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JAlanKatz, you should read the first paragraph in the "Theory and History" Introduction : http://www.mises.org/Books/theoryhistory.pdf. Here, Mises does not reject determinism outright, but rather just says it's not practical at this time: "Man—up to now [cannot] bridge the gulf that he sees yawning between mind and matter ... science
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>Your view of "indeterminism" seems based on a dichotomy - either things are determined, or they are random. Scientifically it's impossible to know the true nature of things. The dichotomy is that you either have a model with experimentally-proven predictive power, or you have no such model. You can say that something behaves "randomly"
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I'm not sure what Dennett's ideas are. I don't believe in free will. It is possible in some circumstances to reliably predict what people will do. For example, if you struck a policeman the outcome would be predictable. We lack a practical theory accurately prediciting peoples' behavior under every possible scenario; but that simply
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Since part of a bank's job is to serve as a warehouse of money, it seems natural that the existence of a bank would help decrease the money supply. It would encourage the transformation of money from liquid into illiquid forms: from cash into checking and savings acounts. Money warehouses are deflationary. The effect is minor since forms like checking
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[quote user="Calvin"] If 100 gold coins represent the total amount of money in circulation, then the most that can be paid for the Mona Lisa is 100 gold coins. [/quote] Really? But for a Mona Lisa, I would offer 100 gold coins plus an Etch & Sketch. In fact, these gold coins are not sufficient as a medium of exchange and fail to qualify
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So this bank has no debtors in default? And it's able to charge an inelastic interest rate? Does this bank not face competiton from other lenders? If the bank really does deplete the money supply, by holding the majority of it in reserves, then it seems that it is not able to be very productive in comparison to its vast resources. Wouldn't the
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gethky, in your example of the bank loaning money, you act like the interest that the bank earns simply disappears from circulation. It does not. It is used to pay employees, to build new buildings, to purchase advertising, or it is loaned back out. It is still in circulation. >We cannot bid up the price for everything at once. For the price of all
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Fed's mission is to inflate the money supply in order to set an interest rate below the value that the market would ordinarilly choose. The inflation has the effect of spurring malinvestment, devaluing the dollar, and transferring wealth from everyone into the hands of banks. The Fed also has duties
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>So inflation is 'good' for borrowers. Well, owing a shrinking debt, measured in dollars, is nice. However, because everyone has come to expect the continual inflation of the money supply, borrowers have greater demand for the loans, and lenders need to charge more interest. The two kinds of partcipants come to a compromise, and in effect