The wage conversation is a bit of a tangent, but from my point of view the right answer is to expand unemployment benefits and welfare, rather than reduce the minimum wage. I might be convinced that yes, people in certain situations should be able to work for less, but I'd rather the market just adjust to knowing that projects that rely on cheaper labor can't be done here.

As for your assertion that the entire housing asset bubble was caused by Fannie and Freddie and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act...I'm disappointed. I'd thought you were more well-read than to believe that story.

Here's the most basic, simplistic response -- if it was all Fannie and Freddie's fault (two formerly privately-owned and operated companies, BTW), why are other banks in trouble? Why is AIG in trouble?

I agree that the problem here was moral hazard, but I disagree that it was government that created that situation. It seems that the market's own mechanisms for accurately gauging risk failed utterly.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Money spent by govt is, in principle, rarely spent as wisely as money spent by people, because people work to earn and therefore value their money, they usually have to be productive to earn it (which isn't easy), while govt is just politicians and bureaucrats deciding over money they easily appropriate from productive people. I don't know how I can put this in simpler terms.

I hear this a lot from Austro-libertarians. If this were true, banks should never work right, either. The people making the investment choices, and choices about loans are not the people who own the banks. The most risk they have to bear is getting fired, and often they get lavish severance packages even when they are fired, and are almost immediately rehired by another bank.

I agree that having some skin in the game helps motivate people to be more wise with their money, but I don't think there are any people in government who're casually disinterested in how taxpayer money is spent -- on the contrary, I think they're highly interested in either spending it on altruistic things (like unemployment, healthcare, green technology incentives) or spending it on selfish things (tax cuts/subsidies for industries that donated to you, aid in skewing regulation to benefit donors). I like to vote for the former, and call for the latter to be jailed (though it seems they're all guilty of both in varying ratios).

I also think government spending is best directed at things that are unlikely to turn a direct profit, but are useful for humanitarian purposes, or a general positive impact on the economy (e.g. infrastructure).

I would like to see less military spending, but I think that will be politically difficult when there are two wars going on, and a recession. I like the way Obama/Gates have shuffled the military budget in terms of reallocating money between different military projects, but I'm annoyed that the budget did still get an increase for next year.

As for the bank bailouts, I feel like they were a necessary evil. I would rather they'd asked more in the way of concessions from the bank in return, but I do think letting them fail would have just made things worse.

When I give you money, the money is now yours, what you do with it is your own business. But when I'm the govt, and I give you money, I'm giving you money that IS NOT MINE and that I SHOULDN'T BE GIVING TO YOU (at least that's what I'm arguing, a keynesian might think differently). So there lies the root of the problem: govt is to blame for handing out free money, not what people did with it, because it's expected that people will be careless about money that is freely handed to them, as opposed to money that is earned.
People with guns don't inevitably commit murder. About the bus driver, it's expected that he'll drive poorly and crash when drunk (maybe not though if he's lucky), even though I said he was force-fed the alcohol, which is not accurate since I'm not sure investment banks were legally obligated to accept govt money, but it's easy to imagine how a bank might be strongly influenced to accept money if it has no strings attached and it's also offered to its competitors.

This, I think is a crucial part of our disagreement. Say you're a well-known investor who's made ridiculous profits through shrewdly investing in successful business. I walk up to you, give you a million dollars, no strings attached. Are you going to necessarily be reckless and wasteful with that money, simply because it was a gift? What if the money had come from some investment that simply performed better than your expectations? Does that make you unwise?

Would it make any difference how I got the money I gave you? Even if I conned it out of a bunch of nice old ladies, wouldn't you still invest it correctly? That's why I think the Austrian theory doesn't make sense, especially on this topic.

It would make sense if the government, before the economy went haywire, said "do whatever ya like, we'll absorb all your losses" -- but it didn't do that, implicitly or explicitly.

All that said, I disagree with your characterization of there being a qualitative difference between money given to companies being theirs, but that money given to government to pay taxes still somehow remains yours. It's this whole idea that government is operating as a giant racketeering organization (which seems utterly incorrect). It's like the managing corporation of a condominium. By living here, you agree to a contract with the government, and you have to abide by the obligations in the contract, like obeying the laws, and paying taxes.

Regardless of how you think government got the money to give away, I don't see why money government gives to banks somehow will automatically be frittered away, especially if they say "this is yours, no strings attached".

Even though I think Ben Bernanke is an idiot, he's smart enough to be the current chairman of the Fed and even he thinks the Fed helped cause the Great Depression. The conclusions one can take about what happened in the 20's and 30's are not as clear cut as you'd think. What is important to understand are the motivations behind those that acted and those who interpret what happened.

I think you should perhaps read that speech of his more carefully -- I find what Bernanke says about the Great Depression persuasive. He's mostly talking about how much he loves Milton Friedman, but the key paragraph is:

Friedman's emphasis on avoiding monetary disruptions arose, like many of his other ideas, from his study of U.S. monetary history. He had observed that, in many episodes, the actions of the monetary authorities, despite possibly good intentions, actively destabilized the economy. The leading case, of course, was the Great Depression, or as Friedman and Schwartz called it, the Great Contraction, in which the Fed's tightening in the late 1920s and (most importantly) its failure to prevent the bank failures of the early 1930s were a major cause of the massive decline in money, prices, and output. It is likely that Friedman's study of the Depression led him to look for means, such as his proposal for constant money growth, to ensure that the monetary machine did not get out of order. I hope, though of course I cannot be certain, that two decades of relative monetary stability have not led contemporary central bankers to forget the basic Hippocratic principle.

He doesn't go into why the Fed thought what it was doing was the right idea here, but it should sound refreshingly Austrian -- they were worried about deviating from the gold standard too much, and weren't concerned about bank failures because they figured, as you do now, that banks failing is a blessing in disguise: ownership just moves from incompetent managers to competent ones, no muss, no fuss (liquidationism, it's called these days).

What Bernanke believes is that the Fed should have known better and reacted by massively expanding the money supply to stave off deflation, and rescuing the failing banks. What it actually did was contract the monetary supply and let them fail, and that was pouring gasoline on the fire (or as one economist said of Austrian advice at the time, it was "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood.")

I don't contest that the Fed has a lot of power, and that if wielded incorrectly it can cause a lot of damage. But I think the period of time between the Great Depression and now is a testament to the stability a central bank can create. There were recessions, but no Depressions, or Panics. There's already a debate about whether Greenspan could have prevented this one, but so far that debate is leaning towards the relaxation of banking regulation being at fault, rather than a FRB monetary policy error.

I don't really think debate on the history of the Great Depression is over; Keynesians and Monetarists are still fighting about aspects of it. But Austrian economics fell out of the mainstream in the aftermath of the Great Depression, largely because their policy prescriptions were carried out, to disastrous results. Present-day Austrians don't even deny that a contractionary monetary policy in the late 20's was a bad idea, they just deny it was their idea, even though it's what people like Hayek and Schumpeter were calling for at the time, and what they're calling for now.

That's why I can be perhaps a bit over the top when trying to quash Austrians as quacks; in my opinion their policies caused both Depressions.

I'm not sure why people hold Schiff forward as being particularly prescient.

Paul Krugman was talking about the dangers of a deflationary depression and a housing bubble starting in 2003.

I've never heard a word come out of Schiff's mouth that wasn't some sort of over-the-top Austrian Economics-fueled fear mongering about the fact that we still collect taxes and have a Federal Reserve leading us to swift and inevitable doom, especially since we elected a Democrat.

Schiff is a quack, and a partisan hack to boot. Here's a good analysis of his supposed prescience:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/01/peter-schiff-was-wrong.html

I'm somewhat surprised that Stewart didn't call him on some of his more ridiculous claims.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Reiki, quack, alternative medicine, mumbo jumbo, Baltimore, hospital' to 'Reiki, quack, alternative medicine, mumbo jumbo, Baltimore, univeristy of maryland' - edited by kronosposeidon

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Reiki, quack, alternative medicine, mumbo jumbo, Baltimore' to 'Reiki, quack, alternative medicine, mumbo jumbo, Baltimore, hospital' - edited by kronosposeidon

>> ^quantumushroom:
If Hannity was standing atop his ratings and Olberman was standing on his, Hannity wouldn't be able to hear Olbyloon's quacking even through a megaphone.


And your source for that would be?

A verifiable source, or the dark reaches of your ass, as usual?

According to this site Hannity is ahead, but it's hardly a mountainous lead.

So basically, QM, you just lied again, and you don't give a shit, because lying is your second nature.

If Hannity was standing atop his ratings and Olberman was standing on his, Hannity wouldn't be able to hear Olbyloon's quacking even through a megaphone.

Give away more than 10K, cause Obamarx will just seize it anyway. Sucka!

^ Crap, quack, BS. Boyd E. Haley is a scientist of dubious morals and a known scam artist with a penchant for suing people who stand up to him publicly. you are an anti vaccine/amalgam loon and I will waste no more time on you and your appeals to authority, straw men, etc. Have fun with my AD hom's

good day

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Terrifying oldtimey electrical vaginal probe for quack cures. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

I made a reply to your post. From the bottom of my heart, none of it was meant to be rude or challenging. The sentiments and suggestions made by this video is what inspires new younger generations of einsteins and newtons to never be happy with their perceptions of things, and to always challenge them and hope for more.

I've gotten into arguments on the sift before over less than this (with utter jerks), but i hope you see that it was all from a good place.

In reply to this comment by Ornthoron:
Bah, I hate this. This movie takes some common thought experiments and twists them around so as to justify some quack New Age nonsense. The talk of dimensions here has absolutely nothing to do with quantum mechanics. During the whole movie they give well-known physical concepts new meaning, so that they retroactively justify their unsound theories. Beneath this clip is the unspoken promise that you can be so much more than you are today, if you only buy into the crap of the movie producers and let them help you on the way in the same manner Dr. Quantum helped Ms. Flat there.

The other clip on here from the same movie is worth a watch, though. In spite of the movie's flaws, that clip actually gives a good explanation of the double slit experiment. But the conclusions they draw from it are horrendous.

Bah, I hate this. This movie takes some common thought experiments and twists them around so as to justify some quack New Age nonsense. The talk of dimensions here has absolutely nothing to do with quantum mechanics. During the whole movie they give well-known physical concepts new meaning, so that they retroactively justify their unsound theories. Beneath this clip is the unspoken promise that you can be so much more than you are today, if you only buy into the crap of the movie producers and let them help you on the way in the same manner Dr. Quantum helped Ms. Flat there.

The other clip on here from the same movie is worth a watch, though. In spite of the movie's flaws, that clip actually gives a good explanation of the double slit experiment. But the conclusions they draw from it are horrendous.

>> ^NetRunner:
^ When is our hyperinflation coming? What's going to be the inflation rate that makes you call it "hyper"?
Just asking, so we can mark our calendars, check the inflation rate at that point, and then call you a quack for getting it wrong, or give you a medal for getting it right.


Within 5 years, if you don't see abnormally rising prices across the board on products, I'll virtually lick your boots. The amount of monetary expansion right now is insane, and NONE of it is going towards creating exportable production, it's all consumption. So you won't have to wait long before foreign creditors on which we've depended for years to reduce their buying of our bonds (debt), forcing the Fed to step in and buy them directly with pure inflation/counterfeit (quantitative easing). Deleveraging, liquidation sales, and kneejerk flooding into treasuries will eventually give way to massive price increases as a result of too many dollars chasing too few goods. I also predict price controls within 10 years, similar to what we had in the 70s.

^ When is our hyperinflation coming? What's going to be the inflation rate that makes you call it "hyper"?

Just asking, so we can mark our calendars, check the inflation rate at that point, and then call you a quack for getting it wrong, or give you a medal for getting it right.

Buying common stock in companies is not nationalization, any more than the government hiring people constitutes "nationalizing" their labor

It is no wonder Obama and his socialist cronies can sucker everyone so easily when it is full of so many people like this. When the GOVERNMENT buys stock in a company, that is nationalization. You can pretend otherwise all you want, but the inescapable fact is that when the government tells a company "If you want $800 billion in bailout money then you're going to do things how WE tell you..." then that is nationalization.

Have you read what Obama wants in exchange for his bailouts? Among other things, the feds want to set pay rates for employees, force unions on companies, eliminate private votes in unions, tell companies what they can and cannot build, dictate who does and doesn't get loans, who gets medical care, and all kinds of other day to day operative processes that should be the sole decision of the COMPANY - not the government. That's nationalization for all intents and purposes.

You and those like you are parsing semantics... Playing a little word game to make what Barry-Boy is doing sound less onerous by saying that it isn't REALLY 'socialism' because the government is not completely 100% the owner of the business itself. I'm saying that it is socialism because the government is the one making the rules, and deciding who/what/where/when/why/how the company is run.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has webbed feet, and tastes good with orange sauce then it IS a duck. Quit trying to say Hussein-O isn't what he is. You should quit living a lie and actually embrace it. Just come out and admit it. You think socialism is better, and you're glad your boy is pushing it. Only cowards try to hide what they are.

Drugs are bad... mmmkay.

In reply to this comment by Darkhand:
Anyone here a strange noise out of there right speaker at some point between :10 and :14 ? Like a quack?

Anyone here a strange noise out of there right speaker at some point between :10 and :14 ? Like a quack?