I was reading thru some of Webster Tarpley's stuff and found his views refreshing from a non-Austrian viewpoint but am not convinced. He seems to lump Austrians together with the likes of other economic schools that do have distinct differences. He also seems to focus on Hoover's rhetoric rather than his actions. I'm curious to get other more learned individuals' opinions on his thoughts that just having a gold standard will not create an industrial base in-and-of-itself and his idea to make derivatives illegal?
I'm going to echo Byzantine, and I will quote a passage of pure WTF-ness:
Monetarism is based on the von Hayek-von Mises Austrian school, which started when a bunch of rent-gouging Viennese landlords wanted to abolish rent control and hired some scribblers to prove that “the market” was always infallible and government is always the enemy. Von Hayek got his chance under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back rickets, scurvy and pellagra for British working people. The dumbed-down US version of the same doctrine is Milton Friedman and his Rockefeller-funded Chicago School, which got its big road test under the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile.
What? Monetarism is NOT based on the Austrian School, it is debatable whether it is even a school proper. It is more of a reaction to Keynesianism. The Austrian School greatly predates it. And as usual, this joke tries to paint the Austrians as defending some "reactionary" (of course malevolent) interests. Where's his proof? This is little more than name-calling. This paper is a refreshingly ignorant, openly dumb exposition/articulation of leftist views.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
Banning anything desired by humans is idiotic as people simply work around the bans, think pot. This is especially true for the class of financial instruments ,I prefer the term contracts, known as derivatives. The only folks against these are people who want world wide socialism (poverty, high prices, inefficient delivery of goods and services, mass murder, etc) and the sellers of these contracts that have to pay them off. Everyone else benefits from their existence and continued use. How much more would the cost be for these things: food, petrol, timber, steel, etc without Futures (Derivative) contracted buying and selling.
As for the ultimate evil, the credit default swap, these are simply insurance contracts taken out by loan underwriters in case their ultimate borrower is unable to pay their loans off. It is a perfectly useful device that protects underwriters for a fee. The current case has AIG selling these contracts in access of the loans to the borrowers. This is fine and AIG should cease its existence and the bankruptcy court should handle who gets what left.
But this is also going to bring down the Ultraman of finance: Goldman Sachs who is using all of their political power to force the government to cover the contracts for AIG. So there is nothing wrong with deritivative contracts except when added to government force.
SO:The best solution for the economy is to have AIG and its partners cease to exist and keep the derivative contracts.
Jon Irenicus: Von Hayek got his chance under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back rickets, scurvy and pellagra for British working people.
Von Hayek got his chance under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back rickets, scurvy and pellagra for British working people.
This is something I have often heard from the left i.e. Hayek is to blame for Thatchers actions etc. This is of course totally idiotic. If anyone takes the time to study the situation in Britain in the 1980s then you cans ee Thatcher was as much a Statist as Gordon Brown's government. They just seemed slightly better at avoiding a huge national debt.
However Thatcher was guilty of using the police as her politcal force for smashing anyone that disagreed with her, hardly very Libertarian.
To the fundemental issue of banning deriviatives - does this not parallel some of the philosophy of banning fiat currency? Isn't fiat currency a kind of derivative in and of itself? I guess libertarian philosophy would not seek to ban fiat currency but rather allow a return to the gold standard?