Admin of "Austrian Economics" Reddit Deleting Articles for Ridiculous Reasons

michaelsuede · 2012-05-26T08:30:52.165742+00:00

I think having more than one moderator might have a better effect. Its not as if Nielsio is 100% wrong. The general feeling is that he might take his role too seriously, not that he's incapable of performing it. IMO two or more moderators will achieve a better result than simply changing ONE person, we're supposed to be ancaps after all ;-)

michaelsuede · 2012-05-26T08:06:47.542529+00:00

I've had 2 posts removed by Nielsio because of editorializing the title and he adviced me on how to achieve the effect I wanted while also avoid editorialization. I resubmitted on both accounts and had my submission normally posted. The exchange with Nielsio was polite and I for one can vouch to his intentions and ethics (from my personal experiences). So for what its worth I support him and encourage him to continue his hard work.

By the way, the post about private companies being created to stop Somali Pirates IS related to AE.

Grdeken · 2 days

Should banks be limited in the scope of involvement in securities, insurance, etc?

Personally I think regulations should follow the spirit of "If you break it you pay it", I think regulations that impose strict and precise restrictions are more likely to fail, in part, because there's no way to plan for every single case that might occur and because its not possible to figure out everything what migth go wrong until it had gone wrong. And when that happens you need to rewrite thousands of pages (possibly) and that will also take a lot of time, etc.

If they weren't "over-leveraged" could the crisis been tamed or avoided?

Also related to the first point, are you familiar with Taleb's black swan theory? Basically, we base our statistical knowledege around the idea of the normal distribution, as in the most common cases, but Taleb points out that the real danger lies on on the margin of error, and the methods to minimize such danger also hace a margin of error, etc, etc. so as long as we fail to understand the outliers (the black swans) then we don't really understand anything. taleb calls the crisis a black swan so I think there are deeper, perhaps structural, problems than the over-leveraging of banks.

Grdeken · 2 days

Unbiased or not, one should always weight the arguments and the evidence that supports it. If it was so easy to implement the scientific method in economics (controlled experiments and repeatibility of experiments, etc.) there would hardly be a need for debate.

So, do you have any counterarguments or evidence to disprove the one presented here?

guyty416 · 2 days

Well, there are already many good insights in this thread but I'll try to add a few that hasn't been mentioned yet so I'll just raise a couple of points:

wealth is not static, on a free market you create wealth, instead of simply accumulate it or transfering it, by providing goods and services other people want/need.
Related to above, who creates money? We are interested in wealth, of course, but money is how we represent and transfer wealth (through buying and selling) so no monopoly on money makes it difficult for anyone to "have all the money", its kind of how people in thirld world countries try to keep a bank account in dollars just in case anything happens with their own currency.

xProphet · 2 days

I second this idea.

Grdeken · 3 days

This one does: We Didn't Deregulate

Banks had figured out how to dodge the Glass-Steagall prohibition on ownership of firms “engaged principally” in underwriting and securities dealings. They simply formed subsidiaries that conducted a large enough volume of other business that they could legitimately claim they escaped the “engaged principally” clause. This avenue was not available to smaller institutions that could not marshal the required volume of business to employ this dodge. Thus by the 1990s Glass-Steagall was fast becoming a dead letter. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 acknowledged the situation and provided a straightforward path toward financial integration as opposed to the variety of side routes that had been taken. Incidentally, no other developed country has ever seen fit to separate commercial banking from investment banking. Banks in Germany and Switzerland have always been free to engage in underwriting and securities holding to no obvious harm. British banks are slightly more regulated: They are not allowed to sell insurance.

illeatyourheart · 3 days

not sure if being sarcastic or not...

reddit4 · 3 days

It can be seen that he assumes that all Marxists want are higher wages and (probably) unions within a capitalist economic framework. A serious inquisition into the literature and history of people's wars that might be said to have begun with Marx's theories would find this assumption to be completely false.

What would be an accurate representation of Marxists and what they want in your opinion?

devilsadvocado · 4 days

I imagine its theoretically possible but its such a recurring theme in sci-fi that I supposed they've installed safety measures to prevent that. Now, whether some terrorist hacker can override them or whether there's a bug in the safety measures.... who knows?

TestZero · 4 days

There's a whole wikipedia entry, apparently it was Rousseau who started this:

Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, seeing as Confessions was, on the whole, a very inaccurate autobiography: "The 'facts' he so frankly admits often emerge, in the light of modern scholarship, to be inaccurate, distorted or non-existent";[4] and his work is the oldest source for the saying.

devilsadvocado · 4 days

Thanks, I'll read it ASAP. I'm not sure what to recommend, I usually don't read a lot of stuff on religion (or philosophy for that matter, not enough for sure) but for some reason Orson Scott Card-Religion--The Nature Of Existence came to my mind as I read your comment. His Ender's Game novels are full with religious ideas (including freewill), its not so obvious in the first novel but its unmistakable on the subsequent novels.

Quite on a different note, but always about religion, I'm still enjoying God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundation of Modern Science.

devilsadvocado · 4 days

I knew freewill as the answer to why does bad things happen to good people (of course there may be other explanations). Its the (now) obvious relation between freewill and God as the überlibertarian that was missing.

devilsadvocado · 4 days

If that surprises you then sit down before you read about Jeffrey Tucker from the Mises Institute or Judge Napolitano. :-D

devilsadvocado · 4 days

God as the ultimate libertarian who champions free will above all else.

Never thought about it that way but I like the concept.

phileconomicus · 5 days

but with some data to back this up

Such as?

elliebell370 · 5 days

Thanks, you may enjoy this Funk you up list.

ToddAC · 5 days

Meta

agenthauser · 5 days

Has too many close shots for my taste. It has way too many scenes where u just see their faces and some flashing red, then blue, etc. If they would have made those shots from further away then it would easily be number 1.

eclecticEntrepreneur · 5 days

the notion that "the state" will act benevolently when nothing else in society will.

This ought to be repeated more!

eclecticEntrepreneur · 5 days

I agree and I have read the manifesto its just that to me it doesn't seem like the meaning of communism has changed at all, but neilmcc made a good point that, excluding modern liberals, most people associate all kinds of things with communism that has little to do with what it means. Problem is, as you have succintly expressed it: if you plow a field and plant the seed, why are you surprised when the crop comes in?

lukeman3000 · 6 days

I love Rurouni Kenshin, the OVAs, the series and the manga! But... that particular episode of the sumo wrestlers is actually the kind of crap I don't like about the series. Its not actually part of the manga (IIRC) but a part of some episodes they threw in to make the series longer than the manga (for business purposes of course). Those episodes with some wacky pirates and the other of a little kid who was being trained by some crazy swordmen are also part of the filler episodes.

Everything else, what's actually part of the manga is amazing! Kenshin torturing himself over his past and how he had to learn to let go of his dark past and use that acceptance to actually become stronger spoke to me directly and is why I've watched and rewatched bothe the series and OVAs and read the manga more than once. It really spoke to me.

eclecticEntrepreneur · 6 days

It still means worker ownership of the means of production, at least in the minds of the modern leftist you mentioned, but I guess it means somehting totally different in the minds of the general populace. The problem with that concept, IMHO, is that while the concept of worker ownership sounds nice, it has meaning only in the world of magical realism where worker thinks and acts as a single entity. I don't see how it might be implemented in the real world. Best I've found so far are Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution but he's more a philosopher than an econmist and seems to ignore (understandably) basic intuitions from game theory.

Maxcactus · 6 days

Acemoglu on Why Nations Fail about Diamond:

There's a very interesting thesis that Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel sort of formulated, which is that really the geographic factors determined where early civilizations blossomed, and that, almost in a deterministic way, shaped which societies are more developed today. And we go in detail about why we sort of disagree with the thesis and why it's not really capable of explaining the patterns of what we see around us today; but they are interesting sort of variants of this.

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TROPHY CASE

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