You got to be a troll...

Anyway, easy way to debunk this bs-thread is to look at the area between the curve and the x-axis. Democrats have clearly less deficit spending if you look at the first chart (considerable amount nevertheless). Clinton even managed to rise US to savings from huge deficit which was left after Reagan and Bush I. Bush II managed to plunge the deficit back to the pre-Clinton levels. Republicans have bad habit starting wars and that explains a lot. % of something charts are not difficult to read.

Oversimplified and flawed is what I would describe the book as a whole. Actually I found the book bit arrogant as first Hazlitt started with explaining what is proper reasoning in economics, and then fails to follow it himself. Difference of MPC within people is just one short-term effect he failed to recognise and happens to have huge impact on most of his arguments.

In chapter dealing with reducing work-time by law he used two clear straw-man examples in which wages were fixed and then showed that this leads to problems. The strongest case with reduced work-hours and wages set by markets were ignored.

The inflation chapter is just bs dealing only with government spending with printing money.

Hazlitt also got the workings of banking wrong, which is common fallacy. Banks do not lend peoples savings, they just make two IOU's one of which is the debt-takers bank account and other is the agreement to pay back the principle plus interest. Peoples savings is just one of the defining factors of the limit how much this 'debt money' banks can create (Basel I, II, III).

Hazlitt also seem to reduce the purpose of economics to mere growing of the GDP over well-being of individuals, which in my opinion is confusing the end with means. Economics is for creating well-being which is subjective value, so resorting to absolute objectives is inherently flawed.

As book dealing mainly with economic fallacies, I find the omittance of law of comparative advantage a huge flaw as it is so unintuitive and thus leads to many fallacious reasonings regarding free trade.

The chapter dealing with price control after war was also flawed. Obviously the purpose during crise is to guarantee the adequacy of supplies by restricting hoarding. This is done by rationing. Price control will follow only if necessary, not the other way around as in the book.

That being said, I agree with many of the conclusions in the book. Nevertheless, I think Hazlitt's reasoning hardly qualifies him for the reputation he seems to have.

You are probably right that calling the arguments as straw mans is bit too strong when looking at the historical context. As he mentioned Keynes in the beginning he should've been aware of the consumption function. In the Keynes's book the consumption function was probably modeled as linear and as there probably weren't many empirical studies done at the time of Hazlitt's book, the MPC would have been assumed constant thus validating Hazlitts point of view.

I found that the general tone in the Hazlitt's book was that here you have bunch of recurring economic fallacies, and then let the reader to read between the lines that all theories emphasizing government spending, including Keynes's arguments are reducible to those and thus there is no need to touch upon them. The fact he needed another book for Keynes indeed shows that Economics in One Lessons wasn't alone sufficient criticism.

I have one argument that I believe seriously hampers the main arguments in the book:

The author seems oblivious of consumption function (and improved models with similar content), which was first introduced by Keynes in his The General Theory at 1936. Simplified model of consumption function is shown here:

The x-axis is the persons income and f(x), the black line, is his consumption. The vertical difference x - f(x) is what person's accumulates. The point where the black and red line intersect is the so called brake-even point. Above that person accumulates money and below either spends his savings or has to take debt. The consuption function is in reality not linear but the slope is reduced when the income increases.

Important concept here is MPC, or marginal propensity to consume. If we give a person extra money, the ratio of it that will increase consumption is the so called MPC. The MPC is simply the slope of the consumption function. In the simplified model all income-classes would have same MPC. In reality, however, average poor people have higher MPC than average rich, as the slope is reduced with x. This leads us to very important conclusion: aggregate demand is not indifferent to transfer of wealth.

Many of the Hazlitts arguments are of form: When you take x from person A (by taxation, accident or other means) and give it for entity B to consume, the loss of consumption of A cancels the positive effects of consumption of B, and as consumption of B is inherently less effective as not being decided by the markets, the net effect is negative. This completely ignores MPC. Consider for example employing somebody with taxation. Somebody loses money in the process. If he has lower MPC than the one employed then aggregate demand will increase thus improving the employment rate in aggregate. In addition, if the job filled is improving circumstances for business (law-enforcement, infrastructure...) it is in effect investment improving prospects for economy. Also, the taxed money is used to increase domestic employment rather than foreign.

This argument does not clearly refute any of the arguments, but clearly shows the book is using straw-mans. There were few other smaller ones, but I'll post them maybe later to keep things bite-size.

The book can be found as free pdf at http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf

I'm looking forward to reading it as it is often used as reference for arguments I find unfounded. So either I'm going learn new stuff on economics or new straw mans on economics, in both cases it should be worthwhile reading.

The censorship actually make child-porn more easily accessible for dedicated people as blocking is easy to bypass and it effectively lists all sources.

Classic problem-reaction-solution in action. In Britain there was similar stunt with pedophilia scare, thus plans were to proceed in nation-wide database for those working with children so one can check for pedophilia-suspects. I wonder if database of convicted persons only would do the same... I checked and the plans apparently got halted but it wasn't far away.

This wasn't in response to climate-scientists claims or even what some 'deniers' have claimed climate-scientists to have claimed. Actually this argument is completely mine, not read from anywhere. Any real scientist knows this, so you are right, this has zero relevance to the real scientific debate. As for lay-persons to lay-person arguments (which is most you see) I think there is need to deal with matters not obvious to everyone. Also, this was more so in response to the presuppositions some melting ice news-stories mentioning global warming seem to have. (That is sea-level is going to rise radically because of this, leading to islands sinking, we must stop emitting CO₂)

One can show flaws in the science or in the fear-mongering, both are relevant in peoples formation of opinions. This was for the latter.

It would be better to make a separate thread for AGW-theory criticism, but I'll sum few points, some refuting the AGW, other the doomsday scenarios:

• Basic knowledge of physics tells us that solubility of CO₂ (and most other gases) to water is reduced significantly as a function of temperature (think of soft drinks). When global temperature rises, oceans will also rise in temperature but with lag, thus leading them to start releasing CO₂ to the atmosphere. When climate cools oceans become CO₂-sinks again. From this background it surprises me little that historically CO₂ concentration happens to follow temperature with few century lag, not the other way around.
• Warming of the climate reduces not increases extreme weather patterns. Simple physics again: When the globe warms, poles warm up the most. This is due to the fact that in the equator the excess heat is goes to vaporizing which leads to cooling cloud cover. This leads to the reduced temperature-difference (=energy difference). If you think climate as heat engine, this reduces the heat to mechanical-energy conversion rate significantly. (Local temporary exceptions possible)
• Warming climate does not necessarily lead to reduced ice and thus rising sea levels. Warm climate –> vaporization –> more rainfall, that is also more snow –> Ice-cover thickens. Glaciers have indeed increased during past few years.
• Melting ice, when floating, does not rise sea-levels. Simple Archimedes law in action: the ice has displaced amount of water exactly of its weight. How large portion do you think the water will replace when it melts? Same as it's weight, logical? It makes me facepalm every time somebody tries to induce panic mood by showing cracking ice-bergs. North Pole is by the way completely floating ice.
• Modern temperature records happen to start from the coldest moment for a very long time. It is only natural that temperature records have risen with the coincidental industrialization.
• The famous hockey-stick curve is blatant lie: it misses the medieval warm period and Maunder minimum. Also temperature was at par to now at 1930 (at least in northern europe). Climategate and other similar stories have revealed other consistent frauds in the climate-science community. There have been many 'fixes' to make the story more consistent. All the time it has been 'precise science'. If it isn't objective, then it isn't science and worth believing.
• Sun activity (sun spots) has far higher correlation with temperature than CO₂. Some scientist have suggested we are heading to mini-ice-age as sun is heading to inactivity. Last time this happened was the already mentioned Maunder sunspot minimum which 'coincidentally' was very cold time. I agree it is very dubious claim that earths temperature would be related to the input of it's main source of energy...
• Most long time temperature measuring spots have been corrupted with growing nearby cities. Satellite data and uncorrupted spots show no significant trend. The corrupted data was used to calibrate the six IPCC climate-models which are the base of all doomsday scenarios.
• During Jurassic period CO₂ concentration was whopping ~2000 ppm. Earth didn't transform into Venus. (surprise)
• The media saturation of climate-truth is just unrealistic. Agreed, if true it is damn important, but do you need all the time bombard people with emotion inducing crap that is not founded on any known science (not even the mainstream climate one). My propaganda-alarm has been in lot of use lately with climate-change and terrorism and swine-flu scare and who knows what will instant kill us next time. These things just happen (coincidentally?) to keep the populace under iron grip of fear. Fear and anger, two emotions that are the key to mass manipulation.
• "The only constant in the climate is change" -some smart dude whose name I don't remember.

If you really want to start discussing this, copy-paste the points with credentials and make another thread, or ask me to make one. I don't want to entirely off-topic this thread as I truly enjoy watching the silence indicating lack of proper counter-arguments by the libertarians.

Edit070812: I could swear I wrote this differently back then; here's one important correction to the second dot: The cooling cover of the clouds sets in effect maximum temperature for equatorial areas. This in turn means rising aggregate temperature causes lower temperature difference leading to the lower efficacy of the imaginative heat-machine. Extreme weather patterns should be reduced by this mechanism. I would like to change few other parts but I'm going to leave the post as it is. I don't want to tamper the original post.

If we agree there is one, I think it isn't that precise that do we hit the right spot as long as we have the right direction. Politics is for getting to a result in such ambiguous matters.

Health and wealth are very different assets. If we could pump abstract thing called 'health' from people and lump it back to sickly then we seriously would need to consider the ethics of forced redistribution of health (I'm not behind it though as we would be fixing bad luck and peoples own choices). As completely theoretical construct I would not touch on that. In practice (kidney transfer for example) egalitarianism is not met in compromising someones health for 'utilitarian good'. Thus we don't need to consider overriding someones health if we believe in right to equal and just treatment. Wealth can be redistributed equally among each income-class so it can be done 'equally'.

As to completely different question than the original post, I'll sketch few reasons why I think transfer of wealth for health-care is okay:

• If transfer of wealth is acceptable in first place (as I believe it is as there are structural unfairness that need to be fixed), then it is reasonable to direct part of it to health-care as that is expense for people same way as everything else. This is my main reason
• Health is capital. The whole economy functions better when people are healthy. In long run this will benefit also those paying the bill. Only way to do this rational 'investment' is by forcing the collective behind it as all will want to reap the benefits but nobody foot the bill. Individualism is bad excuse for not doing reasonable things.
• I think we are both individuals and part of the community (or larger entities, in the end whole biosphere). Entities we live in are the precondition for our well-being so we are morally indebted to keep them well-being too. Some people just seem oblivious to this.
• If we consider that people have equal right to lead good life regardless of their socio-economic status, then not being able to afford health-care is in effect contradicting this.
• (We are not touching your tangible property. Only your bank account. There is subtle but significant difference when considering property rights.)

You could sum up my stance as that in essence we are not overriding your property rights but more like charging a moral debt. That is, in effect your property rights were not violated.

I think in theory global warming is tough bite to libertarianism, as simple analysis of game theory tells there almost zero incentive to reduce your 'polluting' in fear of law-suits. As long as you are marginally small 'polluter' compared to the whole amount of carbon accumulation your responsibility is insignificant. If you happen to be a big polluter, the most damage has already been done so on the margin polluting more is irrelevant. As all will think the same, the 'solution' of the game is inaction, which in this case could be 'game over'. As discussed already, there are many juridical problems to solve that are difficult for single legitimate court, not to mention the wild west court model of the libertarianism.

In practice this is very boring debate as I have ceased believing in AGW long time ago. It is not an issue of this thread but it would be interesting to debate science behind AGW too.

Haven't seen this one. Seems interesting. An excellent (albeit long) film on the same topic is Adam Curtis's The Century of Self.

Propaganda and 'manufacturing of consent' is everyday. This is not an issue prevalent in USA only. The more people will realise this, the better.

As side note, the individualism of western world has been created (not necessarily intentionally) by social engineering. Libertarianism is as individualist movement as you can get. It would be funny to hear opinions what folks here think being a movement in essence created by propaganda.

'Partial referee' (btw, I didn't mean impartial, sorry not native in English) was a sort of allusion to my previous arguments in which I defined difference of fair inequality and unfair one. If you are damn good tennis player then that isn't really unfair to anyone. If the the difference in the game, however, is due to partial referee, then that is. My argument is that wealth accumulation and deprivation is partly due to such unfairness in economics, so it is okay to even things out with transfer of wealth. In this case partial referee was reference to the de facto rules of economics. It obviously isn't a real feeling and thinking thing.

I'm not sure if I caught what your idea was, but it seems it could be something relevant, so feel free to clarify it.

Of course to determine what is the right 'correction' for each income-class is difficult question (not to mention how to enforce it), one in which the accidentally mentioned impartial referee would be good to have. I don't see how we could get one so we'll have to go with the usual 'who manages to enforce his opinions no matter how wins'.

By the way, there are two concepts that should be familiar to all before we continue on debating on equality: 'equality of outcome' and 'equality of opportunity'. Even these aren't precise science but at least they are lot better than the terribly ambiguous plain equality.

The main argument (2) I had – the one I believe refutes your comparison – is that you can't do organ transfers in the name of equality without violating someones right to equality. With wealth you can dealing each wealth-class independently. With N people with fully functioning kidneys and m people with bad kidneys and n with non functioning kidneys (N > m > n), if you did forced kidney transfers there will be

• N - n people with functioning two kidneys
• m people with bad kidneys
• n kidney donors
• n kidney acceptors

Group 1 and 3 were treated unequally so we violated the principle of equality which we were trying to fulfill. Thus forced kidney transfers violate strict equality (this might be overcome with payment, although I consider that dubious and not equal). I believe that with this reasoning you will come to agree that you original comparison was not founded. With transfer of wealth there is no similar problem as wealth (at least in money terms) can be split in to almost arbitrarily many parts and thus the transfer of wealth can be done equally in each income class. Notice that to achieve 'equality' we treat different income classes as 'unequal' same way as people with fully functioning kidney and badly functioning kidneys got different treatment. Collectivity was one of my arguments which I believe is necessary (but not sufficient) condition for justified forced transfer of wealth.  There are very few things you can truly redistribute collectively that aren't measurable in wealth so in my opinion only thing left to discuss is if transfer of wealth is justifiable in the first place. Measuring 'transfer of health' in money terms (to overcome the discrete nature of kidneys) also reduces the question back to just transfer of wealth.

My opinion is that to fix systemic unfairnesses ('the partial referee') transfer of wealth is okay and to use those money to healthcare is just good use of resources if it goes to the target group. Bad luck is not an example of systemic unfairness. More difficult question is whether transfer of wealth is okay just to support naturally more unfortunate groups. I believe that is good, reasonable and beneficial policy but how to argue that everybody would be obliged to do this is a more difficult question. I'll return to it maybe later. Best I can now say is that currently democracy grants legitimacy for it, but this is bit shady as anything deriving legitimacy from democracy is circular as democracy is in effect legitimized by democracy...

As for semantics of 'equal', let me tell that it is very slippery word just as is justice. They can have so many different presuppositions so I would be very careful when deriving any conclusions from somebody using them. 'Partial equality' is even more of an oxymoron than plain equality. Most people don't realise the ambiguity of the word so there you go with exact arguments. One viewpoint on 'equality' is that 'inequality' is acceptable if those unequal are better of in that situation than in the assumed perfectly equality but there are many arbitrary other ways. Maybe we'll discuss about these semantic problems later.

Sorry that I didn't carefully answer your points. Just wanted to summarize my points so far. As said, I think we should talk about legitimacy of transfer of wealth in relation to lefts arguments. Deriving any analogies with seeming contradictions is in my opinion unfounded.

Edit: 'Impartial referee' –> 'partial referee'.

I believe concept equality is an oxymoron as to truly achieve it you would have to have perfect similarity. That is why I do not adhere it and like to think in terms of justice. That of course is subjective term so it is not unproblematic. My opinion is that most leftist would come to agree with this, but currently word equality is used interchangeably for what is deemed just, thus leading to these semantic problems. Even if left were about equality (aka justice) in only finance, what's the problem? I could advocate equality in literacy but not in skills playing tennis. I see no problem cherry-picking certain areas and ignoring the others. And by the way, only communist would advocate real equality in finance.

And yes, naturally most people tend to follow policies that are in their favor. What do you do? Pick a ideology you know would be bad for you? (As a side-note, funny thing is that if we were discussing in my country, my opinions would be considered right-wing as I think government spending should be cut.)

Argument ad populum? To claim that you must have seriously misunderstood something. Point (3) was there not because majority's opinion grants real legitimacy, but because it clearly shows reducing left to utilitarian egalitarianism is a straw man as de facto left does not function like that. (1) and (2) have the content that show your comparison was unfounded and that your claims don't follow even if one followed equality strictly.

As for now, I'll claim that the OP's claim of left being inconsistent for not accepting forced organ transfers is refuted.

Some left-wingers definitely are inconsistent. So are some libertarians. Whats the point of arguing against those who by definition are, well, straw-man of the ideology. The point we should look at is if the left-wing ideology is consistent, not whether some random individual is. If the point of this thread is that some left are inconsistent then my point has been that not all are and thus this thread has little significance.

If somebody is good at tennis and other isn't, I do not define that really unfair. If the referee would be consistently partial then thats unfair. Same in here: problem isn't that some are naturally more talented than others, or even that they have more wealth. It is that your wealth determines the rules you play by. If poor, you pay interest for being that way, if you are affluent you are paid. In other words you get different amount of wealth relative to your contribution to the economy (~your skill in the game). Economics is just an arbitrary construction so why not fix it with another one so what you really contribute matches better to what you get.

First think of two groups, one with 2 functioning kidneys and second smaller group with no functioning kidneys. To redistribute the 'health' one has to arbitrarily pick the donors and that is not equal because someone in equal position didn't need to give a kidney. Now think of two groups, one wealthy and one poor. To do a transfer of wealth we can share the burden of wealth-loss equally among the wealthy group. Thats equal in that group. When I say 'Transfer of wealth can be done equally among certain group' I mean that in certain income-class the burden is shared equally. Of course your wealth determines how 'responsible' you are under such system. Somebody earning twice what the other is paying more but their position is not equivalent in the first place.

I agree, but the legitimacy of majority is significant here as it tends to be premise of left-wing ideologies and also is currently the leading paradigm.

If ideology states that transfer of wealth is okay, and then you argue that you should also agree kidney transfers by the same logic, you have a straw man if de facto the ideology really doesn't agree that. In that case premises of the ideology you used would be wrong. To make a valid argument you would have to formalize the real premises that agree with reality. If you can show incoherence in those premises (compared to some moral framework or the ideology's de jure premises), then you have a valid argument against the ideology. In this case you could criticize democracy as a valid way of governance. I never claimed majority's opinion is what makes transfer of wealth really legitimate. In our system it just happens to be enough and makes a difference. The two others were my main argument which stand regardless of democracy, albeit enforcing them without similar system is probably not possible.

Edit: You can remove all points with (3) and (iii) and the argument is still valid. This actually was the format I was originally writing.

Left-wing ideology shouldn't be reduced to mere 'utilitarian egalitarianism'. As I previously argued paradoxes with intuitive rights can be overcome by simply granting those rights status of untouchability but I'd like to add one important aspect here:

Your moral examples aren't really equal and thus comparable for at least three reasons:

(1)Reason of poverty and excess wealth in aggregate can be accounted for systemic unfairnesses in the economy. Interest is one mechanism that greatly favors those already wealthy. Reason for kidney failure, on the other hand, is mostly sheer bad luck.
(2)Transfer of wealth can be done equally among certain group, organ transfers can't. Thus forced kidney 'donation' is against the principle of equality as all equal individuals don't have to donate a kidney, but one would have to go with random donors.
(3)Forced transfer of wealth has support of the majority, forced transfer of kidneys don't.

As a western European I've never heard the argument that you wouldn't have legitimacy over property you don't use. Not really even by the insignificantly small (0.3%-0.5%) communist minority (and by communist I mean real communists, not the 'has-a-flavor-of-red-communist' you see thrown around in these circles. They, as you might imagine, have their own ideas of property). Thus I consider your original argument be bit of a straw man so I took the right to speak for transfer of wealth in general.

So, in conclusion we can say that transfer of wealth has legitimacy because (i) the systemic problems that lead to poverty can be attributed to every individual ('caused by the collective'), (ii) according correction can be done collectively ('fairly') and (iii) majority thinks its reasonable policy. Forced kidney donations don't have legitimacy because (i) kidney failure is unrelated to other people, (ii) the forced donation can't be done according to principles of equality and (iii) it is against majority's opinion of what is right.

Left-wing ideologies tend to emphasize democracy and so I think from this perspective its unfounded to use anything as counter-example that wouldn't pass for majority opinions. It is of course valid point to ask if something is right because majority thinks so, but currently it grants legitimacy.

Edit: To summarize, I'd would say OP made a straw man on that left-wingers are all about marginal utility.

I'm not an economist but I think you got it wrong. Whats relevant is the supply and demand of the coins. If 10% of coins are in active trading and others are hoarded then you need money for only the 10% of the 'total value' (total created BTC * price in $) to have a stable price. That is if bitcoin trading is active with say 1,000,000 BTC (supply-side) and 15,000,000$ (demand-side) the price would be 15$/BTC. The rest of approximately 5M bitcoins of course have this same value but if you try to cash them – the price plummets as supply increases. This is the logic of the overall price-production of bitcoin.

Mining changes the amount of total amount of bitcoins, part of which will become new supply to the trade and thus requiring influx of dollars to stabilize the price. If they all were directly cashed out, then your calculation probably would more accurate, although I don't think its even in this case that simple. Anyway, its not that bad, methinks.

I don't know about pre-installed trojans, but I wonder why people would pay 150€ (+license-software) for what they could get free. You trim linux once in to the shape and it's good for years (albeit updating more often is a good idea ). With M$ you can hardly go three days without having to update. And funny thing is that on default the system tells you what to do, not the other way around.