Economics and Ethics

Here, read this, and attempt to understand the true nature of our economy, our market, before calling for regulation. Everything that we see in American business is the result of government distortion. The structure and operation of a corporation are restricted and shaped by the tangles of federal and state corporate laws. The boom/bust cycle of the dollar is the result of socialized central banking. The problems everyone complains about are what we get for allowing a group of people to commit massive violations of the basic ethic of the non-aggression principle. Read this writing on the non-aggression principle. Not only are the current regulations unethical, they also cause most of the problems of our economy. This is no free market. Unfortunately, we seem bent on learning that “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism” the hard way.

Why Socialism is discredited

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book called Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis which explained that socialism and its related systems do not work because there is no way to do economic calculations which are necessary to efficiently allocate goods for production. It is available here.
F. A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom which explained that all socialist systems must devolve to totalitarianism. Oh well.
Anyway, that should clear that up.

Spring Musical at School

So, I have been working on the tech crew for the spring musical, which is Urinetown. It claims to be a criticism of capitalism, but it is not. I think the main problem is that the writer, Greg Kotis probably does not know what capitalism is. Capitalism is a system involving voluntary exchanges of goods and services. Both the pre- and post-revolutionary systems of Urinetown resemble Socialist systems.
In the pre-revolutionary system, there is no free market in the use of toilets. One can only use the public toilets, which are pay-to-use, and it seems that this money goes back directly to the government. The Urine Good Company (groan) is effectively an arm of the government that is a perfect copy of most real government “services”. It only survives because a static economic situation has been created. The purpose that the UGC serves, which is to maintain water levels in a drought, would be rendered useless if an efficient water purification system was created.
The post revolutionary system has removed the pay-to-use aspect of the UGC, but is still maintains a monopoly on bathrooms. Soon, the people die, because the lack of a free market and the disturbance of the static economic situation means that there is no economic calculation system; the law of supply and demand can do no work here.
In both situations, the effects of the drought would have easily been mitigated under a free market, because the cost of water would have been raised, reducing the usage of water without any top-down coercion; at the same time, demand for water purification would lead to a boom in this market, soon destroying the effects of the drought, while keeping everyone alive in the meantime.
At the end of the musical, there is a piece entitled “Hail, Malthus”. Well, I hate to be the one to break it, but Malthus has been discredited; the fact that I can waste time writing this testifies to that. The free market is not a zero sum game; the saying “make money” is true under such a system (voluntary exchanges increase the value of money). Any time a good decreases in supply, it becomes more expensive, and the demand lessens, and new goods tend to fill the gap. Oh well. Greg Kotis is a playwright; feelings are the rule, who cares about reason?

On the economic highway, there is no middle way.

“Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism”
This is a writing by Ludwig von Mises that explains the problem with the thinking that has made the US government so huge, and so controlling. Essentially, it proves that the theoretical “middle of the road” between free-market (true) capitalism, and socialism is: 1) unstable and 2) really a entirely separate system. It really lines up with what I see going on in politics today