sometimes the best explanations are the most simple.
that was excellent.

Moving this video to PlayhousePals's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Haha!

If everyone's a babysitter, well, that's not a genuine division of labor, is it? And if money can only buy babysitting, well, that's not really money, is it?

And free markets don't work by agreeing through contract how much a currency will buy. If you restrict currency to one "babysitting" unit only, then, of course you'll have problems. You don't need to "print" more of these tokens. Deflation will invariably take place instead in an actual market, not in one where you have to contractually "centrally control" the value of each token.

And of course, a prison camp is not a free market. No entrepreneur can simply start supplying the goods and services needed.

The prison camp does not represent a "free economy," but only a prison camp economy.

I don't think either of those two examples are useful in any real way, but what exactly did you think you'd learn from them?

This isn't "how an economy works," but it's maybe how a non-divisible "currency" works in a one product/service "market;" or how a food embargo works.

P.S. If you really want to understand how economies work, you should read Mises' "Human Action" (PDF) and stop being lazy, thinking you'll learn something from these short youtube videos. (Once you hear Krugman mentioned, it's enough to know that everything that follows is about as rooted in reality as a kindergartner's fingerpaintings.)

This video's always worth revisiting...

@Trancecoach
you could have commented on the video without quoting me.
but you didnt do that,did you?
care to explain why?

/scratch that..i dont really care,so dont bother.
you have already made it abundantly clear how see/feel/perceive me.

i am familiar with the mises institute and most likely BEFORE it became your religion.
i have also read the PDF you posted (multiple times on multiple threads) and what i really got out of it was where the majority of your arguments arise.

i even recall an incident where you were caught plagiarizing one of the mises institutes contributors.

the reason i mention these things is that i have been witness to you consistently telling people to think for themselves and to make their own arguments,when in fact,it is YOU who have copied others peoples arguments and called them your own,using the same source material for almost every argument you posit.

do you know who else does that? fundamentalist christians.

they too speak with an air a fake authority and arrogance given to them by the written word.they too deride and ridicule anyone who would dare disagree with them.

you ridicule me for liking this video?
and then have the arrogance to suggest i read YOUR bible..*cough*..i mean mises.

this assumes two things:
1.i am not familiar with mises.
2.i am willing to devote that kind of time in regards to economics (which i have already explained to you,i am not).

neither of which have been evidenced by my commentary here.

i would go as far to say that many people are not willing to spend that kind of time on economics and short videos like this,while maybe not as in-depth as you would like,do offer us all a small inclination in regards to simple economics.

now maybe that is not a smart decision.maybe we should all take the time to understand something that affects us all,and maybe your suggestions have merit and are worth pursuing.

but the arrogance.........
and the belittling...
the ridiculing...
hard to listen to possible sage words when they are spoken in the language of the fanatic.

i do not say these words to harm,nor lightly.
i am quite confident you are unaware you come across this way.
but somebody has to say it.
so i said it.

realizing how little you think of me and my opinion,you may dismiss this.
but i beseech you not to ignore my words.
i am not the only one who feels this way.

please consider your tone when engaging in something that you are obviously very passionate about.

Economics is not a matter of faith. It's a matter of rationality. Logic. The laws of geometry do not change on the basis of one's interpretation. Same is true in economics. As such, one can apply this logic in the absence of any particular belief system. I cite Mises' book because it lays out, in a clear and understandable way, why this is so. But you can read others on the topic (e.g., Hazlitt, Hayek, and Rothbard), as I am not attached to any sort of "fundamentalism" despite your attempts to depict me as such. But so long as you (or anyone) believes they're going to gain any understanding or insight or ability to parse the type of rhetoric demonstrated in this video, then the confusion and suffering that it propagates will continue. I assure you, nowhere in the text I linked (nor in any of the work of the authors I've cited) have addressed, specifically, the "babysitter economy" or the "prison camp economy," and yet, somehow I've pointed out the flaws in the postulated arguments here (flaws, I might add, you chose to ignore, opting instead to engage in a diatribe about me personally).

I could care less if you or anyone on videosift likes me as a person, but stupidity can be addressed with education. Willful ignorance, on other hand, cannot be helped.

@Trancecoach
sorry mate but you have entirely missed the point.

which i will take responsibility for,in my usual verbose fashion i sometimes lose the plot.

so let me try again:

you speak in the language and certitude of someone who has found jesus.
i didnt ignore your argument points because i was NOT ADDRESSING them.
i was,however,addressing your:condescension.arrogance and constant passive/aggressiveness.

you quoted MY comment,so i responded.dont puss out on me now that i called you out on it big guy.

god you are one big ball of passive aggressive.
oblivious to your own proclivities.
and THAT my friend is what saddens me the most.

but feel free to preach to the masses and chastise them when they disagree with your conclusions,sneering down at them from your fortress of arrogance.

yeah..thats the tactic to get them to listen to your words.

good plan.

let me know how that works out for ya.

Geometry and economics are not in any way comparable.

Geometry worked before humans evolved and will continue to work long after we're going. It has no need of human input.

Economics, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on human behaviours. Rationality might be a factor, but you would have to be willfully ignorant of history to argue that human behaviour is always rational.

Economics is not a science, and it's certainly not logical.

Honestly, you could not have picked a worse comparison. Imagine if Pythagoras' Theorem was "the square of the hypotenuse is mostly, kinda equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides"? Or "the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 (except on rainy days)"?

Is that some kind of attempt to pick a fight? Ignore the argument and attack the man? "Let me know how that works out for ya."

No one is talking about a comprehensive view of everything relating to the world. But with economics, like geometry, and the other natural sciences for that matter, yes, they follow logic and rationalism. Rational theories are necessary to make sense of the data.


That you seem to understand nothing about it is a completely different issue.

@Trancecoach

interesting how i use a line i see in your commentary quite often :
"let me know how that works out for ya?"

i was being a cheeky shit,ill grant ya that but to think i was picking a fight?
that dips into delusional land.

ya know trance,
when people point out that you may be coming across as an arrogant ass,most people respond with an apology,but not you!

and @ChaosEngine pointed out the flaw in your logic,just as i have and so many others.
humans are irrational and economics is a human based system.

/drops mic

pick a fight?....seriously?
some people...

"No one is talking about a comprehensive view of everything relating to the world. "

So why are you bringing it up?

We can discuss physics, math, engineering, logic, chemistry without human behaviour. Hell, we could even talk about accountancy.

But economics focuses on the interactions of economic agents and economies. True, some economic agents are perfectly rational and act according to predefined rules (these are essentially software), but almost all other economic agents have a degree of human control to them.

Even if the degree is relatively small (a single person on a board), economies are inherently chaotic systems and a small variance in inputs can radically change the outputs of the system.

The system is essentially stable, but unpredictable.

The ultimate refutation of your theory is quite simple.

If economic systems are inherently rational, we should be able to perfectly model them and predict them. That is clearly not the case.

Videosift is clearly not the forum on which to teach economics (let alone philosophy or epistemology), but suffice it to say that logic applies to economics, just as it applies to geometry, and the other natural sciences.

Economics follows axiomatic-deduction. Human behavior is too complex to treat empirically (thereby precluding experiments that would be similar to, say, chemistry, which replicates the same results over and over again). With economics, such experiments are impossible because there are too many variables for which there are no controls, so therefore, a deductive approach is used, like with geometry which, if you recall, experiments aren't conducted in geometry, but logical deductions are made based on self-evident axioms.

This is in contrast to what, say, econometricians do. They try to make economics into an empirical science, like physics or chemistry and so they focus on the "science" and ignore the "social" in "social science."

Hermeneuticians/rhetorician on the other hand, ignore the "science" and focus on the "social."
Economics cannot be properly studied as a natural empirical science, but it also cannot be properly studied as rhetoric.

Deductive rationalism is the best fit for economic study.