Jardine
I had assumed your questions were simply rhetorical.

Money comes from government mints (haha) and the banks creation of debt. But, the value of money comes from the interaction between consumers and the fulfillment of their demand by producers, service providers and capital.

It is years since I got into Mises, Hayek et al. I confess the minutia of disputes escape me. But, I have no explicit problems with the foundational ideas purported by this school. Its description of how consumers behave and make decisions offer more robustness than the simplicity of the classical economic demand/supply curves.

As for Government, noone can honestly argue that Government is anything but a parasite on an economy, an overhead which contributes little and mostly misallocates; at every turn causing inefficiencies, waste and even down right destruction to industries, producers, and cumbersome red-tape.

Its no longer just government that is a burden and waste on the economy. We have pseudo industries proliferating everywhere. Over the last 20 years, Government and Big business, have ostensibly reduced their staff numbers by huge numbers. Only to replace them with almost an equal number but more expensive consultancy firms and Contracting companies.

The most successful big corporations from Coles/Woolworths, the Banks, the Miners have become oligopolies. Small businesses have been either swallowed up, marginalized or illegally bullied into a single contract with the oligopoly. All this too, is a distortion of the efficient running of an economy. Something entirely absent in the Austrian schools considerations.

There is no discernible difference between a big government department and a big corporation. Once a business has a certain market share within an industry which is either essential or in growth mode, than it is as protected as a Government Dept. A Shell, a Microsoft, a CBA or a BHP. These are oligopolies and cartels, only flagrant and fraudulent mismanagement is a threat to them. Competitors are purchased or destroyed. Government lobbying is as important as any marketing campaign.

The essential point is their are far more inefficient and useless practices in out economy than the heavily subsidized automative industry.

Yebiga
You're contradicting yourself over and over both in word and action.

For example obviously if you cannot identify any rational criterion by which you distinguish between the market price and the alleged fair price, then you are in no position to talk about what is a 'pseudo' industry, or what's wrong with alleged oligopolies, or what's 'inefficient' or a 'distortion'.

It's like that joke about the two economists:
First one: "How's your wife?"
Second one: "Relative to what?"

Unless you're going to specify *relative to what*, all you're doing is arbitrary moralising.

Of course the neo-classical school pretend to the conclusions you are making relative to the concept of equilibrium, which is complete nonsense.

However there's no need for me to prove it so because you haven't even begun to defend your argument. Most of what you're describing as wasteful, inefficient, and fraudulent etc. is because of the interventions of government, so to that extent you're agreeing with the Austrians. And the rest is demonstrably wrong.

Look, tell you what. Here's a copy of "Man, Economy and State" by Murray Rothbard.
http://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF
Why don't you read the first chapter, and see if you can identify any proposition that you disagree with or can refute? Go ahead, it won't hurt. You might even learn something; after all, it shouldn't be so easy for an Austrian to completely demolish your entire argument as qucily and easily as I have done should it?. Unless you have some attachment to self-contradictory fallacious theory that is demonstrably untrue, why not have a look?

Notice how Binoy is completely unable to answer the question how he knows the resources going into industry handouts would not achieve more and better benefits left in the hands of their original owners?

Jardine
Simplicitus!
Why do you sound like some kind of Marxist passionately rabbiting on about the means of production? You appear to be so thoroughly immersed in this ideology that you are incapable of seeing the forest from the trees - as the saying goes.

At no point, am I questioning the raw power of free enterprise. Yes a thousand times yes, wealth, goods, services are best created thru the free interchange between individuals satisfying their needs and yes a thousand times yes a government any government distorts this.

But my simplistic ideologue, we are humans not economic robots. We need government, we need police, we need laws and unless you subscribe to some radical anarchist nirvana you will acknowledge this. That is the first thing that your precious Mises and friends fail to address.

The next thing is that because of technology and the acknowledged power of free entreprise the totality of goods and services we require is provided to us by a mere fraction of the number of individuals required merely 50 years earlier.

Once you acknowledge this self evident reality, you may then cast an eye at the landscape and actually be able to think. Until such time you are entrapped in some historical ideological disputation - interesting perhaps - but incapable of addressing the contemporary scene.

To help you along, what we now have is some perhaps 20% of the available workforce providing all the goods and services necessary to satisfy the needs of the 100%. The fundamental thing you must grasp is that rather than scarcity our age is defined by excess. Your brainwashed mind will endeavour to resist excepting such a statement but the sheer volume of the deliberate manufacture of disposable and non durable products which pervades the economy may just penetrate your skull with its ideologically shattering significance.

The question then arises, what the hell do you do with the redundant 80 % of the available workforce? And it is this question, which mocks Abbott and this ideological decision to no longer support an automotive industry. The war your conducting is over.

Ho hum, repeated passionate ad hom, question begging, collectivist fallacy of Yebiga’s assumed gods-eye view of how the entire world’s economy should run, and the old socialist fall-back whenever challenged of squarking “ideology” (undefined term that presumably doesn’t apply to you).

Of course the question is not whether something is ideology, it’s whether it’s true or false.

Notice how Yebiga says he’s ready to be proved wrong, but steadfastly refuses to answer the questions that prove him wrong, because he knows I’ll blow him out of the water with his own bullsh!t as soon as he does.

I’ll ask them again:
1. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governmental activity?
2. How do you distinguish between the market price, and the fair price, in any given case?
3. You haven't read any Austrian school theory have you?
4. Where do you think the government gets the money from, to pay for handouts to industries?

“The question then arises, what the hell do you do with the redundant 80 % of the available workforce?”

This assumes that your economic theory is correct in the first place. It’s not, as you yourself are demonstrating by coming back from my total demolition with nothing but ad hominem and question-begging.

Sorry but it’s sheer stupidity to allege, without any factual or rational foundation whatsoever, that “80%” of the workforce is redundant based on … what? Where did you get that figure from? Your own posterior?

And even if it were true, the solution is what? Government handouts to industry? Are you serious?

You could only rationally make that argument if you were able to demonstrate how you know the resources going into industry handouts would not achieve more and better benefits left in the hands of their original owners?

Go ahead. Show us your workings.

The problem is not “ideology” it’s reality, and in particular, it’s the consequences of economically illiterate government policies in raping industries to death, and then trying to revive them by killing other industries. Complete foolery.

But perhaps another emotional tantie will satisfy your intellectual standards in reply?

We laugh at the complete stupidity of the Soviets who used to have "jobs" for people sitting in a museum in the dark, to turn the light on when a visitor walked in the room.

But how is that any different from what you guys are suggesting - for exactly the same reasons?

And then you get offended when I say it's stupid!