Tyler Cowen linked to this NYT reader poll about how to stimulate the economy. I had to stop reading after the first five. Go ahead and try it. In just two minutes you can ruin your whole day.
Invest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
I liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.
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...
In this paper , Hoppe, Hülsmann, and Block (HHB) make their ethical case against fractional reserve banking (FRB) based on the fact that "two individual owners cannot be the exclusive owner of one and the same thing at the same time." They then posit that since fractional reserve bank notes creates multiple titles or claims to the "same" gold, they are inherently fraudulent. In analyzing this claim, the first thing we will have to do is to turn it into a remotely sensible claim. No one who deposits money at a bank thinks they are entitled to the same money back. What they want, when they go to get their money out, is the same amount of money back. What a gold-backed fractional reserve note comprises is a claim to a certain amount of gold, not certain particular pieces of gold. I hope that change to their argument is uncontroversial! So their complaint comes down to this: if a bank issues pieces of paper that allow the bearer to claim a certain amount of gold...
EDITORS' SELECTIONS
ReplyDeleteInvest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
— Nick Hayes, Milwaukee, WI
*cringe*
Put a muzzle on Ben Bernanke.
— dave, Tucson
Hey, now that's a good one!
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
ReplyDeleteI liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.