Sorry I don't get it. What's wrong with this idea? If states could secede you could have a more diverse set of regimes and people could choose more the style of government they prefer by moving state... It seems like quite a good idea. I'm not an American so maybe I'm missing something but why is there animosity about people suggesting the idea? I don't mean to provoke. I'm just curious...

Although it's counter-intuitive the case of Portugal suggests that you are less likely to see people overdosing in front of you under legalization than prohibition. Does this alter your views?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
>> ^jmd:

Looks like cops and a dose of Mr Obvious.
The war on drugs is because a significant part of the population does not want drugs in their country. Now is it having a huge impact on us because of our poverty rates? yea.. if anything it is a holocaust on the dollar bill. The more we spend on drug wars, the more people that get poorer. There isn't a GOOD ending to this scenario.. either we stop fighting it or it will eventually makes us broke.. how ever...
Still doesn't stop the fact that we don't want these types of drugs around, or the people that use them. Find a different country if you want to shoot up. A country I can't go around without seeing people overdosing in front of me is not a country I wan't to live in.

That's interesting. When you say people fail, do they start to eat sugar and carbs again and get fat or do they stay not eating sugar and carbs and even so start to get fat again. If it is the former it doesn't mean it's not the correct way to lose weight, it just means people need more determination not to eat sugar and carbs. My impression is that the usual prescription of eat less exercise more is also very hard to maintain in the long run.

Again I strongly recommend the book. It's not so much a diet book as a book about the evolution of the dietary science.

>> ^DocDarm:

>> ^pyloricvalve:
In "Why we get fat", Gary Taubes argues very persuasively that the above is almost entirely wrong. Increasing exercise will have have the effect of increasing hunger or reducing your activity at other times through tiredness. Eating less will likewise reduce your activity level or lead to levels of hunger that are intolerable in the long term. The way to lose weight according to him is the Atkins, South Beach, Primal method of reducing sugar and carb intake to something very low. Personally I found it very convincing and I strongly recommend the book.

As a medical doctor, I call bullshit on this guy. Look at Atkins/South Beach's effect on peoples weight 1 year AFTER the diet. I see people go on diets all the time. They almost universally fail after 1 year. (Remember, we're talking about LONG-TERM weight loss, not SHORT-TERM weight loss...Atkins/South Beach perform very well in the short term!) My patients that go to the gym to lose weight do much, much better....but only if they KEEP going to the gym.

In "Why we get fat", Gary Taubes argues very persuasively that the above is almost entirely wrong. Increasing exercise will have have the effect of increasing hunger or reducing your activity at other times through tiredness. Eating less will likewise reduce your activity level or lead to levels of hunger that are intolerable in the long term. The way to lose weight according to him is the Atkins, South Beach, Primal method of reducing sugar and carb intake to something very low. Personally I found it very convincing and I strongly recommend the book.

How many Iranians will die so that Cenk can avoid having very indirectly supported offensive newsletters? How many more will die in the continued drug wars so his hands can be clean? He disgusts me.

@NetRunner
Thanks for the reply. There were things I really didn't understand about Krugman's Hangover Theory article, especially that very point that you quote. In fact I tried to ask in a post above about this but maybe you missed it. To me it seems only natural that there is no unemployment in the boom and there is some in the bust. Both are big reorganisations of labour, it is true. However, to start with the boom is much slower and longer so adaptation is easier. Also the booming industry can afford to pay slightly above average wages so will easily attract unemployed or 'loose' labour. As it is paying above average, there will be little resistance to people changing work to it. The boom is persistent enough that people will train and invest to enter the work created by it. The information for entering the boom industry is clear and the pay rise makes the work change smooth. I see no reason for unemployment.

The bust however is short and sudden. There is no other obvious work to return to. That information of what the worker should do is much less clear. The answer may involve taking a small pay cut or on giving up things in which people have invested time and money. Many people wait and resist doing this. They may well not know what to do or try to wait for opportunities to return. Thus there is plenty of reason for unemployment to be generated by the bust.

If I hire 100 people it can probably be done in a month or two. If I fire 100 people it may be a long time before they are all employed again. For me this difference seems so obvious I have a real trouble to understand Krugman's point. I know he's a very smart guy but I can't make head nor tail of his argument here. Can you explain it to me?

As far as I understand, were Ron Paul to be elected, the big change that would happen is the return of all the troops to the US. I think most of the other policies could get blocked in various ways but the end of the wars would really happen.

A vote for Ron Paul is really about ending the wars.

@NetRunner, On reflection I would be interested in your criticism of the Austrian School. Probably to long too go into here but could you recommend any links? (If it's just Bryan Caplan's criticisms I would accept those already)

We may be getting distracted by the name Austrian which may mean different things to different people. I think there are views skeptical of stimulus held by respectable economists. I put forward Russ Roberts as one example. You seemed to say earlier that these kind of views don't constitute a continuing argument against stimulus-type policy. If that's right, could you explain why? They seem very reasonable to me.

I would also be curious if you have a criticism of the Hangover theory of this recession (that it was caused by malinvestment due to artificially low interest rates.) Krugman criticised it by saying that if unemployment results from frictional problems reallocating workers to new industries, "why doesn't the investment boom—which presumably requires a transfer of workers in the opposite direction—also generate mass unemployment?"

Krugman seems to think that's a slam-dunk against the theory but surely there are simple explanations for why friction could happen one way and not the other. When an industry booms it takes place over a long period and is a beacon attracting loose labour to it. When the collapse comes it is much faster than the boom and there are no obvious beacons for where the misplaced labour is to go. It seems normal to me that the reverse process is more difficult and leads to more unemployment. If you've an answer to that I'd be interested to hear it.>> ^NetRunner: Honestly, I'm happy to litigate out the actual reasons why I think Austrian economics is wrong, but I don't really care to get into a contest of who's got the bigger expert parroting their pet theory.

Like Russ Roberts, I would agree that people's biases tend to drive the economics they believe in. But I think it's as true of the left as the right. Free marketers like Hayek and redistributionists like Keynes. I don't think you or I are free of these bias. In this case, the best thing is to try to argue the actual case rather than just dismissing people's arguments ad hominem style. Can you dismiss Russ Roberts congressional testimony? Do you deny he's an actual trained economist?
.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^pyloricvalve: Would this persuade you there is still debate on this? Perhaps not.. Not even the rap video convinced you there was a debate? . I thought this was also an interesting analysis. . My links disappear for some reason.. Anyway there's a long list of economists that don't support stimulus at Cato Fiscal Reality. The other is How economists analyze the stimulus by Arnold Kling. >> ^NetRunner: Actually, it's not really a persisting argument amongst actual trained economists. The Austrian theory of economics has been invalidated time and time again by facts, but it lives on because it's a branch of economics that appeals to the ideological right. My accusation is that Austrian economics is the hobbyhorse of people pushing an ideological agenda, and not dispassionate people looking for objective truth. Anything you might cite from CATO in support of Austrian economics will just add weight to that argument. In any case, one doesn't need to adopt the Austrian view of economics to disagree with the stimulus. There is a segment of the Chicago school economists who have their own theories about why the stimulus would be ineffective. I think they're wrong, but at least there's a real honest-to-god debate going on amongst actual economists happening there.

Would this persuade you there is still debate on this? Perhaps not.. Not even the rap video convinced you there was a debate?
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I thought this was also an interesting analysis.
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My links disappear for some reason.. Anyway there's a long list of economists that don't support stimulus at Cato Fiscal Reality. The other is How economists analyze the stimulus by Arnold Kling.

>> ^NetRunner: Actually, it's not really a persisting argument amongst actual trained economists. The Austrian theory of economics has been invalidated time and time again by facts, but it lives on because it's a branch of economics that appeals to the ideological right.

Strictly speaking, it's more like 10 people since I'm paying double the normal rate due to progressive taxes. But I don't understand why you consider my earnings theft. Even if there is a limited supply of money, my money has been received through consensual exchange. If I buy a car which is in limited supply is it by definition stolen? Surely we should reserve the word theft for when things are taken from people against there will. Personally I think taxation is an example of this.>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
Because you "earn" the income of about 80 people. Or in otherwords - since the supply of money is limited - you steal the wages of 79 people who would otherwise have an income. That's called selfish. Plain and simple. [Not to mention completely cruel & dickish now that we're in a Global Depression] >> ^pyloricvalve: Why is it morally justified to impose a higher tax rate on the more highly paid? I'm already paying twenty people's worth.. Why should it be more?

That's a good summary of the Keynesian response. I guess my answer would be that even supposing the 10% unemployed were neatly then employed in building these weapons this would just be temporary. Later they will eventually all be unemployed again having wasted time and money in training for "fictional" work. Even if that work had some beneficial side effects, making unnatural economic growth will still be a net cost to the economy versus spending time finding real jobs. These are what they really 'should' in some sense be doing. To do this would surely be better unless you claim the 10% will continue unemployed permanently.

A typical argument against my response is that the economy is like a pump and that this is pump priming. Demand from these people's fictional labour will create the new jobs. The Austrian reply to that is that the pump metaphor is simply not valid and the economies grow organically. If you force a branch to grow with artificial sunlight, when that fake light gets turned off the branch will wither and all the people involved in its support spend a lot of time looking for what they should have been doing. I think Hayek would claim this type of fake labour policy is what causes the 10% unemployment to begin with.

These arguments can be seen in the two Hayek/Keynes rap videos. There are two inconsistent models of the economy. How can we decide which one is right? This argument is very old so I guess it's not that easy... Maybe look at long run growth in more and less interventionist countries? I suspect growth will be faster in the less interventionist nation.


>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^pyloricvalve: Just seems like straight up broken windows fallacy. If we spent 18 months preparing for war with aliens we might all be employed but we'd end up with a bunch of weapons pointed at the sky. Otherwise we could have spent the time making ipods, cars or whatever good or service you might want. Doesn't what he's saying just sound wrong? It clearly would not be a good thing for the world to spend 18 months that way.. I think that's the real problem with the broken window "fallacy" -- it assumes that as your starting point you already have full employment and no idle infrastructure or capital. That's not true in our situation at all. Unemployment is around 10%, factories are being left idle, and companies are sitting on mountains of cash. The idea here is to get people back to work doing something, because even if they're producing things there isn't a high demand for (windows, alien-fighting spaceships), it's not like those things come at the cost of the other things they would've otherwise been producing, since they're not producing anything at all right now. Oh, and in the case of alien-fighting spaceships, there's a pretty high chance that the technology and industrial infrastructure that's developed to build them will be able to be re-purposed for consumer goods once the alien threat is shown to be fake. Ideally instead of faking an alien invasion, we'd just have the government go and invest directly in our infrastructure (transportation, education, power generation), but without the alien threat it doesn't seem like Congress is willing to engage in any more fiscal stimulus, no matter how economically sound it would be.

Why is it morally justified to impose a higher tax rate on the more highly paid? I'm already paying twenty people's worth.. Why should it be more?

Just seems like straight up broken windows fallacy. If we spent 18 months preparing for war with aliens we might all be employed but we'd end up with a bunch of weapons pointed at the sky. Otherwise we could have spent the time making ipods, cars or whatever good or service you might want. Doesn't what he's saying just sound wrong? It clearly would not be a good thing for the world to spend 18 months that way..