Skeptic Project

Funny how the early Soviet Union managed to produce an impressive amount of capital goods in a few years based on central planning. Outside observers in the 1930's noted that Russians went to jobs every day making steel, concrete and machines while the Western countries suffered from mass unemployment. If the USSR had avoided the wealth destruction of the Second World War and the Cold War, by now it might have developed up to a decent standard, but based on a model fundamentally at odds with Western economics. Then the Austrianists with their "calculation problem" would have a lot of explaining to do.

I think Austrianists have that explaining to do any way, because modern corporations can centralize and coordinate production and distribution on a literally world wide scale. These companies ignored Austrian economics and just went ahead to figure out how to gather and make effective plans with dispersed and localized knowledge through modern technology.

Otherwise, for example, you'd have no way to find out the location of something you've ordered because only the guy with his hands on the package at the time (dispersed and localized knowledge) would know anything about it. Instead you can go online and track the package's location at every change of custody along the way.

Yet these same people lecture us about "spontaneous orders" and how social complexity arises from human action but not necessarily from human design. If statism and corporatism develop "organically," so to speak, from an originally limited government and a free market, then Austrianists have set themselves against powerful historical forces which nobody controls. Instead they want to blame these trends on bad ideas (i.e., everyone else's but theirs) and conspiracies.

I've just noticed another bit of cognitive dissonance coming from the Austrianists: On the one hand many of them keep up their Chicken Little act about "hyperinflation"; yet on the other hand they say that abolishing the minimum wage laws would solve unemployment because wages naturally "want" to fall below the current artificial levels and clear the market for labor. Uh, doesn't the latter situation -- market pressure for lower wages -- indicate deflation rather than inflation?

As George Lakoff argues, "framing" makes all the difference. If we say, "The Federal Reserve creates the money we use _to pay our taxes_ out of 'thin air'," that changes the way the brain evaluates the information. Those Goldman Sachs employees certainly don't dismiss their extra bonus money, thanks to the Federal Reserve, as "thin air" while they prepare their tax returns.

Oh so many Austrians aren't looking for jobs at universities. For 200 Federal Reserve notes, you can get Marc Faber's investment newsletter, for 50,000 FRN you can invest in Peter Schiff's brokerage firm, and for 2,000 you can have someone from Mises speak at your event.

>Considering the von Mises Institute considers Somalia to be an example of Austrianism in action

Edward didn't make this up:

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It
http://mises.org/story/2066</p>

Yet estimates of human development place Somalia near the bottom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index

Jumping on gold now would be insanely stupid. The only reason it's reason as much as it has is because so many people are investing in it. Just because gold "always has value" doesn't mean when you artificially inflate it to hell that the value you've created is real in of itself.

How about this for Austrianists' delusions of grandeur:

For Civilization, It Is Mises or Bust
http://mises.org/daily/3917</p>

Replace Mises with your favorite ideologue, and it would make as much sense. For civilization, it is Christ/Marx/Hitler/Fuller/Fresco/Rand/Hubbard/LaRouche/Gore etc. or bust. (I know a guy who says that sort of thing about Lyndon LaRouche, in fact.)

These partisans apparently don't understand man's ability to muddle through adversity using his own resources, and without an intellectual or guru telling how to do it.

Changing the subject slightly, I've noticed a couple of conflicting stereotypes about atheism and atheists:

1. Atheism made the Soviet Union warlike and oppressive; atheism makes Western Europe pacifist and weak.

2. Atheist men engage in sexual promiscuity; atheist men lack the social skills to find sex partners. (The christians like Vox Day who promote the latter stereotype intend it as a put down. But don't they also believe in sexual abstinence, and shouldn't they commend these atheist men for not fornicating?)

Casey just doesn't like it that the ruling elite in the U.S. considers Austrianists about as inconsequential as Lyndon LaRouche, unless an Austrianist with some prestige plays along, like Alan Greenspan. They don't want to admit that they've wasted time and energy on promoting an inferior product.

Someone on another forum claims that Austrianists have done solid work on the theory of the business cycle. Well, the Wikipedia article on business cycles considers that work a minority opinion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle</p>

Economic progress didn't even exist until about 250 years ago, with the start of the Industrial Revolution in England, so we may not yet have enough experience with business cycles to understand why they happen. Consider this analogy: It took the efforts of generations of astronomers, across a succession of civilizations, before scientists in the 17th Century could formulate an accurate model of planetary motion. The road to understanding took a detour through Ptolemaic astronomy, which we've long since discarded. By way of analogy, the economics of business cycles might not have left its "Ptolemaic" stage yet.

Well, all those state banks issued too much paper money, which the market gladly accepted even though people could still use gold as money also.

The whole "printing money" idea has become obsolete these days. By now most financial transactions happen electronically, yet another technological advance the market has embraced enthusiastically. Do Austrianists want to come out as enemies of that?

Buy gold! The black helicopters are coming!

Can you imagine the hassles of trying to use gold for money in the modern world? Suppose someone tried to wire you some money you urgently need, but the receiving business couldn't honor the draft because it didn't have enough gold coins in the strongbox.

You know I once asked somebody at a Ron Paul booth about why gold is so great to have when the economy collapses. He said when the new currency comes in you will have preserved your net worth. Well that's all fine and dandy, but what are you going to do in between when you have no food, water, or electricity?

Advancedatheist: I have wondered how the cashier would give me change when I handed them a 10 oz. bar of gold for a loaf of bread. In fact Bob Moriarty once claimed that gold would be like handing in bills and silver would be the change.

On another note, I seem to remember reading one of the Austrian doomsayers talk about how wonderful it would when we could take gold to the supermarket. He even talked about getting whatever tenths of an ounce and getting the change.