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That sounds very much like what Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek had been advocating. He also discussed prices as being information signals. The danger of go

That sounds very much like what Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek had been advocating. He also discussed prices as being information signals. The danger of government money-printing is that the government ends up distorting the supply of money entering various industries (especially through big government contracts) and thus, to some extent, ends up determining what is profitable and what is not profitable... Then we end up with an economic system wherein winners are selected not on the basis of their adherence to the needs of working people, but on the basis of their adherence to the whims of government bureaucrats.

jongjong 4y ago
On a related subject, I can understand why reserve banks and governments think that they can use money printing as an incentive mechanism to fight against climate change, but so far, it does not seem to be effective because government bureaucrats are terrible stakeholders when it comes to the climate; they do not have the ability to differentiate between the kinds of ventures which will genuinely help to fight climate change and those which are merely engaging in green-washing... And it's too easy for government officials to claim plausible deniability when their true intentions have been to help their corporate friends get their hands on big stacks of public 'ESG' money. I think the problem both has to do with incentives (since government bureaucrats do not 'own' the climate; it's not really their problem) and also with capabilities (they generally do not have the scientific knowledge/qualifications or the critical thinking skills required to be able to effectively make such decisions). Climate change is a very complex topic, it's probable that nobody in the world fully understands all the dynamics which drive it because every single thing (living and non-living) which exists on this planet is a factor contributing either towards or against global warming and everything is interconnected with complex feedback loops... So it's difficult to see how politicians who do not have any scientific background would be able to know how to allocate funding to fight climate change. There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether; in this case, the whole global warming narrative could be seen as nothing but a giant financial scheme to launder freshly printed money from governments to large corporate entities under the ESG label.
- mellavora 4y ago
  Your first paragraph makes sense, but your reasoning on climate change is lacking. > Climate change is a very complex topic everything ..interconnected with complex feedback loops. Main driver of global warming is CO2/methane levels. Main drivers of CO2/methane levels since the industrial revolution are human. That's not complex. > There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether This is only true if you are loose with your definition of "many" and/or "scientists". The reason for the apparent confusion over climate change is a well-funded long-term initiative by the oil industry to create confusion by creating fake complexity and doubt.
  - jongjong 4y ago
    >> That's not complex. Humans only contribute around 3% of total CO2 emissions... That's almost certainly less than normal year-on-year variability of CO2 emissions from purely natural sources. The level of volcanic activity (which, on its own contributes more CO2 than humans) is not the same every year. It's difficult to see how human impact on climate change could be significant. Another thing is that CO2 is good for plants and trees; so increased CO2 should contribute to global greening; and there is evidence of this occurring. Since plants consume carbon dioxide, one would think that more plants and trees on earth would mean that more carbon dioxide would be taken out of the atmosphere. It seems like mother nature has already figured out how to achieve CO2 equilibrium. Do the climate change models account for things like global greening? Do they account for the fact that plants can evolve to adapt to a changing environment (with more CO2) through the process of natural selection? A good environmental model would have to account for all the different plant populations around the world and their DNA changes over time... We would have to understand how plant genes affect CO2 consumption; and the simulation would involve trillions of variables and probably require millions or billions of times all the world's current computational capacity to compute accurately. That's barely scratching the surface of the complexity. It's arrogant and disingenuous to suggest that it's simple. All scientists have been able to establish to far is correlation. There is no evidence of causation. Establishing causation is likely impossible due to the huge number of variables involved. Not only do we not fully understand how all the variables interact, we don't even know what all the variables are because the earth is so complex and massive.
_jal 4y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that it depends on mis-modeling the government. Doing so is intrinsic - the argument is that market effects caused by government action is different than that caused by other market actors. The usual reason given is that government action is not "voluntary", for definitions of voluntary that don't model reality very well.[1] The reality is that various market participants have powers the others don't. One can argue that the law treats me and Goldman Sachs the same. (I'd also argue that's false, but at least there is a kernel of a case there.) But nobody can argue with a straight face that I have the capabilities to make the same bets. Repeat in thousands of different ways for different actors. Similarly, the government has special powers that others don't. Indeed, if you treat "government" as a monolithic entity, it is certainly the most powerful actor. But it it just another actor. (Or rather a number of different actors in different contexts, sometimes fighting with each other.) When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices. Change your model or complain about reality. The Austrian school has made a philosophy out of the second. [1] The idea that choosing to feed your kids is a voluntary act but choosing to pay your taxes is not runs contrary to most peoples' moral intuition.
- jongjong 4y ago
  My suspicion is that any asymmetry in the markets which makes it even slightly easier for one participant to make a profit over another is going to have a huge impact on determining which participants survive and which do not. I think this is why there are so many large monopolies today; they've been getting a little extra help; their profit margins have been a little bit bigger and they received a little bit more government contracts (or bailouts) during the economic downturns than their competitors.
- tremon 4y ago
  When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices: change your model or complain about reality This should be on a t-shirt, I feel. Or on a tegeltje (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegeltjeswijsheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegeltjeswijsheid)
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  You just eviscerating an instance of a problem I see damn near every time I follow a link to mises.org, and the pattern of argument that got me to give up on ever getting value out of Ayn Rand's essays the time I gave that a shot, and you did it better than I likely could have. Thanks you, because those bug the hell out of me. Smug-ass more-logical-than-you tone (which is itself part of the con, so you feel good when you identify with them and start to repeat their arguments, and can more easily dismiss other ideas as "emotion-driven" or whatever, so you don't slip away from the pack) while apparently hoping I won't notice the parlor tricks they pulled near the beginning where they were relying on folksy, naïve definitions of key terms, and trying to sneak poorly-justified premises past me. And it seems to work on lots of people, is the worst part. Damned charlatans.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> Then we end up with an economic system wherein winners are selected not on the basis of their adherence to the needs of working people, but on the basis of their adherence to the whims of government bureaucrats. You mean like Uber or WeWork? Just remove "government" and it works just as well. Let's not pretend that the government is the only entity that distorts the market and pushes through preferred solution regardless of "the needs of working people".
- jongjong 4y ago
  Private bank loans also play a part in increasing the money supply and inflating bubbles too. But who is to blame for reserve banking and our current soft-money standard which facilitates endless cycles of extreme booms and busts?
aidenn0 4y ago
For those who prefer to learn Hayek's argument in rap-battle form, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

jongjong 4y ago

On a related subject, I can understand why reserve banks and governments think that they can use money printing as an incentive mechanism to fight against climate change, but so far, it does not seem to be effective because government bureaucrats are terrible stakeholders when it comes to the climate; they do not have the ability to differentiate between the kinds of ventures which will genuinely help to fight climate change and those which are merely engaging in green-washing... And it's too easy for government officials to claim plausible deniability when their true intentions have been to help their corporate friends get their hands on big stacks of public 'ESG' money. I think the problem both has to do with incentives (since government bureaucrats do not 'own' the climate; it's not really their problem) and also with capabilities (they generally do not have the scientific knowledge/qualifications or the critical thinking skills required to be able to effectively make such decisions). Climate change is a very complex topic, it's probable that nobody in the world fully understands all the dynamics which drive it because every single thing (living and non-living) which exists on this planet is a factor contributing either towards or against global warming and everything is interconnected with complex feedback loops... So it's difficult to see how politicians who do not have any scientific background would be able to know how to allocate funding to fight climate change. There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether; in this case, the whole global warming narrative could be seen as nothing but a giant financial scheme to launder freshly printed money from governments to large corporate entities under the ESG label.

mellavora 4y ago
Your first paragraph makes sense, but your reasoning on climate change is lacking. > Climate change is a very complex topic everything ..interconnected with complex feedback loops. Main driver of global warming is CO2/methane levels. Main drivers of CO2/methane levels since the industrial revolution are human. That's not complex. > There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether This is only true if you are loose with your definition of "many" and/or "scientists". The reason for the apparent confusion over climate change is a well-funded long-term initiative by the oil industry to create confusion by creating fake complexity and doubt.
- jongjong 4y ago
  >> That's not complex. Humans only contribute around 3% of total CO2 emissions... That's almost certainly less than normal year-on-year variability of CO2 emissions from purely natural sources. The level of volcanic activity (which, on its own contributes more CO2 than humans) is not the same every year. It's difficult to see how human impact on climate change could be significant. Another thing is that CO2 is good for plants and trees; so increased CO2 should contribute to global greening; and there is evidence of this occurring. Since plants consume carbon dioxide, one would think that more plants and trees on earth would mean that more carbon dioxide would be taken out of the atmosphere. It seems like mother nature has already figured out how to achieve CO2 equilibrium. Do the climate change models account for things like global greening? Do they account for the fact that plants can evolve to adapt to a changing environment (with more CO2) through the process of natural selection? A good environmental model would have to account for all the different plant populations around the world and their DNA changes over time... We would have to understand how plant genes affect CO2 consumption; and the simulation would involve trillions of variables and probably require millions or billions of times all the world's current computational capacity to compute accurately. That's barely scratching the surface of the complexity. It's arrogant and disingenuous to suggest that it's simple. All scientists have been able to establish to far is correlation. There is no evidence of causation. Establishing causation is likely impossible due to the huge number of variables involved. Not only do we not fully understand how all the variables interact, we don't even know what all the variables are because the earth is so complex and massive.

_jal 4y ago

The problem with this reasoning is that it depends on mis-modeling the government. Doing so is intrinsic - the argument is that market effects caused by government action is different than that caused by other market actors. The usual reason given is that government action is not "voluntary", for definitions of voluntary that don't model reality very well.[1] The reality is that various market participants have powers the others don't. One can argue that the law treats me and Goldman Sachs the same. (I'd also argue that's false, but at least there is a kernel of a case there.) But nobody can argue with a straight face that I have the capabilities to make the same bets. Repeat in thousands of different ways for different actors. Similarly, the government has special powers that others don't. Indeed, if you treat "government" as a monolithic entity, it is certainly the most powerful actor. But it it just another actor. (Or rather a number of different actors in different contexts, sometimes fighting with each other.) When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices. Change your model or complain about reality. The Austrian school has made a philosophy out of the second. [1] The idea that choosing to feed your kids is a voluntary act but choosing to pay your taxes is not runs contrary to most peoples' moral intuition.

jongjong 4y ago
My suspicion is that any asymmetry in the markets which makes it even slightly easier for one participant to make a profit over another is going to have a huge impact on determining which participants survive and which do not. I think this is why there are so many large monopolies today; they've been getting a little extra help; their profit margins have been a little bit bigger and they received a little bit more government contracts (or bailouts) during the economic downturns than their competitors.
tremon 4y ago
When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices: change your model or complain about reality This should be on a t-shirt, I feel. Or on a tegeltje (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegeltjeswijsheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegeltjeswijsheid)
yamtaddle 4y ago
You just eviscerating an instance of a problem I see damn near every time I follow a link to mises.org, and the pattern of argument that got me to give up on ever getting value out of Ayn Rand's essays the time I gave that a shot, and you did it better than I likely could have. Thanks you, because those bug the hell out of me. Smug-ass more-logical-than-you tone (which is itself part of the con, so you feel good when you identify with them and start to repeat their arguments, and can more easily dismiss other ideas as "emotion-driven" or whatever, so you don't slip away from the pack) while apparently hoping I won't notice the parlor tricks they pulled near the beginning where they were relying on folksy, naïve definitions of key terms, and trying to sneak poorly-justified premises past me. And it seems to work on lots of people, is the worst part. Damned charlatans.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> Then we end up with an economic system wherein winners are selected not on the basis of their adherence to the needs of working people, but on the basis of their adherence to the whims of government bureaucrats. You mean like Uber or WeWork? Just remove "government" and it works just as well. Let's not pretend that the government is the only entity that distorts the market and pushes through preferred solution regardless of "the needs of working people".

jongjong 4y ago
Private bank loans also play a part in increasing the money supply and inflating bubbles too. But who is to blame for reserve banking and our current soft-money standard which facilitates endless cycles of extreme booms and busts?

aidenn0 4y ago

For those who prefer to learn Hayek's argument in rap-battle form, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk