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>I happen to like property rights Actually, on second thought, people disrespect property rights frequently. For example, taking a toy away from a misbehaving child. Or slaughtering an animal. Similarly, if I was a superintelligent being, I might impose my will over you for your own good and establish a communist, utilitarian society where I choose
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>property rights as simply legal fictions, not something that objectively exists in reality Of course they are fictions. Have you ever touched a property right? I think I'm a moral relativist. There is no way of proving what "should" be done, unless you subscribe to some moral axioms and deduce things from there. My moral axioms might
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Issuing a backed currency provides convenience to your customers, so it is a way to increase the scope of your business. The main reason for issuing an unbacked currency is to abuse people's trust in your currency and secretly confiscate wealth by producing more of it. Historically this happens with every fiat currency. For example, since 1913 the
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[quote]The one thing that is absent from this that you all can help answer for me are the economic implications of such huge military spending... I saw somewhere on this site that it hurts the economy in a lot of ways. How is that? [/quote] Spending $2 trillion on two failed wars hurts the same way flushing $2 trillion down the toilet hurts. Is it really
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> “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” I don't understand why you think this statement is weak. It is stronger than its two parts, "A well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state" and "The right
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[quote]I prefer a simple minimalist argument: the aggressor bears the burden of proving himself justified in acting. No justification is possible, for the simple reason that any justification must ultimately boil down to a circular argument.[/quote] Aggression can be logically justified. For example, if I'm trapped on a raft and the other person
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I saw an article by George Reisman the other day and realized I could not understand any of it. It's peppered full of economic terms, for example, "savings" and "investment". Is there a standard definition for such terms? Or does it differ between economic schools? Without agreed upon definitions of terms, one can't get very
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>Amazing how a group of people with supposedly exceptional educational credentials can understand so little about money and the economy? Are they really idiots who don't understand what they are doing? Or perhaps they do understand exactly what they are doing? They work for a private organization after all, and I suspect that their job is not
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I did read some of his drivel at the website and, the more I read, the more inane and/or irrelevant it all seems. The only part of the site I liked reading is http://www.szasz.com/critics.htm Here are a few quotes from Szasz. " There was no evidence for a humoral imbalance causing illness, but the doctrine prevailed for two thousand years."
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Why do you say "real estate bubble"? I thought the Fed doubled the money supply over the last 7 years. Ceteris paribus house prices should also have doubled.