Dear oh dear Master Hume, what an 'attitude' you do display.

Foot stomping, hair pulling, and demanding your birthday, NOW.

I am as cautious of embracing one Messiah as I am of another, and their evangelists and acolytes, for that matter

Harper and his very unChristian crew of 'faith' driven economists, who tend to forget the tale of the money lenders, perhaps focusing on 'the Talents' instead- John Howard's favourite parable- are as dodgy as your Messiah sounds to me, from reading the snippet of book blurb you posted for us all to rush out and read.

He sounds like another version of that misfit Hayek, from what I read there.

I am not sure that I mentioned any form of 'socialism' at all. I can just recognise a 'crock' when I see it, and particularly so when I read it, whether written by Harper, or yourself.

I am vaguely aware of a system, run in Switzerland perhaps?, during the '29 Depression era, or was it the War?, that taxed unproductive monies, lent at no interest, and created a booming economy with no inflation. So successful was it, that it was not allowed to continue. I doubt it had anything to do with your hero, from what the book blurb says of him. It does sound enticing, for sure.

As Squeers suggests, your blindness cramps your ability to walk breezily with others, your colour blindness afflicts you too with a scarlet haze covering all you read that does not click instantly into line with your hero's scribblings.

I suspect 'socialism' was more of a mild human condition than a despotic ideology prior to Marx and Engels being lifted for base power reasons- as religion is- whereas capitalism, as we can see before us all now, has always been a rapacious system that steals from the future at a faster rate than can be justified by anyone but economists, vote seeking politicians, and the social misfits who our community embrace as epitomising 'success': those who serve their own interests above the community in 'organised crime', better known as 'the business community'

hehehe
I started reading Mises book that you linked Peter but I had to stop when I read

"People often fail to perceive the fundamental difference between the liberal and the anarchistic idea. Anarchism rejects all coercive social organizations, and repudiates coercion as a social technique. It wishes in fact to abolish the State and the legal order, because it believes that society could do better without them. It does not fear anarchical disorder because it believes that without compulsion men would unite for social co-operation and would behave in the manner that social life demands. Anarchism as such is neither liberal nor socialistic: it moves on a different plane from either. Whoever denies the basic idea of Anarchism, whoever denies that it is or ever will be possible to unite men without coercion under a binding legal order for peaceful co-operation, will, whether liberal or socialist, repudiate anarchistic ideals. All liberal and socialist theories based on a strict logical connection of ideas have constructed their systems with due regard to coercion, utterly rejecting Anarchism." Ch 2.1

Since I am a committed Anarchist Mises writings dont apply to me. Indeed I agree with quite a lot of his critisisms of (state)socialism and have plenty more that I could add.

The funniest bit is "Anarchism as such is neither liberal nor socialistic:" funny in that Anarchism is alternatively called Libertarian Socialism. http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secA1.html#seca13
But he is right in that it does operate in a different plane from either socialism or libertarianism the main difference being that all others are authoritarian and only Anarchy rejects all hierarchy and coercion. http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secA2.html#seca22

A reasonable article; I certainly have to agree that we are all ultimately to blame.
From amoeba to cows getting their heads stuck in fences, to the dole receiver who could just use a few dollars more, to the billionaire...
If there is one unifying aspect of all Life on earth, it is that 'consuming' desire for just a little bit more.
How much is enough?
A discussion such as this must be incomplete without any mention of Victor Lebow.

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies."
"These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole “do-it-yourself” movement are excellent examples of “expensive” consumption."

That was written the year I was born; 1955. I have spent my entire life under the shadow of this heinous philosophy, which has done so much to (mis)shape our economy and destroy our ecology.

Oh Grim, how grim!

While many might label you a 'Baby boomer', you are in fact a 'Black and Decker'.

This is the first time I have considered this change of nomenclature, but it is significant, as you point out.

Whereas in 1955, your parents may have felt plush in a Standard Vanguard, perhaps the 'shooting brake' version, yet aspired to a Morris Minor 1000, the new kid-on-the-block, these days young parents are not happy unless they have a Mazda 3 for the missus and a WRX for 'im even before they tie the knot.

Levels of consumption skyrocket when the plasma, pool, cinema room, present wrapping room, 5 bedrooms with 6 ensuites and two bathrooms combine to create the large garage with small house attached.

And some here regard all that as normal, and what we need to keep the economy going, while cringing at the few who aspire somewhat lower down the Richter Scale of 'consumo d'struction'.

It is significant that with all Rudd's empty rhetoric, the end of neo-liberalism, he still supports exactly this 'progress' as 'the Australian way', while his treasurer continues to spruik a 35 million population count, in order to keep AV Jennings and Co., going.

Yet, where I live, in the second largest inland city, we have no water, and no prospect of water from this catchment area, unless it pours with rain for months.

Our dams sit at 10% capacity, and we steal from the GAB, along with uranium mines and farmers, to keep ourselves afloat.

We should stick with the farmers, but we don't need uranium mines, whose contribution is less than their cost to the public purse.

Sadly though, this perceptive Vic' is a consumption acolyte, rather than a warning post for the future?

I'm reminded of that post-War book, 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit', whose author was warning us of what the bosses gymps now refer to as 'The Work-Life Balance', always very careful to stress 'work' as the first priority, and who would shrink at having it around the right way as 'The Life-Work Balance'.

The movement to sound money need not involve any more economic dislocation than is involved in weathering the current depression, which cannot be avoided in any case.

The market liquidates the malinvestments and re-allocates the capital to productive purposes – as long as government doesn’t actively prevent it.

No-one remembers the depression of 1920-21 because President Harding, and the Fed, did nothing to bail out loss-making businesses, and it was over in a year: http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods125.html By contrast, Hoover’s price-fixing interventions in 1927 on a thousand fronts just happened to precede the biggest destruction of wealth ever.

Losses mean the people en masse value the finished product *less* than they value the factors of production that went into it. This capital should be released for employments to satisfy wants the people consider more urgent - commonly known as ‘going broke’. People have no moral right to make wagon-wheels forcibly subsidised by people unwilling to pay for them.

Storing money in a bank should no more be prevented by policy than storing goods in safe storage. It is not for you to say people should take them out and use them, nor lend them out for a fee. They will when they want to. It is not a reason to impose a chaotic and immoral monetary system on society.

Similarly, with sound money, there is no need to prevent lending nor trace the provenanc
e of loans. The requirement is only that money-substitutes cannot be multiplied out of proportion to the money base; and the money base cannot be multiplied so as to change the market price for money as determined by supply and demand.

The reluctance to abandon fiat money and fractional reserve banking fears that we would have worse economic outcomes. But what makes everyone richer is capital accumulation, and inflation destroys capital on a massive scale.

Marx considered himself an economist first and foremost. But in the humanities, the economics departments were the first to abandon his theories. His cachet lingered on in academic philosophy, history, sociology etc. where people simply do not understand the economic issues and disproofs.

Marx’s entire theory was that workers’ wages under capitalism would decline to subsistence level. The opposite happened: they rose to the highest levels in the history of the world. Marx’s exploitation theory is wrong, and was already refuted by the 1890s. He ignores the time preferences of the parties. The employee gets a certain fixed income now, while the capitalist must wait for an uncertain variable income in the future. He considers the workers as equally entitled to the total product as if they had worked with their bare hands without tools, machines, factories or direction. Marx treats as unproblematic the problem of *how* to combine the factors of production in a changing world so as best to satisfy the wants that the consumers consider most urgent. He ignores the fact that economic calculation is impossible where there is no market for capital goods; hence the planned chaos that results from socialism. He ignores the problem that the knowledge needed to achieve what he wants is dispersed in the minds of billions of people, and cannot be known to any central planning authority, ever. He got the economics upside-down, inside-out, and back-the-front.

The ordinary people trust that the educated people in government understand the crisis, but the armies of humanities graduates, most of whom go into government, are steeped in Marxian fallacies refuted a thousand times. We see this in bald assumptions that capital or economics are intrinsically unethical, and employment exploitative.

And the so-called neo-liberal economists, who reject central planning of shoes and wheat, think it’s somehow necessary and desirable for the production of money. The resulting planned chaos is blamed on freedom instead of bad ideas about omnipotent government.

Sound money would promote steadily compounding capital, savings, delayed gratification, responsibility for one’s own actions, faith and credit, making money by work and enterprise, higher living standards for all, and freedom. It would end the boom-bust cycle, and reduce the culture of debt, institutionalised fraud, making money by speculation and tax-jiggery-pokery, privilege, dependence on government, the military-industrial complex, and aggressive war.