banking - that it is at someone's discretion to grow (or shrink) the money supply.  Disregarding the fact that this is something that can work toward the public interest as it did with the 1st and 2nd Banks of the US under Hamilton and Biddle respectively, this is something that would have to be controlled by legal recourse as an only way to secure the network.  Obviously, this isn't the idea of anyone here, nor is it even worth discussing further.  With regard to "A" the problem that arises is that the demand and supply will seldom match each other with regard to the issuance of the CC "money supply".  If the supply roughly correlated with the demand for CC you'd see relative price stability.  What we saw with BTC was these two things having no rough correlation at all, where the price would be going up and down like a roller coaster.  So setting the creation of the currency at a fixed rate has the inescapable problem of never being able to manage the wild increase and decrease of its demand with regard to any price stability.  And that's fine if you want to have 'free market experiments' but you'll never be able to attract a large body of merchants with such a system.

3)  The fact that Moore's law exists.  In order to set a certain fixed growth of the money supply you need to tie it to a certain amount of algorithmic work performed.  Herein lays yet another problem.  Moore's law says that hardware performance increases at a certain rate, meaning that the difficulty of the block chain must evidentially hit a virtual ‘wall’ where the best hardware available cannot create enough coins to pay the power bill.  There is also an issue of 'opportunity cost', but I’ll get to that later.  There was one ‘solution’ for the problem of the price of BTC being too low to justify mining, and that was Transaction Fees.   But for this fee structure to work it requires that there be a bustling economy in the CC world.  Since the CC ‘market’ has this problem and the other inherent problems numerated, each alone that would (and did) destroy the CC project as a viable alternative to other currencies, no ‘bustling market’ was ever forthcoming, only some very small market operations.

4)  Opportunity Cost and CC Distribution.  It would be impossible to fix the amount of currency issued even close to the demand of the currency, much less be able to compensate for the fact that you are going to always have to deal with the eventual conflux of the block chain difficulty hitting the Moore’s law wall.  The fact that in a system such as this Moore’s law will always provide a much tilted structure for CC distribution due to Opportunity Cost.  When any CC emerges the difficulty must be low in order to entice people to join the project as a means of furthering it for financial gain and ideological reasons.  It couldn’t start out by requiring that the people buy $500 video cards in order to make a small amount of CC, if it did the project would never get off the ground.  It must start with almost $0 opportunity cost, which is what we saw with Bitcoin where people were earning large quantities of Bitcoins by running the program on laptops with Celeron processors.  It must evidentially become harder for the system to mine CC as it goes on or else the first-comers have no reason to begin the project and sacrifice the time in building it all up.  Here is where another problem occurs; although it is necessary to have this structure in order to spread the systems popularity, like a “gold rush”, it causes the total amount of the CC to be very unevenly distributed.  In fact the Bitcoin inequality and mis-distribution makes our existing wealth disparity in this country (USA) look like some Marxist Utopia. 

5)  The hack-ability of the client.  As this is effectively eCash on your disk drive that only requires read access to steal from anywhere in the world, there will always be a large drive to crime in any area this easy to illegitimately make money.  At its peak it had roughly a $200 million dollar market cap, if a CC system ever had a $200 Billion market cap (where you could literally have thumb drives with billions of dollars on it), can you imagine the underground crime syndicate that would grow up around this market in trying to steal and hack everything CC related?  What is your recourse if your money is stolen from an employee?  If your key is destroyed?  Etc? 

Once again, all this is fine if you want this to be an “experiment”, but be aware that it will never be anything more than an experiment if it doesn’t overcome these challenges.

Seeing as all of this –actually, any of this, totally ruins the potential for a CC to ever supplant a national currency, at least until REAL solutions are created for each of this failings then any CC project that doesn’t learn from Bitcoin’s demise will mimic its failure.  I’ve spend a lot of time on Bitcoin and it taught me an incredible amount for the thousands of dollars I lost in speculating with it.  I consider the money I lost well worth what I’ve learned.

Seeing as the above is incontrovertibly the case to all those who aren’t wearing Bitcoin-Cult-Blinders would anyone who would like to make positive change help me with regard to the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement?  I’m up in the Portland Oregon area and could use help distributing fliers (already distributed 2000+ of them and they are proposing the best and most well organized system compared to all the other ideas floating around out there) and implementing all manner of ideas I have around something that has real potential to make a positive difference.   Just reinforcing for you (that is if your mind is open to reason) that Bitcoin is terminal and dying, and all your energy would actually yield something worthwhile if it were vested in something that has potential, and OWS appears to be that thing if we can interject the right programmatic changes to the movement before it gets hijacked by other political players.

If you want to get hold of me to help the OWS movement please email me at "revolutionmeow@gmail.com". 
I’ll post my economic recovery plan in the next post.  If you’d like to help me further this plan then please let me know; many hands make light work, and it is going to be impossible to avert us going off a financial cliff without people like you and the help you have the power to contribute.  I need people that can understand good economic principles when they are put in front of them, people with web experience, people with marketing skills or ability to do research projects and gather information.  If you read any economic books you can get your hands on, like myself, or much better actually have worked in finance or have an advanced degree in economics or related fields please get in contact with me, it could be the beginning of a beautiful collaborative relationship.  If you have anything to offer please hit me up as I have all manner of ideas and limited time and resources to implement them.

Please post what you think defines a "Free Market", using a moderate level of detail.  No two sentence answers.

 

The problem I see in the near future for Bitcoin is that the best hardware that presently exists will soon (months?) be inadequate for mining at existing price levels.  Meaning that buying a Radeon 6990 will not even net you back a worthwhile amount of money (or any) at existing price levels.  As there will therefore be added a tremendous amount of downward pressure on the market at the same time that only more demand for BTC will be able to counteract.

The other built in failsafe to this scenario is the 'transaction fees' that miners and clients can charge in order to process transactions.  Well this presumes a robust economy with people actually trading in goods and services and not what the actual Bitcoin economy looks like.  Look at the charts there is not much movement, and how much of that is even really exchange for goods and services?  Most the value that BTC has gained in USD over the past many months is of a purely speculative nature.

It was a different world when you could get any crap laptop and make 50 bitcoins a day or even a week for the potential gains were much higher for a much lower amount of 'capital investment' (ie, crap laptop that you weren't using anyway), but now with the introductory capital costs being so high with so little returns I don't see a way out of this, which is unfortunate.

I believe we'll have a large shedding of miners soon as the difficulty chews up all but those that are running the various levels of hardware.

Next we'll see another exodus when it hits a competitive level at the level of the highest existing hardware.

Then another one when people who are the enthusiasts (those who tweak every little setting for maximum efficiency) start bowing out.

This may already be happening.  And this combined downward pressure (assuming that the miners sell their BTC when they leave the system) will cause even the highest efficiency miners to question if they want to continue to mine at a loss.  As we've seen it only takes someone with about 4% of the supply of BTC to completely crash the price to $0.01, that is the kind of downward pressure compounded with the lack of liquidity that can be brought to bear.  For example, if one of the primary founders has thought of this problem as I have and would rather try to 'cash out' than hold on and potentially see the project survive it might actually set this 'bomb' off.  There will be plateaus in this process as the difficulty goes down as people are exiting but the overall trend is the same.

I've already sold all my BTC at a loss and am not planning on buying back in, so I'm not hear to start a panic.  I haven't spent the last 2 months organizing meet-up groups for Bitcoin, spending hours a day on this forum and researching bitcoin and money theory and economics and talking to all manner of people about it to try and kill it.  You can take or leave my word on that, it doesn't matter to me.

However the only way I see out of this is:

1) Either to have the client for BTC radically improve so those non-techy can use it (?)
2) Have another wave of users come in and buy BTC (not likely)
3) Develop a custom ASCI that does the hashing, it is unknown if this could even solve this problem for long (very unlikely)
4) Expand the use of BTC as an actual median of exchange as more movement will equate to fees which will better insure the integrity of the network (dependent on the client and other factors)

If there is some glaring thing I'm missing as part of this equation please let me know.

It was at a political meet up group here in Portland.  I met a man who works for a company back east that works on writing Algorithms for automated trading systems.

The irony was that I was there trying to recruit people to help me build a Tobin Tax website.  What a small world.


He said the following:

Algorithmic trading is financial warfare.
Algorithmic trading is a financial arms-race.
It is really a form of 'scalping', and admitted that it serves no role whatsoever to anyone but the person doing the HFT
The average ratio of dollar-earned-to-dollar-lost is about 6-to-1, meaning that every 6 dollars they make they lose 1
He was working on an algorithm that was getting 30-to-1 and 40-to-1 ratios
He called the whole line of business a 'printing press'
He was a web-developer but sort of fell into this line of work, now he makes multiple times what he used to, he said there is nowhere else he could ever make the money he is now
It was clear he was making so much money writing short programs in visual pascal that it was probably over $100k, bare minimum, probably in the $100k to $200k range
But even what he was making paled in comparison to the true experts that work on algorithms for the biggest players (literal million dollar bonuses were given out)
He also told me that everyone he knows pays an incredibly low tax rate due to loopholes (18% for millionaires, etc)
He told me about a hedge fund managers plan to build an 'oil derrick' out in the mid Atlantic ocean (where there is no oil) directly over the fiber lines running between the Euro and London exchanges and the US just to get a 1/600th of a second lead on the rest of the market


I'm going back next week to learn more.  He laughed when I told him about the Tobin Tax plan, he said it would never work and that there are so many fortunes being made in this that there are literally armies of millionaires and billionaires that would oppose it.  I'm starting to believe him as the only 2 people that knew about HFT (High Frequency Trading) and algorithmic trading at that event were myself and him... and he worked for a company that did it.


Enjoy your 'free market'.

I sent an email to my congressman regarding stopping the war in Libya, it was scant and I just voiced my opposition in regards to any US involvement in Libya.

He returned with this canned turd of a response:

=============================================================================================================================================


Dear Mr. ******,

Thank you for taking the time to contact me. I appreciate hearing from you.

I do not support an open-ended commitment in Libya and I am disappointed that the White House did not further consult Congress before committing resources to the NATO-led mission. Additionally, in my vote for the Conyers amendment and H.J. Res 68, which both bar all funds from being used to deploy, establish, or maintain a presence of Members of the Armed Services or private security contractors on the ground in Libya, makes clear I only support a limited U.S. role.

Too often the greatest powers, including the United States, have failed to act when they could have intervened in a responsible way to stop the slaughter of innocents. In Libya, it was clear that there was a crisis developing and America, with our NATO allies, the Arab League, and the UN Security Council, appropriately provided limited support to rebel forces. This assistance included a no-fly zone that has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. 

America's primary role in the NATO mission has been to provide operational and logistical support to other countries that have taken the lead on enforcing UN Security Resolution 1973 and I support that. It would have been an unfortunate precedent and undermined key global institutions if we failed to act with such a clear, unified call for intervention. Inaction would have endangered the recent display of democratic aspirations by so many in the region. Our failure to act would have emboldened the despots of Syria, Iran, Yemen and others, suggesting there were no consequences for murdering peaceful protesters. 

What I would have liked to see offered in the House was a resolution similar to the one sponsored by Senators Kerry and McCain. The Kerry/McCain resolution goes further and clearly defines our interests and objectives in the region. It makes clear that it is the sense of this Congress that we will support the Libyan people and political reform in the country; it clearly defines our goal in Libya as the removal of Mummar Qaddafi and his family from power through the NATO mission outlined by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which includes diplomatic and economic pressures; and that we must support the Libyan people transition to a representational democracy. 

As I have said from the start, I would support thoughtful legislation that acknowledges the U.S. has chosen to answer the cries of the innocent Libyan people, but makes clear that our commitment to their aspirations of self governance is not open-ended, and which clearly defines our goals and – more importantly – limits. That is why I voted for H.J. Res. 68 and look towards the Kerry/McCain Resolution to carry the day because it sets the right tone.
 

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with me. Please continue to be in touch.

 Sincerely,
 
 Earl Blumenauer
 Member of Congress

==========================================================================================================================================================

So I responded with this:

The putsches in the North African region are not some 'Arab spring' of democracy.  It's more geopolitical cynical overthrows by CIA and company against vassal nations seeking to escape from the Globalized Empire.  What a coincidence that Russian and Chinese engineers where in the region building all manner of infrastructure (as Libya was 'siding' with them over the Empire powers embodied in NATO and the Globalized economic hegemony made most manifest in the World Bank and IMF) and that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was planing on meeting with Merkel and Quadaffi to establish an alternative to the dollar.  If we can recall history we see that as soon as Saddam seriously considered getting out from under the dollar things conveniently turned against him, but these are more than a matter of coincidence, and to this much more could be said.

There should be no role of the USA whatsoever in regards to Libya.  The 'slaughter of innocents' as you describe are another PR stunt by western backed media establishments that fly in the face of the reality of what is actually happening.  The innocents you cite are literally Al Qaeda forces in eastern Libya, a typical counter-gang of Islamic extremists fully funded by the Empire to further balkanize the area in typical Brzezinskite fashion.  You site the Green Revolution of Iran and 'other despots' as if those were in addition spontaneous events, which either shows how naive you are or how naive you think your average constituent is.

I study these things literally hours a day so sorry to disappoint you with my lack of swallowing the propaganda around said events.  Now with the average person having means of choice regarding their selection of media don't be surprised if just repeating the talking points of the ideological bankrupt media cartels don't get you as far as they used to.

I just hope that you are promoting this cruel farce as a point of ignorance to what is actually occurring rather than an unwillingness or inability to discern the reality of the situation.

==========================================================================================================================================================

Does anyone think I overdid it?

 

This is an older idea I've had kicking around for a while and listening to Guns and Butter http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/71485 has rekindled it.

Trying to salvage our political system we need to turn the dynamic of class struggle (which is always with us contrary to what the naive members of this forum think) in the paradigm of Finance vs. The People (rich, poor, middle class, business owners, everyone).

To do this we promote ideas that reorganize the political spectrum along those lines:

1)  A Tobin Tax
2)  A national infrastructure & research program
3)  Shifting tax burdens unto Wall St.
4) End the Fed by nationalizing it

And perhaps avoid the oft-used "left-wing" call for higher income taxes for the time being.  Those arguments have very little traction where I think the general populace would be much more open to the idea of a Tobin Tax or ending the Fed.

Since there are so many fans of Austrian economics here I'd like to ask for examples of success stories where a country used Austrian economic polices to become prosperous.

Please post what you find below, thanks!

 

Since we are still in a Global Economic World Wide Depression I'm wondering what the general consensus is out there regarding:

1) What caused it (primarily)
2) What is your plan to get out of it (includes any laws or programs you would add or repeal)


I'll post my program after I put some finishing touches on it.

I just finished reading "Economics in One Lesson".  Oh boy.  The fact that anyone can gobble that swill down without as much as a burp of mental indigestion is frankly stunning.  I read it due to someone's rave revues on this forum to which they basically revered this book as a bible of sorts.

There are only a few chapters with any worthwhile arguments to salvage, some of those chapters (and there weren't many) I truly liked the principle message of, but even those he had to pack as much polemical mouth-frothing vitriol in as he could, much of which felt manic, like he couldn't even finish a thought without bursting out in Strangelovian fashion. The chapters were also stacked with the most obvious straw man arguments you could possibly dream up.  It's as if his sole source for counter-arguments was someone who read a bad translation of Keynes into a non-native language, had a lobotomy, and were given opiates and hallucinogens prior to their interview with Mr. Hazlitt.

The naked class warfare of this book was so blatant it's amazing that people can read this thinking that it's some disinterested objective view by a scholarly hermit completely removed from the system he seeks to influence, which due to the reverence in which it was previously addressed lead me to believe that some believe this not far off from the truth.  No sooner than you might give him the new chance of being objective and fair in the next chapter he bursts into another polemic.  The lack of objectivity and disingenuous nature actually put this book the borderline of being a manifesto rather than any actual work of academia.  The words "liberty", "freedom" and other slogans are smattered about the pages to keep the average libertarian plodding along thinking that the system he promotes would somehow be in any of their best interests to which they are woefully mislead.

But to be fair, it is nowhere as bad as "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

Frequently, when economics are discussed people falsely believe that everyone has the same underpinning moral evaluations or the same ideals or objectives to what a economic system should do.  As economics is an interesting combination of mathematics, politics, history, morality and law it is no surprise that we come to such wildly different outcomes to what type of systems we propose in terms of the relation of the government in said system, in spite of the fact that we all probably have a very narrow idea of what type of society we would like to live in.

I propose the following experiment: to list in the order of preference what you think a economic system should provide in the order of importance; if you think that the system shouldn't provide at all for the specific line item then mark an N/A next to it. Or just group them in "Should be an area of government involvement", "shouldn't be an area of government involvement" and perhaps a "depends" category.    These are just examples, feel free to list these as part of your evaluation and/or create your own.  Explaining why you decided what you did will be enlightening for all.

I eagerly await your responses.

 

*) The system should provide encouragement for social mobility.  Merit should determine people's ability to rise in society, not birthright or arbitrary class.
*) The system should provide price stability and combat inflation.
*) The system should provide for the best possible degree of personal freedom in economic terms, freedom from regulation and taxation
*) The system should encourage and provide means for research and technological discovery
*) The system should levy taxes to promote the construction of worthwhile public assets (i.e. infrastructure)
*) The system should provide a 'safety net' against extreme poverty
*) The system should provide in protectionism of select industries
*) The system should subsidize, pay for or otherwise encourage education
*) The system should levy a progressive income tax
*) The system should levy a flat tax
*) The system should regulate the business in matters of public health or pollution
*) The system should seek to disrupt monopolies and cartels
*) The system should regulation licensed occupations
*) Trade should be unregulated/free between countries

The need for at least a 1% Tobin tax has long been overdue.  The amount of speculative money sloshing through the world markets is staggering and a speculative drain on the real economy.  In addition the advent of hyper-trading and flash-trading is another toxic poison to the real stock market of capital investors, entrepreneurs and businesses.  In addition, it is the most feasible way to shift the burden of closing the deficit from the backs of the pillaged and raped middle-class to the bailout taking parasites on Wall Street.

If you don't know about the Tobin Tax and how it could close the deficit and fix many problems of our existing system then please read up on it.

For those that have already done their homework and know the benefits that a Tobin tax would have please PM me.  I'm diving into doing more 'hard research' targeted specifically at this issue exclusively in order to build my website.

I need help: researching, making animated videos, website design, essay writing.

If you'd like to help please PM me and we can start a conversation.

Thanks.

 

http://pdxbitcoinjamboree.eventbrite.com

Portland Bitcoin meetup at the Green Dragon!  Sign up and hope to see you there.