Here is my recent Townhall piece. As always, skim the comments. Aren't these people supposed to be Rush Limbaugh fans and support the free market? Man.
"I find it hard to believe that banks, borrowing from sovereign wealth funds around the world and accessing the Federal Reserve's newest Term Auction Facility, would be in a financial position to lend freely from new savings."
Maybe I misinterpret this statement, but isn't this ignoring that whole fractional reserve thing? Theoretically there's nothing wrong with a fractional reserve requirement. Historically, on the other hand...well, we're all about to see how bad it can get, aren't we?
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
"The idea seems to be that if we all just ignore the recession, it will get bored and go away."
ReplyDeleteGreat line!
Nice article.
ReplyDelete"I find it hard to believe that banks, borrowing from sovereign wealth funds around the world and accessing the Federal Reserve's newest Term Auction Facility, would be in a financial position to lend freely from new savings."
ReplyDeleteMaybe I misinterpret this statement, but isn't this ignoring that whole fractional reserve thing? Theoretically there's nothing wrong with a fractional reserve requirement. Historically, on the other hand...well, we're all about to see how bad it can get, aren't we?