Foyle
MacFarlane was quite right to make those comments you cited.. but they have nothing to do with main theme of the article.. he was, I think talking about the tendency of major investors to shift funds from one country to another.. That was around the time of the Asian financial crisis so he was speaking after the event. Since then we've had a much bigger crisis due to much the same problem..

However, that it what happens with markets and no-one has been able to think of anything better.. Not even Davies with his eccentric theories would advocate getting rid of international currency markets..

Geoff, I think your “free market purist” is a bit of a mythical beast. More typically, the free-market mantra is like the old Country Party capitalisation of gains and socialisation of losses.
This is well illustrated by the road transport lobby in Australia, costs such as fuel are subsidised, facilities like roads cost them virtually nothing, the real costs being foisted onto the general public. They then have free-market open slather to compete with the railways who have to cover all their costs.

Once again the right whingers come out with their usual catchcry:
“If you criticise Capitalism, YOU'RE A COMMIE!”
There are more political and economic theories than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Peter Wing Ah Jardine.
Glass Steagall was a “regulation”. It's repeal was a major cause of the Great Recession.
Guess what! Without regulations (rules, Laws) people (businesses, banks) cheat. Go figgur.
In the absence of regulation (rules, Laws) Banks have even been known to recommend stock purchases to their own customers, then bet against them and then affect the outcome to favour themselves.
I suggest all the free marketeers get together and try playing Monopoly, -without rules. First, have a brawl to decide who gets to be banker, then let HIM decide what the rules will be.
Or, try this: imagine playing football against a team whose captain was capable of eating his team members, and doubling in size with every feed.
And when he was through with his own team, he was free to eat your team as well.
Would you really want to be fullback?
Just laws make people free. Absence of Law favours the powerful, at the expense of everyone else.
The greatest threat to the liberty of individuals won't be democratic governments. It will be the natural result of a “Survival of the Fittest”, Lawless Capitalistic system which inevitably results in all power -over billions of people- residing in the hands of a tiny handful of sociopathic individuals (far less than 1%).
BTW, thanks for the download link, Geoff Davies. I hope to be able to have a gecko over the weekend.

Geoff
Imagine a physics professor told you he’d demonstrated the theoretical possibility of a perpetual motion machine, disproving the “mantras” of rational science. But on examining his workings, it turned out all he’d done was add a quantity on one side of the equation, failing to account for the same quantity on the other side.

What would you think of that intellectual offering? You’d think it was stupid or dishonest wouldn’t you? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

The civil and rational thing to do, would be to assume he’s not being dishonest, show reason why you think he’s wrong, and ask him to disprove you, wouldn’t it? That’s what I’m doing.

Economics, by definition, concerns all situations where the resources available are not enough to satisfy all the human wants they could be used to satisfy. This is the original economic problem, which gives rise to all economic activity, and all economic theory. It’s not caused by “free markets”, it’s caused by reality. And it cannot be changed by the fact that dolts, and fools, and garble-brains, and socialists, keep endlessly misapprehending it. Please acknowledge that you understand this fact.

You need to show, for any benefit of government intervention that you allege, how you have accounted for the cost in resources withdrawn from alternative possible employments, in terms of the possible satisfaction of human wants foregone, in units of a lowest common denominator.

Go ahead. I say you can’t do it. Prove your theory is not as stupid or dishonest as our professor’s.


Grim
Do try to understand the basic issues.

The initiation of force or fraud are:
a) illegal in market transactions, and
b) legal in governmental transactions,
so this doubly refutes everything you said in your last post.

That rest of your intellectual sloppiness – hysterical misrepresentation - may be thought cute, or even laudable, in the Marxist intellectual kindergartens that you inhabit. But here you’re only making a fool of yourself.

All
Notice how all of the anti-libertarians slimily evade the opportunity of specifically answering the questions that prove me or them wrong?

Jardine K Jardine wrote,
1.At what stage, short of actually shooting people, do you renounce the initiation of force to enforce the policies you advocate?
Answer;
When was force last used in a mixed economy? You ignore the fact that corporations are organisations that could not exist but for laws that allow them to limit liability. The regulations that require protection for others in society allow education, health protection, road use and all the other benefits citizens enjoy

2. By what criterion do you know the difference between the market price and the just price in any given transaction?
Answer;
In a mixed economy preventing collusion (regulation) and having and applying serious penalties works.

3. How do you know what the correct rate of depletion of depletable resources is?
Answer;
One example would be that fossil carbon is essential for metal production from oxidised ore is required for ever.

4.How do you know what is the correct discount for futurity for everyone in the world?
Answer;
This generation should never neglect the interests of the next. See 6.

5.
How do you know whether government is providing too much, too little, or the right amount of any given service?
Answer;
The government is at least as good as corporations - look at the errors of BHP, Rio, and the Australian banks (The latter were all in effect bankrupt once Lehman collapsed).

6.
If your assumptions of governmental omniscience are right, then why don’t you agree with full socialism?
Answer;
Who claimed omniscience rather then just more competent in a mixed non-totalitarian society.

7. Why don’t the same problems inhere in the partial socialism you advocate?
Answer;
See 6 above