mirage

Because every half-arsed internet debater likes to wheel it out every so often.

Wrong again. Oh wait....let me just apply the new Injin rule I found out yesterday... Hang on.... Got it! You have just said something so it must be true, even if the opposite is in fact the case! Got it. Entropy cannot destroy wealth. Wealth can only be destroyed actively, whatever you choose to mean by that, by people. And even if wealth "doesn't last very long" then it certainly isn't destroyed, because.....because.... that would mean you having to admit you were wrong for the first time in your life. No, the wealth of a back rub doesn't last, but then it does last really. Simples. Yes, personal wants. How useful for discussion! Much better than some kind of idea of what people in general tend to consider valuable. That is just too general to have any meaning. Good idea. And of course, the man wanting all the '51 vintage Dom Perignon increases wealth by drinking it all! Because what he really valued was the state of the wine having been drunk by him.. Now this '51 connoisseur is the richest man on earth because you see there is none left on the planet for him to drink! He is so happy! Wealth consumption is identical to wealth creation. You are quite right. Total wealth would obviously increase if I destroyed all life on earth. Because it is what I want, you see? Or do you think the other people and their general desires might get a look in in your calculations?

What does? When?

I will benefit you with my reply nonetheless. You are making an entirely tangential point. You are confusing value with originality or perhaps uniqueness. China doesn't have to produce anything new for it to be valuable. Let's assume for the argument that nothing original has come out of China in the modern era. Done. And it's cheaper, for whatever reason. Done. Now I could just type out the previous post, but I'll leave you to reread it unless you want to just go ahead and pretend I don't make intelligent points, whatever the attitude. They are entirely unchanged by these assumptions we just made.

Erm, yes it is. Unless you value the inability to do any work.

Exactly. And when that wealth doesn't last, it is.....being....... _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

What a relief! After a brief period of agreeing, I can point out some of your ******** again. A rich man spending his money on stuff can be wealth creation. Very often it is wanton wealth destruction. Even you Injin, gets confused between money and wealth it seems.

I think this widespread Keynesian idea is confused. Let's take your rich man investing in production. He invests in a farm and bread factory. Each worker obviously produces more bread than they can eat. They get paid in food for themselves plus surplus bread. The profits are taken as bread or grain. What do you think that bread and grain can be exchanged for? The answer is anything the rest of the hungry population can provide or do. So the idea that the rich man would not invest because of "lack of demand" is just a load of ********, isn't it? The idea that printing or ditch digging or any of the oh-so-clever-because-they-are-just-so-damned-counter-intuitive Keynesian interventions are necessary suddenly seems to require a little more justification. In fact, since the rest of the population are digging ditches in return for bits of paper, they actually can't do useful labour in exchange for edible bread. So why don't rich men invest? The answers are complicated (thank God) and not the trite "lack of final demand". They might include ideas such as uncertainty about the future (opportunity cost of investing high - this would imply very high real interest rates). Usually what these stupid ditch-digging schemes really accomplish is provide some sense of certainty about the future, and that is how they accomplish anything (if they ever do). This is another funny idea - that a group needs to consume more! If a group is happy with its quality of life, why should it consume more? (I know that the group probably isn't happy, but that's a different matter). When we are considering a decline in living standards in the West the obvious problem is not the East under consuming. The obvious problem is there not being enough production of those things required to maintain living standards. If we can't get the East to give us those things then hoping they will consume more (presumably our tat?) and pay for it with those things we want seems a pretty indirect way of going about things. Why don't we just make those things we want? I'll tell you what the East "consuming more" will achieve for you: Higher real prices for raw materials, and nothing else. What economists mean when they whine about the East having to consume more is consume more from us. Well if you want that then ******ing make some stuff the East actually wants to consume!

Signals are signals no matter the environment. The government may decide it can allocate capital better than the market, in which case it can justify distorting the signals that the market alone would provide. That has to be argued on a case by case basis, however. There is not definite benefit from any policy direction. You need only believe that the chance of benefit outweighs the risks. I understand the voters may be sceptical. I don't propose anything in particular. I don't know what will happen; I'm just watching. And pointing out mistakes where appropriate. I don't think I believe that a modern democracy is capable of voting for severe short/medium term pain for a long term good in any case.

I'm.....er.....with Injin? Very odd sensation.

No. Nonsense. If we doubled velocity in a month we would have something called I N F L A T I O N. You may have heard of it. We certainly would not work twice as long or twice as productively. If we could just work twice as productively, then why don't we? You seem to be another person hopelessly confused between money and value. I thought you were an engineer or something? This stuff is not that difficult to understand. (If you were making a rhetorical point to Sceppy and not representing your views, then I apologise.)

You have not understood the concept you are criticising. Velocity has nothing particularly to do with the length of time a transaction takes, nor to whether a "particular" dollar is different from another dollar. That last conception of yours is particularly laughable, since dollars are fungible (read: indistiguishable from one another). I had previously thought you had some kind of a grip on the basics of economics. I'm surprised to see you make such points.

I think this requires a lot of justification. Why should a saver be bad for the economy? Where do you think the savings go? Unless they are under a mattress, what do you think is happening to that capital? (even if they are under a mattress that just increases the buying power of circulating cash). I think a lot of people are confusing saving and consumption with poor use of resources and wealth-creating use of resources. Whether something is good for the economy depends upon what things are spent/invested, not solely on the quantity of funds spent/invested.

I understood what you were saying perfectly and quite clearly I was responding to say that of course it is growth that is the hoped for benefit. It is quite bizarre to suggest there might be any other benefit being considered. The only benefit of any economic management can be wealth creation, which is either a mitigation of contraction, or sustainable growth. There need be no presumption of growth whatsoever. "Taking the pain" can be viewed simply as a precondition to growth. That is, a necessary but not sufficient condition. All this is pretty obvious stuff, I would have thought. I now make the further point, that whether absolute growth will occur or not is almost irrelevant. It would still be beneficial to have optimal pricing signals for wealth creation in a contraction, since this would mitigate the degree of contraction, or provide stagnation instead of contraction.

Non-sequitur. Yes, of course sustainable growth is growth. And I answered the question. The idea is that by reducing malinvestment and repricing resources to encourage investment toward wealth creation relative to consumption, this will produce growth. I don't see it pushed by any party at all. No party is saying that we need a massive recession. I am not feeling any great sense of logical connection to you right now.

This makes no sense to me. Firstly, how do we know that there is really any overcapacity in things people want? I suspect there is none. The reason for this is that if people want them, then other "excess capacity" owners can simply produce some of their wanted items/services and swap with other excess capacity producers. It's called trade and works quite well. There would be no reason for all these idle factory owners and farmers to sit on their arses doing nothing when all this stuff was wanted. This is a trite restatement of the Austrian idea that production creates its own demand. This is trivially true of any barter economy. If a guy produces a deer carcass, he has something to pay for stuff for and demand in the village goes up. I can't see why it isn't also true of the global economy. I suspect the true picture is that there are a few areas of "overcapacity" that people can't pay for, because there is desparate undercapacity elsewhere. However, this is simply a different way of saying that in the reduced resources world in which we now live, people don't actually want these idle services after all. You may see an idle luxury yacht factory as excess capacity. If we aren't producing enough food and energy then to me it looks more like malinvestment in a world of chronic under-capacity.

To reprice real resources in the light of their real income generating worth. A reduction in perverse incentives created by non-self-liquidating debt-driven demand. In other words to redistribute real resources from people pissing them up against a wall to people who can use them for wealth creation, i.e. sustainable growth. The benefit of doing this sooner rather than later is that you piss fewer resources up the wall and have more time for productive investments to pay off. That's the theory, anyway.

Right you are then, Guvnor. Everyone is acting morally now and we have a free market at last. Got it. I think.

Yep, one that will never occur. Oh, so the free market as you define it has been the historical rule, has it?

It's becoming a little clearer what a free market is in Injinworld. It is something that can never exist - a world where people universally volunteer to give up coercion. The second one of these people relapse then it's no longer a free market. You see, Injin, we were confused because many of us thought you were proposing a system that would act to cause better conditions. You have now just explained that your system is merely a name for those conditions should they ever, by chance, arise. Your oft repeated assertions that the freemarket would be wonderful because of this or that, are not claims that a free market would bring about this and that. They are merely true by virtue of your particular definition of free market. So if by some miracle everyone on the planet just decides to play fair, then O Hosana! We shall have the free market! The free market is not a means to an end. It's just a name for an end that will never occur. Got it. Simples.

That is an exercise of power. Of course, if you are lucky and/or skillful, that excercise of power may increase your power. There are many examples of people waving guns to great effect in terms of their subsequent power. Oh I see! Because you have said so. I'm starting to get how this works! The power is from hot air!

Morals aren't "derived from observations", silly. I don't see any "moral" anywhere. Just people and actions. They can't exist. Morons, however are frequently observed.

You get power by a combination of chance, skill and effort. You get skill and the motivation for effort by chance. Not really an answer that does it for me.

Requirement? Evidence please?

You made the assertion about a species being a thing. Show me the species lesser Black-backed gull first. My point about France is that I could do just as good a job showing you that (the land, the border controls the people in it and the noises they make) as you could showing me the abstract construct of a species. (Especially a ring species like the lesser black backed gull). No better, no worse. Again, you are failing in an intelligent analysis of what is being argued. I am not arguing for the existence or non-existence of "things". I am not a moron. I am merely pointing out that your ideas about the world are incoherent. That is, they are internally inconsistent. You cannot and will never provide a clear definition, or method to discover what constitutes an "Injin thing". That does not stop you ruling concepts in or out by fiat - because in practice, the only criterion is your say so. So nations and societies are out. Species, free markets, sociopaths, violence, observations and their abstract derivations are in. Because you say so. Repeatedly.