[Truth To Power]

Garbage with no basis in fact, logic or reality. It does play that role in modern mainstream neoclassical economics, but that's not based on fact, logic or reality, either.

Why do you ignore the plain meaning of your own words?

I won't even try to guess what you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about.

Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce.

This is quite clearly a justification of markets based on value.

No; it doesn't mention markets at all.

But value has no meaning outside of markets (unless you're a Marxist, which I doubt).

Value is what something would trade for, so in that sense it is a phenomenon of markets; but that doesn't mean it has no other meaning. We pay attention to value precisely because it has such obvious relationships with utility.

You are literally making an empty statement: market value cannot be determined outside of a market setting.

That wasn't my statement.

This is true in the most trivial sense, but it does nothing to help us understand the need for markets.

It does give some support: the relation of value to utility.

Incidentally, we do need markets, just not the kind we have now.

True: too many people think they can over-rule the market (they can't), and too few understand that they can change the market to yield the results they wanted to (but couldn't) achieve by over-ruling it.

The existence of a market is justified by the individual rights to liberty and property in the fruits of one's labor.

There is no logical connection between the subject and predicate.

Now you are just saying anything.

Controlling the fruits of other people's labor is is not a right I am willing to acknowledge.

That's you. Other people are willing to know the fact that rightful property is conserved in consensual exchange.

[KlassWar]

True: too many people think they can over-rule the market (they can't), and too few understand that they can change the market to yield the results they wanted to (but couldn't) achieve by over-ruling it.

This is an absurdity, pure and simple. If the market can be manipulated to suit an economic actor's agenda, it can by definition be overruled by that economic actor.

[quetzalcoatl]

That's you. Other people are willing to know the fact that rightful property is conserved in consensual exchange.

Other people are wrong. Consensual exchange is a chimera for the vast majority of people who exist or have ever existed on the face of this mudball. Power imbalance nullifies consent. Coercion and implicit aggression are built into most exchanges, particularly those between employers and employees. We tolerate them because we have to, and it's better than starving or being arrested.

At any rate, 'rightful' is meaningless other than as a legal definition. The oligarchy controls the police and courts to assure their rights are preserved. No other rights exist.

[blackjack21]

Nah, it was sustainable, but only at the price of social sacrifice ...

Well, my more economical way of stating is, "communism doesn't work." Same thing.

You mean like the fact that the economy is vastly stronger than it was under Bush?

Printing money isn't what makes the economy strong. Obama's annualized growth rate has been 2.24% out of the recession, which is the slowest post-WWII recovery.

Or that we have modernized our forces and right-sized our military to face the world threat?

With ~150 F-22s? Or are you talking about F-35s? Much of our gear dates to the Reagan era. The major gains we've seen militarily are in drone technology. If we get UCAVs to the Navy, I can eat my words. However, we're not there yet. Then we have to ask whether stealth really matters with UCAVs. With a UCAV, you don't lose a pilot if it gets shot down, and you aren't stuck with a 9G limit in turns. So battle flight geometry necessarily changes, and that may mean that in first generation UCAVs, stealth isn't really necessary provided we're fighting today's modern Russian, European or Asian (Chinese) jets and air defenses. We instead need to focus on new maneuvers in battle flight geometry.

However, a lot of that doesn't matter when you're in a religious and cultural war, rather than an economic one. American popular culture is pretty vapid, so I can see why an Islamist wouldn't be terribly impressed.

That we have virtually extracted ourselves from a tiresome backward region of the world and successfully completed a pivot to the East?

A tiresome backward region that is the fuel station of economic growth... Oil isn't irrelevant. Further, we haven't defeated the enemy by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Obama is finally admitting this via his Secretary of Defense. Ashton Carter: U.S. to Begin 'Direct Action on the Ground' in Iraq, Syria

We have begun the control of medical costs in the US, improved care and insured more people than ever?

Most of us are paying a lot more for health insurance, if that's what you mean by control. Forcing people to purchase insurance they don't want isn't really a measure of success.

GOP seizes on collapse of Obamacare co-ops

The recent demise of Kentucky Health Cooperative, a nonprofit startup seeded with federal loan dollars under the Affordable Care Act, is part of a bigger, national trend. More than a third of the 23 nonprofit health plans created under Obamacare with $2.4 billion in federal loan dollars have collapsed, and most experts predict more failures on the horizon. Late last week, South Carolina’s co-op became the ninth to fail, following similar crashes in Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska and New York.

Why ObamaCare Is Failing

“ObamaCare will almost inevitably be reopened in 2017, whoever wins the election,” notes a Journal editorial. That’s because young and healthy people continue to steer clear of this wealth-transfer scheme. The result is that in 11 states in 2014, the average plan paid more in claims than it collected in premiums. “This month the Health and Human Services Department dramatically discounted its internal estimate of how many people will join the state insurance exchanges in 2016,” writes the editorial board, adding that “for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.”

And deductibles are skyrocketing along with rates. Nice try Drlee. The problem is that if the people who join are older or have pre-existing conditions, and the young avoid this like the plague, rates rise. We were promised we'd save $2400 per year with a family of four. Clearly that has not materialized.

Trump: Obamacare health care premiums 'going up 35, 45, 55 percent'

The extent of the Iraqi collapse in 1991 may have come as a surprise to certain members of the Soviet military leadership (it should not have considering Arab performance during the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Iraq-Iran war) but ultimately the Iraqi military of 1990 was not the Soviet military of 1990.

Well the Iran-Iraq War is interesting in footprints, because Iran had a lot of American military hardware and Iraq had a lot of Soviet and French military hardware. So the fact that it was fought to a stalemate probably gave the Soviets a lot of comfort that they would defeat American arms or at least hold their own in battle.

In 1990's Iraq the US had certainly found a Vietnam era combatant, the Soviet military however had left the 1960's well behind them.

Remember, that in the 1980s, the Iraqis hit a US destroyer, the USS Stark with an Exocet missile fired from a French-made fighter. I would note that the ship did not sink, whereas in the Falklands campaign, the UK lost two ships to Exocet missiles.

The performance of Patriot during the first Gulf war (and the second ... hell even today) is widely acknowledged as abysmal.

The Patriot missile system is anti-aircraft, not anti-missile. The fact that it could be successful against SCUDs was helpful, although had they been armed with chemical warheads, I would concede that point. However, that's again why Russian exports of air defense systems are material as well. A lot of this is technology driven. For example, a HARM missile could have been construed to take out a battery. However, now it can only be construed to follow it's name--anti-radiation. One defensive measure is to decouple missile batteries from the radars, and have a standby when you lose one radar battery, you just put up another one and your missile launchers are still operational. So now detecting radiation means you still have to identify missile launchers and take them out simultaneously or immediately after your HARM attack.

The USSR had sketchy infrastructure and non-existent banking, both of which are necessary for modern consumption.

Which is to say again, communism doesn't work. However, the communists weren't trying to build a consumer society.

Reagan was reckless when it came to international politics.

Reagan was substantially more timid in the use of military force than the Bush family. Keep in mind, George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to effect an arrest warrant on Manuel Noriega.

Massive economic inefficiency, incompetent old men divorced from reality in control, some of which actually believed their own kool aid(Gorbi in particular), and the population not giving a damn about the ideology and being more interested in consumer goods than in the marxism-leninism kool aid.

Sounds like the US today.

Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists.

It's an incredibly important aspect of finance. It's one of the reasons why we're choking now. We're forcing even more money into the absurdly inefficient medical system.

The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.

Again, that sounds a lot like the United States today. We literally have a Supreme Court, for example, who will overturn two thousand years of case law to give lesbians a pass on estate taxes, rather than decouple estate tax from marriage. We have a Supreme Court that claims that marriage serves a "transcendental" purpose other than procreation and a population that thinks marriage has something to do with love, whilst blithely ignorant that the word "love" doesn't appear in any family code within the United States. Most of this sort of thing comes out of the political left, and may eventually result in the collapse of the United States as the left doesn't take law too seriously anymore.

Wrong, Gorbi did preside over the collapse, but the rot was there already.Granted, with enough will power and the right climate a China style perestroika, with economic liberalization could have happened, but northing of the sort could be produced by the feckless nomenclature.

Well China became communist in name only (CINO) in part because US strategy involved flipping the power dynamic between Russia as the senior partner and China as the junior partner in communism.

The Soviet economy suffered a growth slowdown after 1975 but still maintained positive, albeit sluggish, growth rates until 1990 when the planning system was dismantled. I do not agree that the USSR collapsed primarily because of unresolvable economic problems. Instead, the USSR collapsed because of the contradictions inherent in maintaining a socialist economic system alongside an extremely hierarchical political system where the bulk of the masses are totally depoliticized and all power is held in the hands of a party-state elite. You see this pattern in other Marxist-Leninist states where the party-state elite eliminates many of the socialist features of their system and materially benefits from a transition to capitalism (see the Chinese princelings, the children of party elites who have become wealthy from nepotism and cronyism in the post-socialist system).

Your initial point there is still omitting something big. The microprocessor revolution meant that the US was introducing efficiencies that weren't attainable before. Up until the Carter era, for example, the telcos owned the phone in your home and you had to do business with a monopoly. Breaking up the Bell system introduced a lot of new things that technology could support, but the regulatory system didn't allow. Call waiting, three-way calling, voice mail, fax machines, etc. were all effectively illegal until de-regulation. There were a lot of great things that system built, like UNIX. Linux is the operating system of the web, and is a direct outgrowth of the break up of the Bell system. The PC revolution was even before they got networked. Additionally, while landline phones were still regulated, America was exporting cell phone technology to the world (when we actually led that industry too). Since the landline system in the United States was relatively awesome compared to most of the rest of the world, cell phone technology actually lagged in the US compared to the rest of the world. The adoption of cellular technology effectively broke the bureaucratic monopolies of telcos in much of the world. The US was also pushing satellite phones, which were bleeding edge.

All of this was before the internet was made available and networked computing.

The reason why the Soviet Union broke up was mainly due to the politics of the Republics, and especially the power of the Boris Yeltsin pro-capitalist faction in Russia that saw the other Republics as unfairly benefiting from Russian productivity while not giving their fair share back.

I'm assuming you mean the Warsaw Pact in many respects. The Central Asian Republics were a part of the Soviet Union, but that charge is as applicable to the stans as it was to the Warsaw Pact countries. That also probably explains a lot of why Putin--like the French loss of Algeria--feels that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.

Nope. Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce. It is not at all easy to do this in the absence of a functioning market.

It's also how you expand your production possibilities curve.

I think that there is the mistaken impression out there that our beloved free enterprise system is funding the technical innovation from which the US has derived so much of its wealth. This is not entirely true. The federal government is directly funding 32% of all research in the US. Further. The majority of federal non-defense spending goes to basic and applied research and the majority of industry research money goes to development. STRIKING NUMBER: Less than 7% of private industry money went to basic research with over 80% going to development. And our vaunted pharma industry? 12% of total sales go to R & D. This is less than 1/2 what our semiconductor/manufacturing sector spends. (And remember how much of that is development?) After WWII the federal numbers were significantly higher by the way.

Gulp. I think I actually agree with something you've said. A big problem in the tax code is treating research and development as one and the same thing. Research is expensive and a crap shoot, and that's why it should be treated separately. Your pharmco example is one of the reasons why drug companies end up so cash rich, but aren't particularly innovative. Development + bureaucracy means they make it incredibly expensive to get drugs to market and thereby create a massive barrier to entry.

Not really. They were aiming to be able to preempt counter-revolutionary aggression against any socialist country anywhere in the world, and they needed to have man-portable artillery and small arms to spare so that they could supply any revolutionary movement that had a prayer at winning anywhere. The Warsaw Pact was plenty troublesome as it is, and going for broke in order to add more countries of variable loyalty and competence to it was a dubious proposition at best.

Well their small arms were no doubt a major force in the world. The Izmash AK-47 is undoubtedly one of the greatest guns ever created. It did literally change the world. Soviet small arms had a big impact on post-Imperial Africa and Asia.

[KlassWar]

Why should the left take law at all seriously? The legal system was specifically designed to disempower the left, it's only right and proper that left-wingers show utter contempt for it. Reverence for the law is the sure mark of a right-wing moron.

[Zamuel]

Nah, it was sustainable, but only at the price of social sacrifice ...

Well, my more economical way of stating is, "communism doesn't work." Same thing.

No, not the same thing at all ... you can say "Communism DIDN'T work" ... That's true. It was sustainable, but the cost was so high it couldn't progress. Nicaragua is a prime example of this. Communist success was prevented by the MASSIVE resources devoted to restraining it.

Communism does work, but to do so it requires a cooperative environment. The capitalist devotion to restraining it is weakening as corporate systems evolve towards profits and away from social responsibility.

Zam

[Rich]

The legal system was specifically designed to disempower the left,

In as much as it was designed it was specifically designed to disempower the aristocracy. We don't live in a Capitalist system that's a filthy Marxist lie. Of course life is not completely fair. Some people inherit great wealth, not all wealth was accumulated by "moral" means. However our system works , it has brought unparalleled prosperity, hence the large majority of people overall benefit from the system the democratic nation state with a mixed economy and wealth transfers. In our system working class peole get to vote, they get a say in how society is run. they get a considerable degree of autonomy in their lives unlike Communism where the working class are crushed and forced to serve the fantasies of Middle class leftie intellectuals. Lenin smashed every independent working class organisation. Banned the democratic political parties that allowed working class people to have a say and made sure that even the ordinary working class members of the Bolshevik party had no real say in how the country was run.

[Drlee]

It's an incredibly important aspect of finance. It's one of the reasons why we're choking now. We're forcing even more money into the absurdly inefficient medical system.

I couldn't agree more. It is long past time that we had a single payer system just like about every other developed nation in the world.

I also agree with your conclusion about research and development. Research should be treated differently. Development is just a garden variety business expense.

[Truth To Power]

True: too many people think they can over-rule the market (they can't), and too few understand that they can change the market to yield the results they wanted to (but couldn't) achieve by over-ruling it.

This is an absurdity, pure and simple.

No, it's just a fact you choose not to know.

If the market can be manipulated to suit an economic actor's agenda, it can by definition be overruled by that economic actor.

The market has a structure that produces supply, demand and prices. Given the structure, you can't impose different supply, demand or prices without triggering compensatory changes that oppose your objectives. But you can change the structure, creating a different market that naturally exhibits supply, demand and/or prices closer to what you tried unsuccessfully to impose by direct action.

Think of a market as operating like a snare: the more the animal caught in the snare struggles to escape it, the more tightly it is caught, and the sooner it perishes. But a human being caught in a snare easily defeats it by changing the structure of the situation: instead of pulling away from the trap, he moves toward it, loosening the loop enough to remove it.

[quetzalcoatl]

But you can change the structure, creating a different market that naturally exhibits supply, demand and/or prices closer to what you tried unsuccessfully to impose by direct action.

This is simply another way of saying that markets are artificial constructs. They are rule-based CAS's - not as simplistic as a casino, but similar in that there is a a house advantage to whoever is in charge of constructing its rules.

What I strenuously object to is the study of economics as though it were a part of the natural world with its own scientific laws by which we are forever bound. This is the chief scam behind neoclassical economics.

[lucky]

You can most definitely definitely plan innovation: You employ the scientists and engineers in research centres and design bureaus, keep them funded so they can research, design, prototype and test new tech, then you pick the most efficient models out of whatever the design bureaus have churned up and mass-produce them.

Ah, but in that model you face an impossible dilemma. If you only employ a small fraction of the population in those design bureaus, then you will have missed most opportunities for innovation that could have been made by people you have not chosen to employ.

If you decide to solve that problem by brute force and employ much of the population in those design bureaus, you're facing an enormous waste in terms of opportunity cost, where most of your talent is sitting there not doing other things they could be doing, while only few of them will actually come up with useful innovations during that time.

In other words: innovation is in general not a full time job, where you can just sit down and innovate all day long when somebody tells you to. Innovation is much broader than science and research.

[Truth To Power]

But you can change the structure, creating a different market that naturally exhibits supply, demand and/or prices closer to what you tried unsuccessfully to impose by direct action.

This is simply another way of saying that markets are artificial constructs.

Nope. The more important message is that direct intervention in markets to achieve a given objective -- as with price controls, subsidies, etc. -- will almost always have the opposite effect, while reforming the structure of the market can usually achieve the same objective much more efficiently.

They are rule-based CAS's - not as simplistic as a casino, but similar in that there is a a house advantage to whoever is in charge of constructing its rules.

That assumes they know what they are doing.

What I strenuously object to is the study of economics as though it were a part of the natural world with its own scientific laws by which we are forever bound.

You object to empirical science?

This is the chief scam behind neoclassical economics.

Nonsense. The scam behind modern mainstream neoclassical economics is that it doesn't even ATTEMPT to do anything of the sort. It starts with deceitful and invalid definitions, and adds false, absurd and tendentious assumptions to rationalize and justify unjust, oppressive, and atrocious policies. A good analogy is with medieval cosmology, which tortured astronomical observations to try to fit the orbits of the planets into circles, because the church had decreed that God would not have done it any other way. Neoclassical economics is based on a similarly false and arbitrary assumption, which taints and falsifies everything it does: that the massive inequalities of wealth, income and condition that characterize capitalist economies must somehow be justified by considerations of merit, efficiency, necessary incentives, legal institutions, or whatever, and cannot simply be the result of massive, systematic, institutionalized, and wholly gratuitous injustice.

[Drlee]

Nope. The more important message is that direct intervention in markets to achieve a given objective -- as with price controls, subsidies, etc. -- will almost always have the opposite effect, while reforming the structure of the market can usually achieve the same objective much more efficiently

Evidence?

Certainly not in the US. Our greatest growth has come under increased control of markets and robust government spending.

You object to empirical science?

Post a link to this "science". Do not post to opinion sites like the Rand Corporation or other ANCAP propaganda mills. Science.

[Truth To Power]

Nope. The more important message is that direct intervention in markets to achieve a given objective -- as with price controls, subsidies, etc. -- will almost always have the opposite effect, while reforming the structure of the market can usually achieve the same objective much more efficiently

Evidence?

The three most unaffordable cities for renters in North America -- NYC, San Francisco, and Vancouver -- have all had rent control for decades.

Certainly not in the US. Our greatest growth has come under increased control of markets and robust government spending.

Ignoratio elenchi. There is a vast melange of direct and structural interventions in the USA, so it is impossible to disentangle the causes of such general effects as growth.

You object to empirical science?

Post a link to this "science". Do not post to opinion sites like the Rand Corporation or other ANCAP propaganda mills. Science.

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/

[Drlee]

The three most unaffordable cities for renters in North America -- NYC, San Francisco, and Vancouver -- have all had rent control for decades

That is evidence supporting my contention, not yours.

Rent control is an example of a response to out of control free-market forces and predatory practices.

Ignoratio elenchi. There is a vast melange of direct and structural interventions in the USA, so it is impossible to disentangle the causes of such general effects as growth.

Way to misuse a Latin phrase. Good job. Please do not try to obfuscate with me. I am not impressed. I am amused.

But let's get this right. You said that I was wrong and proposed the rent in three cities as evidence. Then you referred to my using a similar kind of argument as a logical fallacy.

And what did you post for evidence? You thought, perhaps, that a PhD would not check your sources? Wait for it folks. As evidence to support his very specific claims he posted a link to an index of articles from a private organization which included these lovely articles:

"Two proposals for creating a parallel currency in Greece."

and

"Book review of The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal"

Well here is my evidence using your definition of evidence:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/home.aspx

You need to cut the pomposity and up your game if you are going to play in this sandbox.

[Truth To Power]

The three most unaffordable cities for renters in North America -- NYC, San Francisco, and Vancouver -- have all had rent control for decades

:roll: That is evidence supporting my contention, not yours.

Absurd.

Rent control is an example of a response to out of control free-market forces and predatory practices.

Nope. It's a way of pretending to do something about a problem created by interfering with market forces in a way that actually makes the problem worse.

Ignoratio elenchi. There is a vast melange of direct and structural interventions in the USA, so it is impossible to disentangle the causes of such general effects as growth.

Way to misuse a Latin phrase. Good job.

I used it correctly.

Please do not try to obfuscate with me. I am not impressed. I am amused.

But let's get this right. You said that I was wrong and proposed the rent in three cities as evidence. Then you referred to my using a similar kind of argument as a logical fallacy.

That's right, because your evidence wasn't relevant to the argument. Mine was.

And what did you post for evidence?

You asked for a link to empirical science in economics. I gave you one. Now you are trying to pretend that I gave you that link as evidence for the argument I had made earlier.

Have you been taking context-chopping lessons from Ingliz?

You thought, perhaps, that a PhD would not check your sources?

I thought you would go to the site I linked and look around, and make up your own mind about whether any of the papers linked there constituted empirical science (some are just scholarship, granted), which is what you asked me to show you.

You thought, perhaps, that a PhD would impress me?

Wait for it folks. As evidence to support his very specific claims

No, that claim is false. You said, "What I strenuously object to is the study of economics as though it were a part of the natural world with its own scientific laws by which we are forever bound."
I replied, "You object to empirical science?"
You then said, "Post a link to this 'science,'" and I gave you a link to a sample of a peer-reviewed journal which does print quite a bit of empirical work. That link was NOT to support any "very specific claim," and you know it. You are pretending to argue against what I wrote by pretending the link I gave was to support a completely different argument.

he posted a link to an index of articles from a private organization which included these lovely articles:

"Two proposals for creating a parallel currency in Greece."

and

"Book review of The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal"

Yes, well, peer-reviewed journals do generally carry items like book reviews, letters, proposals, etc. in addition to research papers.

Well here is my evidence using your definition of evidence:

"My definition of evidence" is something YOU made up, as proved above.

You need to cut the pomposity and up your game if you are going to play in this sandbox.

Sorry, comrade, but you just embarrassed and humiliated yourself by either not being able to follow a simple argument, or deliberately changing the context in the middle of the argument. Either way, not a moment to be proud of.

This sandbox is one of the less intellectually demanding ones, believe me.

[Drlee]

You might as well have posted a link to the Encyclopedia Britannica. You really have to do better than what you have been doing.

[Truth To Power]

You might as well have posted a link to the Encyclopedia Britannica. You really have to do better than what you have been doing.

Another false claim from you. You asked for examples of empirical science in economics. I pointed you to a reasonably good source.

You're the one who really needs to do better here, comrade, and I will thank you to remember it.

[Drlee]

Another false claim from you. You asked for examples of empirical science in economics. I pointed you to a reasonably good source.

I did no such thing. You made specific claims and accused another poster of ignoring the empirical science supporting those claims. I am still waiting for you to provide that evidence. You won't....you can't.

On edit. Reagan increased US defense spending to 7% of GDP. This forced the Soviet Union to increase defense spending to a whopping 27% if GDP. This was dispiriting to the leadership and completely unsustainable for the Soviet Union.

Though the US never represented an actual threat to the existence of the Soviet Union, it was their great scapegoat. Its economy was a miserable failure for the people and its national pride and international identity stemmed from its military might. Had the Soviet Union been able to spend that money building a stronger consumer economy it may well have flourished. Even in a socialist framework.

[Typhoon]

Reagan increased US defence spending to 7% of GDP. This forced the Soviet Union to increase defence spending to a whopping 27% if GDP.

Source?

By many accounts Soviet defence spending levelled off after 1980 as US defence spending peaked around 1985-7, Soviet spending was pretty much flat during this period. If anything Reagan responded to the Soviet spending drive of the 1970's rather than the other way around.