Or you can take the one thing out of that equation that causes pain and suffering more than any idea in the history of man: Money.


That's nonsense. Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange to defeat the inefficiency of barter. It is, in essence, a product that is a placeholder for other products. That was truer when we were on gold than now, but still... Are you saying you don't want people to make stuff and trade with each other? Stop watching TV and read "Economics in One Lesson." It's only $10 on amazon.


Yes i do mean we could all live with out money. Lets value the true worth of ones work to community.. Do you really think that money is the ultimate asnwer? It is someting we humans thought of to make things a little simpler as bartering had it's disadvantages. And by bartering one can't collect such a huge amounts of wealth in one lifetime, all that lead us to the point where a small percentage of people in the world own most of the wealth. Is that right? Some poor schmuck in Thailand is working his ass of to produce for us the cheap tuna that we eat. A good socialist would think that it is just plain wrong. I don't mean that hard work and commitment shouldn't be appreciated, yes of course, that is EXACTLY what i mean. Why should a construction worker make more money in Switzerland than in India? Just let all people have what they deserve, not what we in the western society think they deserve.

And that private schooling? Yes, i bet that the overall quality would raise but what about those who then simply can't afford to pay for it? Will you let them stay in the low income slums and make products for us. Class strugles should be a thing in the past by now, we are smarter than that. Hell, let's put the low class monkeys to prison so we won't have to pay them anything. We can keep them there for years for stealing a cigarrette or smoking a joint. Really?

US of A, i despise you more and more every day and i use to look at you in awe and wonder. The land of the free.. Right.. Just look at the health reform... Let the poor get sick and die, let's just hope that they manage to multiply before the massgrave so we can have more SLAVES!

And the next comment after this probably says i'm a terrorist.. Far from it, pacifist whose grand dad went to jail for not picking up a gun, as did my dad. We should all be free of organized religion, free of the monetary powers, free to be humans. No we are alla just slaves.

Sorry about the rant again but this thing just ticks me off. And i'm afraid that something so bad will happen if these things are allowed to continue. And by the way, i don't even own a TV...

>> ^CreamKreatorAlong with handicapped, mentally ill, anybody really who can't be a good capitalist and take care of them selves without any help from anybody.

First of all, it is the noobiest of noob mistakes to say that capitalists can't be charitable. Charity can ONLY occur from capitalist money because it is a voluntary relinquishment by definition. Second, the only systems in which people become that destitute on average are socialist systems where production is punished and idleness is rewarded until there is very little productivity to actually be divided. Even I might feign illness and take from the pot you're so eager to fill for me. What are you going to do to stop people from doing that? Who is this grand assessor of value of which you speak?

I know, let's copy Finland, people who live much more modestly, spend 1% what we do on national defense, and don't have reserve currency priveleges, a truly insane example of socialism that could "work for us".

Where does that lead us? Education is the next victim. No more decent public schools, everything is privatized, that's capitalism!

Good, the whole problem with public schools is that it is a complex service financed on forcible appropriations. Normal businesses fear losing customers. These people don't. I've read articles of California superintendents embezzling thousands and then keep their pensions when they get out of prison. That's just the worst of the worst. The union collusion and retained voting rights has made it almost impossible to get teachers to eliminate themselves or take pay cuts. People are forced to pay their salaries and moving away from a good job is an uncertain substitute for true choice. Vouchers would be a huge step forward because it puts the spending power with the consumer instead of the provider. Teachers and those who hire them would suddenly fear losing business to other schools and would no longer be able to suck with impunity.

Capitalism doesn't work. Communism didn't work. Even pure socialism won't work. Any political ideology won't work by itself. They need to be mixed up, democratic capitalist socialism would be somewhere closer to perfect society.


Capitalism isn't a system of government, it's simply a term referring to the percentage of earnings controlled by earners. Socialism is the percentage of earnings controlled by non-earners. Nobody who advocates capitalism truly believes in taxless anarchy without courts or national defense. What we don't want is the government being used as a conduit to incentivize one legal behavior over another or benefit one business at the expense of another. You and everyone on this forum continue to vote for obvious corporatists, not me.

Then you throw around the term "democracy," big red flag for anyone who truly understands government. Democracy is mob rule. Clearly, some things should not be decided on a majority vote. That's why we are a REPUBLIC with a paper dictator called a constitution. The more we keep disobeying it, the more miserable we're going to become.

Or you can take the one thing out of that equation that causes pain and suffering more than any idea in the history of man: Money.



That's nonsense. Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange to defeat the inefficiency of barter. It is, in essence, a product that is a placeholder for other products. That was truer when we were on gold than now, but still... Are you saying you don't want people to make stuff and trade with each other? Stop watching TV and read "Economics in One Lesson." It's only $10 on amazon.

All you people do is post videos of pissed off protesters who take positions without understanding them. Weaksauce.

Yeah YouTube is being very fucking evil here.

Instead of following the law for DMCA, they have created a new tier of AUTOMATIC takedown that is YouTube voluntary and NOT by DMCA, so you couldn't even sue if these tools are misused.

They basically created a pre-DMCA system where large corporations can blanket remove anything they want even knowing it is fair use, and you have to barter with YT to put it back up, in which time the company gets a notice that you are claiming it is fair use and they can then use that in court if they actually look at it then. The corporation then can submit a DMCA takedown.

I'm not sure what happens if you argue the "claims" thing and claim fair use, it gets reinstated and then DMCA'd. If you don't fight it after that does it go away? Does youtube close your account for abuse?

I'm all for the benefits of the barter system, but this lady is a maniac. Lemme guess.....Republican?

Haggle, barter, trade for drugs or sex, indentured servery, what would you pay for "health care" if the already available options were not available?

Stay healthy, stay fit, eat right....the cost for emergency and trauma care could be supplemented greatly without a nation of unhealthy blobs, slobs, clods, and frauds....doctors, pharmy companies, included.

The problem is not reasonable cost and availability to all, the problem is unhealthy minions by design and discipline....The fat, unhealthy, and otherwise anemic thinkers have sold their souls to the lowest common denominator as well. Convenience.

In the context of her dialog, it sounds as though she meant to say "haggle" instead of barter as I'm familiar with 'barter' as a form of trading goods or services for another good or service. Here, she's implying that the doc may give you some sort of discount if you pay them in cash.

Which...hey, if I had 20k sitting around for health care emergencies, I'd certainly pay in cash as I'm pretty positive that the doc WOULD provide some discount. But I don't run in circles of people with that sort of coin saved up for emergencies such as that. It's what we use health insurance for...when we can afford it...or are denied based on some obscure print or coding.

I've got 2.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Smoke-Signals-Bartering

http://www.videosift.com/video/Obama-Weekly-Address-Health-Care-Reform

I dunno why they didn't both get 200 votes...something really wrong with the sift last week.

Don't agree with the name (rather see *business for consistency, now the focus is on the monetary aspect of economics instead of trade, and trade related videos that don't involve money (barter) are excluded) but good to have the economics channel in operation, cheers!

http://www.videosift.com/search?q=trade

^How about:
--
1. If you would not sell your mother to a pimp then you have some socialist tendencies, the question as you phrase it is meaningless. Keyes' claim of "Radical Communist" would be something like a plan to nationalize all the factories in the US. The President has not taken this position in word or practice => he is not a practicing radical communist .
2. Is not a point in contention, nor was it the president's doing. He also makes his statements in the English language, which is not contentious, and irrelevant to the absurdity of his other claims
3. "Barack Obama: Opposed born-alive treatment law because it was already law." -http://www.ontheissues.org/2008_Pres_3.htm
So Keyes is either lying, or negligently misinformed => no basing his assessment on reality
4. Obama claimed he was born in Hawaii. And Provided legal documents to support the claim, which the state of Hawaii claims to be valid. If you question this please provide some documented physical evidence that something other than the official documented story took place.
5. This is only relevant if evidence can be found to shown that his birth certificate is a forgery.
6. Obama is supporting a plan which buys and renegotiates mortgages (it's on the whitehouse website), which is not the same thing as buying people out of them as Keyes claims, again he is lying or negligently misinformed.
7. Since all currency is concocted out of thin air, and all economies are constructed, out of whole cloth, by governments, non-involvement of government means no economy beyond barter. Since non-intervention would mean no economy as we know it, intervention is needed, even just to assert that a dollar has value, and that ownership has meaning. The question is not if intervention but how much, and whether less is better than more, and just for reference, consider that we've been trying less for a while now, and it looks not so good.
8. Printing money out of thin air is the entire basis of our economic system, it always causes inflation, even when banks do it, which is where our current problem comes from. There is no, non-ideological (non faith based), reason to presume that the government doing it will be worse than banks doing it, though it may very well not be any better either. Pretending that ANY money is not just pulled out of the air is either propaganda, or ignorance, given his position as a professional public figure I would forgive Keyes neither.

This is classic 90s, one of my favorites. "2 goes in, 1 comes out" "Break The Deal, Spin The Wheel" and one more "Who Runs Barter Town?" "Master Blaster"

*promote barter economy

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:


'Rights' and laws are guaranteed by a group of individuals, otherwise they're just ideas in one person's head. Even the right to life! Genocide, slavery, ritual human sacrifice,... even disparity in healthcare based on your wealth... these are all community decisions that place limits on the comparative 'right to life' of individuals.

So, by my thinking, individual rights are always subordinate to the community that chooses to guarantee or not guarantee specific individual rights. By extension the modified free market capitalism we have in place was a group choice, and is subordinate to any plans the group feels like putting into place in the future.

So we both agree that by definition rights must involve two people, or a "community". So a few questions to help me understand your viewpoint better
1. What process do individuals use enter into certain communities
2. Can you define the fundamental "community right" which is analogous to the fundamental "individual right" that I provided. So far I have inferred this to be "that everyone must do what is in the interest of the majority" but I am not sure if that is correct.

There are different markets that a group can choose to operate under, including the polar opposite of a 'free market', where leaders make all trade and barter decision for the community. Now, the point I'm making is that we have a modified form of the free market concept precisely because communities, especially enormous ones, in guaranteeing rights and laws will always run into situations where guaranteeing those rights and laws requires not only doling out punishment but developing and encouraging activities in the community's interest. That last sentence may again be a point where you disagree, which is fine, but recognize I'm referring to problems that not only effect the individual, but the group of individuals forming the community... health, education, defense, etc..


It sounds that like me, you do not want the polar opposite of what I am providing--i.e. dictatorship. Rather, you want a sort of "compromise" aka something in the middle.
3. What services or benefits are available in a mixed system that are not available in a free market?
4. If a dictatorship is bad, why would moving in the opposite direction be undesirable?


I'm not sure I follow you; my interpretation of what you disliked in the first place was Bill Clinton wanting to spend our community money to selectively subsidize some private companies but not others, and develop laws that would make it harder for some companies to operate. So now I'm lost as to where you didn't like the original clip.

I do not agree that one person (even the government) has the right to initiate force on another, and I believe Bill Clinton, as he proposed it in the video, would be initiating force on another. He is funding his incentives from the taxpayer--that is, he is removing their choice to on whether to fund solar energy. Here is an example: A worker has a family of three and can barely make ends meet. His entire livelihood depends on his job at a local oil rig. It would be bad enough that he will eventually lose his job when the oil rig shuts down in competition from a solar manufacturer--but to make matters worse the government is going to force him to invest, in effect, to increasing the likelihood of him losing his job.

Its fine that many people would like to invest in the solar industry, and its fine that the solar industry, through the the market, drives other companies out of business- However, I cannot endorse forcing people to invest in an industry that they would otherwise not invest in.

>> ^jwray:
You presume that the price of food isn't going to go through the roof when the shit hits the fan. An average house could easily hold 20 cubic meters of grain, or other foodstuffs. In the worst case scenario, nearly everyone's top priority would be acquiring essential housing and food. Everything else is just a luxury.


No, I'm pretty sure he's accounting for that. When the dollar unit gets inflated and made less scarce, the price measured in those dollar units goes up by that debasement, including gold. That gold/oil chart I showed you earlier should have convinced you of that. The value of oil relative to gold never changed much, but both went up relative to dollars because that was what was being debased. Gold CAN'T be debased. You can't print 1 billion ounces of gold in a back room at the drop of a hat. You can do that with a fiat monetary unit. You can't do it with an inherently rare physical product which has to be mined from the Earth.

You're also not understanding what a depression is. It isn't armageddon in a vacuum. People are still employing each other and needing to pay each other, and trading with each other for a variety of products and services. Barter is ridiculously inefficient and cannot lead you back to the modern economy you once knew and stay there, you have to have money, a common means of exchange. In the Weimar hyperinflation of the 20s, many people were using cigarettes as money. Lastly, I tried to point out to you that food spoils, livestock requires upkeep and can die (lol, how'd you like to have your life savings in chickens wiped out by foxes, or a tornado, or disease), both are difficult to transport and have very high weight to value ratios, and frankly you can't hide them very well. If you hadn't paid someone to store it (provided you had what they wanted), someone could easily see you had craploads of wheat in your house (provided you had one) and raid it, killing you and your family. It is, after all, a depression full of desperate poor people. Not a smart idea. Or hey, what if there was a fire? Gold would survive it. Paper wouldn't, food wouldn't, oil wouldn't.

And imstellar, I appreciate your response and I generally think you have a good argument, but I think we need to focus on getting rid of the obvious first. It's a bit early to argue for voluntary taxation when we can't get rid of inflation and mandatory social programs for what should be market services. I find them unpalatable and dishonest relative to taxes.

$1,000 of gold is ~1oz...approximately a single gold coin you can fit in your pocket
$1,000 of wheat is ~50 bushels, or 3000 lbs...
So to store a one year supply of emergency savings, $12,000, you would need 12 gold coins or 36,000 lbs of wheat.

If oil becomes very scarce, farmers won't be able to transport their crops, and the price of food relative to gold will go way up. An average house could easily hold 20 cubic meters of grain, or other foodstuffs. In the worst case scenario, nearly everyone's top priority would be acquiring essential housing and food, and having your own stockpile is safer than relying on trade for your food. Everything but food and shelter is just a luxury. I wouldn't have to barter because I would have all the food I need for a year in case transportation infrastructure breaks down. And when my neighbors are starving, they will pay anything for food. Even under a gold standard, inflation is possible when the amount of goods in the market decreases (while the money supply remains constant). Inflation is based primarily on the ratio between the money supply and the amount of real goods and services available. Any war can reduce the supply of goods and services, thereby reducing the amount of goods and services you can buy with a fixed quantity of gold.

>> ^jwray:
The point is that gold has insufficient actual USES to fall back on as a basis for its high value.

It doesn't have to be useful for consumption, it is useful as money. Do you understand what money is and why it's an important good in a modern economy. Do you understand that people can demand and want something for this purpose rather than to consume it or play with it? Do you understand that that's exactly what happened with gold when people were left to their own devices?

>> ^jwray:
The price of gold is subject to the volatile whims of the people, and has fluctuated a great deal over the last 100 years.

The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has fallen 70% in the last ten years, and 300% relative to gold. That's not volatile? See, your mistake is you're looking at the value relationship in the wrong way. You see the dollar maintaining its value and everything else flailing wildly against it. Instead, the dollar and people's confidence in it is what's flailing wildly. Look at a chart comparing gold to oil (both priced in dollars) the last thirty years - almost completely flat. If gold was money, gas prices would have gone nowhere.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/saville/may022006.html

Also interesting to note from this chart is what the price for both was in ~1971. Guess what happened in 1971 that caused the chart to start moving up for thirty years? Nixon scratched the bretton woods semi-gold standard, removing the last link of the dollar to gold. A nation that built its country on gold and became the reserve currency of the world on gold, inflated heavily in the 60s to finance pointless activities like Vietnam, The War on Poverty, the Great Society. It got to a point where gold reserves were far less than the debt owed to foreigners by 1971, the equivalent of an fractional reserve bank run. Those foreigners began calling in the debt, and rather than stop inflating and cutting a deal, Nixon got on a podium and broke the contract because it wasn't in "our best interest." Just like that. It later became permanent. Full fiat. Now there was NOTHING backing the dollar but confidence in its scarcity which is controlled by government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

We currently lie about inflation and pay foreigners back in devalued dollars, probably more devalued than the interest return on those bonds, but the CPI hides it with hedonics adjustment, substitution, and geometric weighting added during the Clinton years. The bond market is the last major bubble in the U.S. economy.

But since we libertarians understand human behavior and the nature of government, it meant inevitable hyperinflationary collapse. Because like every other fiat currency in history, it will be debased by its spendthrift government and the citizens will stand by and let it happen because they are exactly like you: ignorant of economics and eternally trustful of government. That's why our forefathers tried to illegalize fiat in the constitution after they saw the continental dollar hyperinflated.

http://www.safehaven.com/article-9534.htm

>> ^jwray:
Platinum, Iridium, and Silver would work just as well as gold. But if a great depression comes I would rather have a stockpile of wheat than a stockpile of gold.

How long is that wheat going to last before spoiling? Where are you going to store it? How are you going to carry it around and pay people with it? What if someone already has enough wheat and they want berries, and the guy who has berries doesn't want wheat either, he wants leather? You're reducing yourself to barter. You can't run a modern economy that way.

>> ^jwray:
Under the current federal reserve system, if they set interest rates properly and avoid excess printing, inflation can be kept below 2%. Theoretically, if the fiat money system is done properly, it can be more stable in value than a gold-backed currency.

Welcome to today's powerful neo-Keynesian economic circles. Centralized control curriculums, a sexy interventionist theory financed by the benefactors of inflation, overrides history, human behavior, and all rational skepticism. The benevolent dictator argument, in its truest form. The fallacy that because its possible to have a benevolent dictator more efficient than any system that divides powers and makes it impossible for one man to destroy a country, that we should institute that system. No different than the Federal Reserve, in my opinion. They are THE ROOT CAUSE of most of our problems today. Right down to health care costs, another victim of inflation and HMO legislation, which the socialists are again trying to blame the free market on to build up more socialism. It all comes back to what system preserves wealth, and this ain't it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE

>> ^jwray:
The Euro is doing just fine with an inflation rate of 1.8%.

Measured by whom, and for how long? We could have said the same thing years ago. Will hyperinflation occur under you or your children or your grandchildren? Who knows, right? All you know is it's happened before in Europe, now it's just more centralized so all countries will be affected when it happens. Congrats.

Do you understand why we're fucked now? Why it's hopeless, why I bury my head every time someone calls Ron Paul a kook. You are just one of 200 million people I have to convince in this country, and it took me five hours with you and I probably still didn't make a dent.

In fact, here's the hilarious trickery of Keynesian economics. China holds over 1 trillion U.S. dollars in their reserves. That's right, we borrow from them, they're the largest creditor nation and we're the largest debtor (we actually used to be the largest creditor, that's how far we've fallen). But the reason they do it: they falsely believe that Americans consuming their products is driving their economy. In the beginning, this was true because they did have a legitimately weak currency relative to ours. But now things are different. They're INTENTIONALLY debasing their money to keep trying to grow this way even though they don't need to: currency appreciation would allow them to consume their own products without us. So they are intentionally devaluing their currency by inflating and buying up our bonds, on a grand scale, essentially paying Americans to consume their exports even though they can only afford them because of these payments. Insanity! If they ever figured this out, the bond bubble will pop. Even the ECB is not hiking rates when they should be. The world has been fooled into thinking that the American consumer is responsible for all their growth and is fearful of letting it collapse. Consumption over production, putting the cart before the horse, the mainstay of Keynesian thinking.