The Roaring Twenties gave everyone a free go, you free-marketeers, and it took Maynard Keynes to repair it.

Out went Keynes in the early 1980s, the lessons of 1929 now forgotten as economic freedom again took a hold, the end of the Cold War adding successful politics to the proven economics.

Yet right now, even after years of a rapidly rising China and our subsequent lucky change to quarry economics we are still in a mess with the rest of the world.

Zounds like it could be the free-market once again.

Can anyone explain any different?

Cheers, BB, WA.

Well, you folks are still at it.

Wing Ah Ling, if you read anything other than your mises bible site you might see some of the evidence you keep demanding. Here are a couple of detailed accounts of how Wall Street went astray. Everyone agrees the US Govt and the Fed refused to intervene, and the clever fools led themselves, and us, to destruction. There's your unfettered market.

http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html?_r=1

Actually, I'm posting these for anyone else who's interested. I don't really expect Wing to evaluate the evidence the way most of us would.

Geoff

Unfortunately your personal arguments don't supply what your substantial argument lacks.

At least my personal insults are *in addition to* not *in substitition of* substantial argument on point.

Your argument to date can be summarised:
- assume what is in issue ('unfettered markets' caused the recession)
- ignore the entire apparatus of monetary policy as if irrelevant to the discussion
- ignore or misrepresent the arguments showing the connection between monetary policy to lower the price of money, and favour housing loans, and the increased demand for money and housing loans
- appeal to absent authority (assume government can fix it)
Then when refuted:
- personal argument.

All these are mere fallacies. You haven't got to square one yet.

I don't know why you are hostile to Mises when you obviously don't understand the theory. How do you know if you read it you might not find parts you agree with?

Your citations are merely confirming what Mises says in two ways:
1. mathematical economics is built on a fallacy. Prices are not positive data in the same way that measurements of atoms, or stones, or planets are. This is because subjective human valuation is of the essence of ever single price datum. Not only that, but every single price involves unique, non-comparable empirical data as to parties, qualities of goods, and place in the value scale of the parties. It is fallacious to use such positive statistical and aggregative measures. It's not junk mathematics. It's junk economics.
2. You have simply assumed what is in issue - pure circular argument. You assert that the markets are 'unfettered', as if they are in a separate universe, unconnected to monetary policy.You don't seem to be asking yourself "Would *I* voluntarily buy any of that debt piled on uncertainty with my hard-earned money?" and "If so, why?".
Ask yourself Geoff. Try.

The article answers the critical question. "Everyone was pinning their hopes on house prices continuing to rise,"

Now why ever might that be, Geoff? A house is just a house. Its value as shelter does not keep on rising.

I'll answer the question for you if you really can't get it, but see if you can answer it first:
- can you think of four things monetary policy was doing as the reason why everyone was pinning their hopes on house prices continuing to rise?
- can you tell me what would stop those financiers going broke in an unfettered market by the depositors of money in specie withdrawing their deposits?

What you seem to be suggesting is that the entire apparatus of monetary meddling by government should be just baldly assumed to be innocent of any economic effect, and we should then add in another assumption that government has a god-like power to solve the mathematical complexities of the financial markets by *more* central planning!

Grim
This is the second time I have refuted you on the same argument and each time you just slink off silently, only to pop up again somewhere else running the same fallacies.

Both
Please explain how you arrive at your irrefutable assumption that government policy to manipulate the money supply has got nothing to do with the supply of money.

Of course, if monetary policy really is as completely ineffectual as your argument requires us to believe, why not just agree to abolish it?

What justifies a government power to inflate the currency? Please answer

Wing: I do apologise for not sitting on the edge of my chair, waiting breathlessly for you to sing exactly the same song (ad infinitum). What you call 'slinking off', I would describe as 'having a life'.
You have never 'refuted' anything. You have expressed an opinion which only you find inarguable, and which the majority of economists, commentators, politicians, and moral philosophers disagree with; based solely on your rather selective interpretation of Mises and -parts of- the Austrian School.
I'm not aware of having defended any Government monetary policy. Please define 'Government'. As I recall, successive govs., in this country have divorced themselves from the inflation fight, since the time of Fraser. They quite rightly deduced that expressions such as 'we all need to tighten our belts', 'life wasn't meant to be easy', -Fraser, and 'this is the recession we had to have' -Keating, were not instant keys to political popularity. The politicians therefore dumped the business of controlling inflation on the fed, but gave it just one tool to work with.
The ability to control interest rates.
Where we differ, you and I, is that I believe the banks and the speculators are the true criminals in the current crisis. We need to stop treating money as a commodity, which can be bought and sold and manipulated, and bring it back to being simply the means of exchange of real goods.
As such, it is not part of the free market. It should be treated as infrastructure, just as power, water and other necessities are/should be -which also rightfully belong to all the people, and should never have been privatised.