Following the statist logic train off the CLIFF

So while getting Subway half an hour ago I heard a local Minneapolis radio DJ say something to the the tune of "I love it when rich people support tax increases. It just shows that people with a lot of money are capable about caring about more than just their money."

Great logic. People with more money should pay more taxes? I guess, then, that families with more than 10 or so kids should have them enlist in the Army or the Marines. After all, they have "more than their fair share" of kids, right? Just like the rich have "more than their fair share" of money. Those families don't need all those kids, just like the rich don't need all that money.

Morons. I want to go live on a seastead.

Statist toadies at UMN come to scream about healthcare, and instead get a lesson on the Fed

Ron Paul came to the University of Minnesota last Friday -- it was funny that the army of statist mouthbreathers known as Students Organizing for America showed up with their anti-health insurance signs showed up (ignoring the fact that Obama will INCREASE health insurance company power while Ron Paul would lower it).

They hoped for a chance to scream at Ron Paul (and Michelle Bachmann who appeared due to her support with him on HR 1207) on health care issues, but instead they got an earful about the Federal Reserve, the war on drugs, the AFGHANISTAN war (something their boy supports), etc. Hopefully some of them learned something.

And I'm so sick of people at the U, and elsewhere, taking dumps on Ron because of his association with Michelle. Michelle has come around on the Fed it seems, but not on most other things. A free-thinking individual who is not a partisan toadie would realize this is an ALLIANCE, not an agreement.

Yes Obama is a socialist.....and so was Bush and most other presidents before him.

There's a huge reason why I am refusing to call Obama a socialist: because I believe that the main people who are doing so are actually deluded enough to think that Obama is the FIRST president to move us away from freedom and into the realm of coerced collectivism and big government. On the contrary, Bush was as big if not a greater "socialist" (using the term to mean "increaser of government").

So next time you hear someone call Obama a socialist, ask them if Bush was a socialist. If they say no, punch them in the head.

"YOU LIE!!!!!"

I want to applaud Joe Wilson for having the testicular fortitude for speaking out against the Chosen One, but then again this is coming from a guy who was behind all of Bush's shenanigans, and never shouted "You lie!" at Bush when he lied nonstop about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on "Terror". He also, when debating Democratic congressman Bob Filner on C-SPAN in 2002, said that the notion that the US gave Iraq biological/chemical weapons in the 1980s was "made up" and stated to Filner "This hatred of America by some people is just outrageous."

I rest my case. The day that these GOP toadies shout "You lie!" at Bush or Palin or somebody like that, then I'll cheer. Until then, it's just more partisan hackery.

The "healthcare is a right" logic, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to everything being a right

It amazes me that the progressive line of "healthcare should be a right, not a privilege" is not criticized more often on its intellectually bankrupt terms. The most glaring thing about it is its obvious discrimination against food and hungry people: if healthcare is necessary and thus a human right, why not food? After all, we may only go to the doctor once a month or once a year, but we EAT FOOD AT LEAST TWICE A DAY. By the "healthcare is a right, not a privilege" logic, universal single-payer groceries should be on the Congressional floor as well.

But it's not. Why not? Well for starters, we don't have mandated employer food insurance. You figure out the rest.

And if you take everything society needs as a "right, not a privilege", pretty soon housing, clothing, beds, toothbrushes, computers (to do schoolwork, for example), etc. are "a right, not a privilege." And why should we assume our direct democratic friends should stop there? Why shouldn't every citizen have a right, once all their living needs are taken care of, to happiness? Shouldn't good music and good books be "a right, not a privilege?"

Yet this is exactly what would happen if the government were easily able to nationalize healthcare. There's no reason to assume they'd stop at healthcare, not with thousands of starving and shirtless people thanks, again, to government.

Using the argument "we need socialized military" as an argument for socialized healthcare

Today on Thom Hartmann's program he debated Michael Medved (again, like Dan Gainor and Yaron Brook before him, not exactly the paragon of free market advocacy). In an attempt to intellectually sucker-punch Medved and win the debate, he states something like "Well, if you're against socialized healthcare, you must be against our socialized military!" Medved hesitated, unable to answer.

Which is why they need someone like me or Tom Woods on his show. The way Hartmann words it, you'd think our military was some sort of grand savior to our society. Unless you view the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of foreigners and imperial occupation of over 150 countries as a good thing, I think you'll disagree as well.

Two things: 1) our socialized military has, like our quasi-socialized healthcare system, created an industrial-complex. Just as our socialized military has resulted in murderous OFFENSE (as opposed to its stated purpose of "defense") and fascist offshoots like Blackwater, our socialized healthcare system has created fascist offshoots in the form of health insurance companies, which were cartelized when the government decided to push companies towards covering all employee health insurance , thus giving them great incentive to profit off the incoming demand and turn away the frail sick outliers who would get in the way of the CEO salary. And yet Hartmann views the salary motive as the problem in health insurance. What came first Thom? Come on now.

Hartmann actually stated in the debate something to the tune of "Why should we allow for-profit insurance companies to earn millions just for writing the check to your doctor?" Yet is Hartmann so blind as not to realize that it was government's intervention in the market that created that insurance/co-pay/not-just-for-risk-anymore system? Instead, he attacks the for-profit aspect, which has nothing to do with it at all.

The Healthcare Reader

Since there is much misinformation and non-logic being churned out of both the Democrat camp AND the Republican camp (make no mistake, many Republicans are being manipulated by the cartelized insurance industry who are profiting richly thanks to the government's forced insurance and regulations) on the healthcare issue, I've compiled a reader of fantastic articles to help you plow through the nonsense. I'll be adding more articles as I find them. If any of you have any you'd like me to add, just send me the link.

(And a quick note, with this whole healthcare mess, we must remember what Henry Hazlitt taught us about looking not just at the immediate visible "benefits" of government healthcare intervention, but for the upcoming unseen consequences of government intervention.)

1) The Crisis -- the first couple articles brilliantly explain how we first got into the situation of high doctor/insurance costs and coverage denial with clever allegories

"The Health-Insurance Market Is Not Free", by Anton Batey http://mises.org/story/3727

"How to Make Using the Restroom as Expensive and Inconvenient as Getting a Physical", by Todd Steinberg http://www.lewrockwell.com/steinberg/steinberg15.1.html

"Autobama Universal Car Care: A Parallelism, by David Klein http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/klein-d1.1.1.html

"What If Car Insurance Were Like Health Insurance?, by Kaz Vorpal http://butnowyouknow.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/what-if-car-insurance-were-like-health-insurance/

"Single-Payer Groceries Anyone?", by Thomas DiLorenzo http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo176.html

"Economics of Risk and Insurance: From Healthcare to Welfare", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/MU2009/MU2009_Hoppe2_07-29-2009.mp3 (this is the Insurance lecture given by Hoppe at Mises University 2009 which I attended)

"Uncertainty and Its Exigencies: The Critical Role of Insurance in the Free Market ", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/uncertainty-insurance.html

""You're either with us or you're with the insurance companies!"
Healthcare Nazis Borrow Nauseating Logic from Dubya ", by Me (an article I wrote about a month ago -- thought I'd throw some of my own comments in here ;-)) http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle531-20090809-08.html

2) The Solution
"Healthcare: An Anarchist Approach", by Gary Chartier http://c4ss.org/content/892

"The Real Right to Medical Care versus Socialized Medicine", by George Reisman http://mises.org/story/3613

"A Four-Step Healthcare Solution", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe http://mises.org/story/3643

"Want to shrink the economy? Limit the labor force now!": an Austrian critique of Thom Hartmann's hairbrained anti-labor "stimulus" idea

Listening to Thom Hartmann's radio program, the only halfway-interesting program that is broadcast during the day where I live, is literally like a practicing ground for economic fallacies. It has strengthened my ability to find them, and has given me fresher examples for future usage. Hartmann (who like most of the media folk around him, believes "deregulation" and "capitalism" caused the current economic depression) subscribes to the "demand drives the economy" nonsense that unfortunately made John Maynard Keynes one of the most celebrated economists of the 20th century.

Hartmann recently post a blog on the Huffington Post (read it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/want-to-stimulate-the-eco_b_267517.html) which recommended that, since he believed our stimulus plan wouldn't work because it wasn't adequately protectionist, we should lower the retirement age to 55.

Such an idea is literally insane, not to mention anti-labor. What Hartmann is recommending as a policy to help workers get new jobs is to forcibly limit individuals' entry into the market and kill off future productivity -- read: new wealth, new jobs, etc. In other words, create new jobs by killing off jobs. This sounds quite similar to when FDR attempted to stimulate the economy by destroying food supply in the 1930s. In short, insane.


Here, I will explain why, by responding to remarks of Thom's op-ed column (Thom’s comments in bold):

"Instead [of bankrupting social security and destroying the economy], [lowering the retirement age to 55] would eliminate the problem of unemployment in the United States. All those Boomers retiring would make room in the labor market for all the recent high-school and college graduates who are now finding it so hard to find a job."

First off, Hartmann's own support of the minimum wage shows he fails to realize that the minimum wage is a hurdle that is not jumpable by the types of high-school/college graduates that he specifies here. Without the minimum wage, these types -- who are unemployed for a reason: because employers do not value their services more than the minimum wage rate government makes them pay -- would be employed at lower wages. They could then begin earning new skills, building a résumé and moving up in the work world and gaining higher wages.

This idea of Hartmann's would lower productivity and increase the costs of goods because of lower productivity AND because of the increased volume of spending chasing the already more-expensive goods.

On Hartmann's show today he debated John Lott (author of the book "Freedomnomics") and dismissed Lott when Lott stated that it would lower productivity by saying that the 20-somethings would merely take the jobs, and productivity would then be the same or better.

But this ignores two things: 1) the people over 55 are no longer creating goods and services -- ie wealth. They are merely collecting government benefits and spending them. 2) If the 20-somethings were the best for the jobs that people over 55 held, they would have been hired instead of the older people . In short, we can a priori know that a worse person for the job now holds the job, thanks to a limiting of the labor supply by the government.

Also, Hartmann ignores the fact that the jobs that those 20-somethings would have taken had government not given a disincentive for 55+ year olds to retire will now either not be filled (less productivity) or be filled by less competent people (also less productivity). As you can see, this retirement age change has now disrupted the entire division of labor and the entire economy for the worse.

"If enough Boomers left the job market, it would even flip the current dynamic of too-many-people-chasing-too-few-jobs upside down, and create a tight labor markets. Tight labor markets drive up wages."

Hartmann needs to ask himself why there are fewer jobs than people right now. He blames Reaganomics and NAFTA/GATT for outsourcing labor jobs, as if the only way to ensure good jobs exist is not freedom and voluntary exchange but government forcing citizens to ONLY buy stuff made in America (which is exactly what protectionism does). Free trade drives prices down and allows individuals in different countries to specialize in what they excel in. Without free trade, government is arbitrarily forcing a cartel with objectively less productive operations to form to benefit a single “class” (the working class) at the expense of all of society. It is special interest policy at its worst.

The truth is that right now the economy is vomiting out the malinvestment caused by the boom created by Alan Greenspan's Keynesian interest rate cuts in the early 2000s. Once the economy rebounds and readjusts itself to voluntary consumer preferences, more jobs will be created -- which is what happened in 1920-1921 thanks to Warren Harding's laissez-faire response to the 1920 economic crash (which was worse than the 1929 crash) The only thing that will get in the way of this is the types of interventions that Hartmann proposes.

"Additionally, these new-into-the-workforce people can then pay off student loans, buy new houses and cars, and otherwise drive the economy from the bottom up."

In other words, create the very sort of insane spending that got our country into the economic crisis and into so much debt in the first place. And the economy is never built from the bottom up, unless you believe that somehow supply can magically catch up with demand. Ever heard of savings, Thom?

"To further tighten the job market and drive up wages (and tax revenues), modify the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 -- which tightened the labor market and reduced unemployment by establishing the 40-hour work week - to include all hours worked by a person. We could also, like in France, drop the 40-hour maximum-workweek threshold to 35 hours (used by the Mitterrand government to successfully lower unemployment and stimulate the French economy). A final step would be to emulate the rest of the developed world and require by law that every worker get at least two to four weeks a year of paid vacation -- further tightening the labor market."

In this example, just like the last one, Hartmann is recommending lowering productivity and increasing raw spending. In other words, he is recommending lowering supply and increasing demand , which kills living standards by forcibly subsidizing inefficiency and waste. It is the polar opposite of what is helpful for an economy. He and other "progressives" may quip that the inflated wages spent by the workers will in turn create more jobs and thus stimulate more supply, but the fact is that this is never sustainable -- this can only stimulate little tiny offshoots of economic growth which do not spread throughout the economy, and even then they are offset by the reduced amount of productivity.

And the 40-hour work week and 8-hour workday reduced unemployment? That always increases unemployment, because the individuals who would voluntary work more are barred from doing so by the government.

"This is the main reason why the labor movements of the 18th and 19th centuries fought so hard against child labor; they knew that if children were removed from the labor marketplace, then the supply of labor (the number of people available to work) would decrease and the price of labor (wages) would increase. And, sure enough, that's exactly what happened - and it began the creation of a blue-collar middle class."

Precisely -- one of the key reasons that unions fought so hard for restrictions on youth entering the marketplace was not for social justice like the high school history books say, but it was to protect their own bloated wage rates. And Hartmann views this as a good thing? It's forcing these youth out of a job so other workers can protect their own inflated wage rates -- again, special interest policy at its worst. This is not what led to the creation of a middle-class -- this is a nonsensical post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy (I'll add here that Hartmann has stated previously that "the ‘middle class’ is not a normal result of ‘free markets.’" [4] and that it has to be created by government -- in other words, he believes that freedom would naturally create a bunch of rich people and the rest of people poor, starving, and begging for mercy – a reading of Rothbard's and Mises' writings on monopoly may be in order for Thom).

"It's also why the labor movement pushed for an 8-hour day and a 40-hour maximum workweek. By reducing the amount of labor available from each worker from the average 60 hours a week or so people were working before 1938, the labor market tightened up, increasing the number of people who could be employed and raising wages."

Again, this lowers productivity. As I stated before, the 40-hour workweek and the 8-hour day are ceilings that forcibly prevent people from voluntarily choosing to work more, which would actually give them more money to spend anyways. Unemployment increases as a result.

"Of course, this is the exact opposite of American labor policy ever since the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush era. Reagan drove down wages by busting unions (which tighten a labor marketplace); declared an amnesty for millions of then-illegal immigrant workers to increase the supply of labor and depress wages (particularly whacking the carpenters and other construction trades unions); and began the process (completed in a big way by Bill Clinton with NAFTA and GATT/WTO) of dismantling tariffs, taxes, and laws that made it expensive or illegal to export American jobs."

More of the same. Here, he even decries amnesty for illegal immigrants (!), a standard progressive political position, simply because it would bring down the wages of carpenters and construction workers. But last time I checked, those people need food and jobs too. There's a reason, after all, why they're coming over here.

What is really happening here, if the immigrants are indeed hired, is that the companies are getting better workers for a lower price, thus increasing productivity and living standards. In turn, it is up to the newly-unemployed construction workers/carpenters to realign themselves in the division of labor in a manner that is most productive to consumer wants. Taking down the government's fiat labor restrictions like the minimum wage would be a simple way to get that ball rolling.

On tariffs -- here is Thom Hartmann, who constantly slams "corporate dominance", yet advocates tariffs which force a protected cartel to form within our country. These measures ensure corporate dominance as well as, like before, lower supply and increase demand, which is terrible for economies and living standards for ALL people, including the working class (in order to understand this, you need to understand the long run effects, not just the short run effect -- in essence, you need to see "that which is unseen", to quote the title of a famous essay by Frédéric Bastiat--but I'm sure Hartmann would simply label Bastiat a right-wing ideologue or something).

"Reagan also put into the chairmanship of the Fed Alan Greenspan, who openly declared that his most important job as chairman of the Fed was to prevent "wage inflation" -- a term which he exclusively applied to working-class people. Greenspan is still preaching that now-discredited and anti-American philosophy he learned from Ayn Rand, in fact."

In a previous blog Thom Hartmann referred to Alan Greenspan as an "anti-regulation Libertarian" [1]. Saying that there is a libertarian running the Federal Reserve is akin to saying there is a libertarian running the DEA or the FDA. If you're in charge of one of them, you've proven you’re not a supporter of even basic libertarian principles.

And Thom Hartmann is clearly an Ayn Rand illiterate. Ayn Rand decried central banking and the Federal Reserve, so even though she correctly thought it was wrong to artificially boost wages, she did NOT say that a central bank czar should do it. Hartmann is so wrong on this it's appalling.

Oh, and being "anti-American"? Isn't that the same stuff I heard from Bush and the neoconservatives?

"It's shocking that ideologues like Greenspan, Reagan, and Clinton believe this, but they do. And the only way to reverse the past 29 years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics is to tighten up the labor market again. While a great start would be to pull out of our insane trade treaties and begin again protecting American manufacturers, that will take a decade for the impact to be truly felt even if we were to go back to our 1980 tariff levels today."

Greenspan, Reagan, and Clinton are not free marketers (it was Greenspan's Keynesian reduction of interest rates that caused the boom/bust, not deregulation). A true free market ideology lies in natural rights, which is an objectively determinable ideology. As much as Hartmann criticizes ideology, he himself subscribes to one, as does everyone -- even a nihilist -- because even the nihilist has some sort of a priori objective belief that nihilism must be right. Ideology is inescapable, and is thus irrelevant in any sort of criticism because critics of ideology are themselves using ideology to critique ideology . It's like when David Hume attempted to refute reason -- he himself used reason in the attempt. So anyone, authoritarian or libertarian, who uses the term "ideologue" in a criticism is automatically a hypocrite no matter the example.

"But providing space for a good chunk of the 16 percent of the American workforce over 55 years old will immediately take us to nearly zero unemployment and dramatically stimulate the economy. Then we can begin to bring our manufacturing jobs back home from China and the other important steps”

Thom Hartmann believes that economies lead to wealth stratification unless government force steps in to regulate things in the name of the working class. Does he have an explanation for the quick recovery from the depression of 1920? Didn't think so. Does he have an explanation as to how anarchic Iceland lasted 1000 years? Didn't think so. Instead he subscribes to the public school textbook explanations, which he seems to have memorized.

The "zero unemployment" from a forced reduction of the retirement age to 55 would be a counterfeit one, since those retired 55-and-up people would still be working were it not for the disincentive that the government provided them.

True zero unemployment would only occur in a free society, without misguided policies propping up wages and preventing the supply of labor, as well as land and capital goods, to liquidate to normal levels. If you do not allow the liquidation to occur, and instead do little tricks like Hartmann's retirement age recommendation, you create massive disincentives for laborers that make it impossible for the economy to ever recover.

And even with all this aside, it is bizarre that Hartmann sees falling wages as a bad thing. Falling wages mean labor is becoming cheaper, and thus easier and easier for companies to afford to hire. Once wages are low enough, they are employed, productivity takes off, and more and more jobs are created.

This "liquidation of labor" is precisely what happened in 1920 when the economy crashed and government did nothing to prop up wages or demand. It was over a short time later. But it's not surprising that Hartmann doesn't know or understand this concept, because in a previous blog on the Huffington Post he stated this:

"In Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion........Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." [2]

In fact, Herbert Hoover was a hyper-interventionist who instituted the first New Deal in 1932. Hoover's New Deal of 1932 set up public works, restricted immigration, granted loans to states for relief, etc [3]. Wow Thom, that really sounds laissez-faire to me!

In conclusion, Thom Hartmann's economic views are misinformation. He is correct that there is a corporatocracy in this country, but he advocates the very ideas that got them into that position of power. The only reason Hartmann retains any economic credibility among anyone is because he has weak supporters of the free market like Yaron Brook and Dan Geinor from the T. Boone Pickens Institute on as guests to debate on government control of markets vs. free markets. Were he to have someone of real economic wisdom on the program, this would change. Perhaps this is why such individuals are never on -- because keeping the illusion of Hartmann's economic wisdom alive props up his salary rate and prevents it from liquidating. Teehee.

Addendum: (I will add that Hartmann is decent on civil liberties, and at least is a consistent progressive/democratic socialist, something which I cannot say about most individuals in the Democratic Party and a good number of progressives).

Citations:

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/debt-is-not-money_b_186423.html

[2]: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0

[3]: http://mises.org/rothbard/AGD/chapter11.asp

[4]: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0312-08.htm

Yet another left-wing "progressive" gets Mises wrong, as well as the gold standard, the Fed, and praxeology, Or: Correcting Stephen Zarlenga

http://www.thomhartmann.com/2009/05/12/transcript-talks-with-stephen-zarlenga-about-money-his-american-monetary-act-11-may-2009/

It appears that I have found a misunderstanding and blaming of Mises for the economic problems even more egregious than Thom Hartmann's one last March. The following excerpts are from a May 11, 2009 broadcast of the Thom Hartmann program, featuring a gentleman by the name of Stephen Zarlenga (transcript is in bold):

[[[Stephen Zarlenga: So government gets blamed for [things like the current economic downturn] universally, but in fact when you actually look at the history, that’s not what happened.And people assume that groups such as the Austrian School had done their homework, and I could tell you they haven’t.

Thom Hartmann: The Austrian School being Hayek and Mises.

Stephen Zarlenga: Hayeck, von Mises. You know, von Mises has the nerve to tell us that his theories can never be disproven by mere facts.

Thom Hartmann: Well, he’s been dead for half a century, hasn’t he?

Stephen Zarlenga: Not quite, no, no. But I mean, the methodology’s so wrong. And now we see this in Greenspan.

Thom Hartmann: Is von Mises still alive?

Stephen Zarlenga: No, von Mises passed away.

Thom Hartmann: Oh yeah, like in the 60s. [1973 - ed.]

Stephen Zarlenga: …or two ago.

Thom Hartmann: Oh, recently? OK.

Stephen Zarlenga: Yeah, fairly recently. Now, the proponent that people would know would be Alan Greenspan; Austrian or Libertarian Austrian.]]]

I'm not an arrogant person, nor am I close-minded. I have plenty of friends who disagree with my political views, and I respect that. I even respect Thom Hartmann as an individual of above-average intelligence (even if he's wrong on 98% of everything he commentates on -- I can't say the same for the likes of Ed Schultz and the deranged Mike Malloy). However, comments such as his blaming Mises' ideas for the crisis are so wrong they're basically intellectually unforgivable. However, I think he just got outdone by this Zarlenga fellow.

First of all, he completely fails at understanding Austrian methodology, and presents a bastardized version of what he thinks it is. He claims that Austrians had not "done their homework" -- doing homework, presumably, implies an empirical study of historical events and situations, something that Austrians realize is fallacious and irrelevant except to economic historians.

He then attempts to elucidate on this by claiming that "Mises has the nerve to tell us that his theories can never be disproven by mere facts." I nearly wet myself when I read that -- never in all my time of studying liberty and economics have I read a greater strawman. To correct him: Misesian praxeology has an a priori methodology that explains how there are certain facts about rational human action that can be known beforehand, and exist regardless of whether the empiricists conclude they do via their analyses (things like this already are taken for granted by individuals like Zarlenga -- ex// supply-and-demand). In other words, "mere facts" like a coincidental economic downturn after a tax cut are COINCIDENTAL and unrelated to the downturn. To state it the way Zarlenger did is mindblowing. He also ignores the fact that the belief that empirical knowledge is needed for proof is ALSO an a priori statement, and such things taken for granted by all economists today like the aforementioned supply-and-demand as well as marginal utility are a priori as well.

He then states that the Austrian methodology is "so wrong. And now we see this in Greenspan." Excuse me? Did you ever research anything about Austrian methodology? Even a simple scan of Wikipedia would have shown you you were wrong -- there is NOTHING in Greenspan's economic views that even resembles a priori reasoning about rational human behavoir. No doubt Zarlenga is referring to Greenspan's endorsement of (fake) deregulation -- oh yeah, the institutionalized deregulation that Mises NEVER endorsed. Unbelievable. (I think I know may know why Hartmann believed Mises' ideas contributed to the crisis: he probably heard from Zarlenga that Greenspan utilized Misesian ideas and just took that on faith).

But he's not done. A few minutes prior to his mindblowing misunderstanding of Mises and praxeology, he unloads this:

[[[Thom Hartmann: Why [do you oppose going to a gold standard]? I agree with that, but I know that there are a lot of, particularly the libertarians, this is really big with a lot of conservatives, ‘let’s go back to the gold standard’.

Stephen Zarlenga: Well, OK, we know how to handle that question with them, and first of all you never did have a gold standard. It was always a fraudulent thing. There were promises to pay gold, it was never really there. But what they’ve done, and the Ron Paul people especially are tuned into this that we need gold for money, they are confusing an investment with a money. Now, they like gold as an investment, and at certain times gold’s a fine investment, other times it’s terrible. But you want an investment to go up and up and up. You don’t want money to go up and up and up. You want money to be relatively stable. So what you need out of an investment, which might be gold, at a time, and what you need out of money, totally separate. And the Ron Paul people, they understand this when tell them.]]]

Zarlenga correctly states that there never was a true gold standard. But that's precisely the point! Promises to pay in gold were often nominal and there was still a large amount of fraudulent inflation occurring at the time, which PREVENTED the gold standard from working. His poopooing of the gold standard for being stupid because it was never obeyed is unbelievable. I doubt he would like it if I told him that "health care reform" is stupid because it won't work because "it's not REAL health care reform." But he throws us the same logic.

Zarlenga then says that the "Ron Paul people" (as if all Austrians/libertarians are automatically "Ron Paul people") are "confusing an investment with a money". No Stephen, on the contrary: YOU are confusing money with an investment, a fatal error which leads many individuals to view gold negatively. Historically gold has almost always emerged as a default money of individuals, but since the removal of the gold standard and the implementation of legal tender laws gold has, de jure, been relegated to the role of investment. Secondly, you do not want money to be "relatively stable" anymore than you want any other price to remain fixed one way or another. Falling prices do not kill you, they lead to investment and re-employment of resources in even more productive fashions. Praxeology notwithstanding, to state that it leads to hoarding that destroys the economy goes entirely against the law of marginal utility, because the more money/value you accumulate, the less value each additional unit of value affords you and the more likely you will spend (consumer) or invest (capitalist/market investor) that money. It's hilarious that the very same individuals who favor helping the poor are the same ones who advocate robbing from them via fiat inflation.

Zarlenga, though, saves his best for last with this:

[[[Stephen Zarlenga: And as to the fiat part, any Ron Paul person listening in now will understand the following completely. The problem is not fiat money. The problem is the private issue of fiat money. Then it operates like a tax.

Thom Hartmann: Right, through the Federal Reserve. Right.

Stephen Zarlenga: Like a tax on all of us. Any private issue of money will do that.]]]

Another stunner. The so-called "private" federal reserve was not only created by government (i.e. not an institution created by the free market) but responds to the GOVERNMENT'S need for money, whether it be for bailouts, quantitative easing, lower interest rates, etc. In other words, all things that Zarlenga and Hartmann fully support as long as they think it's in the interest of the "poor". Zarlenga seems to imply that if the Fed were nationalized and put "in control of We the People" (yeah right), there wouldn't be as much fiat inflation. How do you figure? There would be just as much and possibly more. Again, the "private" Fed only prints as much money as the GOVERNMENT demands. He also fails to comprehend that legal tender laws are the cause of the inflation tax, not because the Fed is "private". Removal of legal tender laws would neuter the inflation tax overnight.

The statement that "any private money" will lead to an inflation tax is mindblowing. If there were competing currencies, no one would be forced to use one or another. Good currencies would succeed, the rest would fail and their providers go bankrupt. An inflation tax only occurs with legal tender laws, regardless of whether the central bank is nationalized or (nominally) private. This is basic. Very basic.

The fed is not private, it is fascist (merger of public and private), just as Blackwater is (an institution they no doubt oppose, though as they should). It is not private money that is dangerous, it is fascist money and government money, close to the same thing.

Again, I'm not too judgmental a person. But when you engage in the kind of intellectual failure that is displayed here, I have to take a stand. It's not just that he's completely wrong, it's that he gets all the DETAILS wrong too. Insane.