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 stock markets do have "circuit-breakers", I think they call them now, so that they shut down if it falls too much. I remember reading this in some notice on the Vanguard site. Ah, here we go: Circuit-breaker policies.
ReplyDeleteBut that's a NYSE policy, not (nominally) a government one. And remember, they have shut down the markets before due to panic. But that was a LONG time ago, like, a whole 20 years after I was born.
Shutting down the markets is too drastic, better to leave them open but institute a price freeze on stocks(until things calm down).
ReplyDeleteFor my sins, I work in banking and everyone I know is cock-a-hoop about this sloughing of all of their debts onto Joe "The Hapless" Taxpayer. Now all of their debts have been cleared, they can also now start lending irresponsibly again to take advantage of the high LIBOR rates! There are also many more morally hazardous Austrians within banking than you might realise and they are fully aware of the hyper-inflationary ramifications of all of this. But in the meantime, they will try to make as much money for themselves from this, as they can, before the roof falls in, and get as much of it as they can into gold and property, in a flight to real values.
ReplyDeleteThe ban on short selling will also not take too long to correct. Watch out for much more flexible Put Option contracts to be created, before the end of the week, in an attempt to fix the broken pricing system. Then watch for further interventions from the central planners at the SEC to ban Put Options.
And then watch the ongoing train wreck when the options derivatives market then collapses, thus ensuring a whole army of further interventions to keep the state from imploding.
Mises will once again be proved right. One intervention to break the pricing system (e.g. the ban on short selling) will necessitate another, and then another, until we finally end up with totalitarianism and the total eradication of the free market.
Expect these interventions to continue and to accelerate. What will these interventions be? Who knows. Even the fools in the central planning offices have no idea what they'll be cooking up next. Just expect less freedom of action and friends of the state to be bailed out at the cost of the rest of us.
We certainly live in interesting times.