Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (58370)	1/27/2001 4:51:11 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 71178

Fascinating post, Nihil.

To: nihil who wrote (58370)	1/27/2001 9:52:20 PM
From: Kid Rock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

This isn't the William Anderson to whom you refer is it? theoldwestwebride.com

To: nihil who wrote (58370)	1/27/2001 11:37:19 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

If not for Lincoln's sectional faction slavery would have ended in the United States just as it did in the rest of the countries of the western hemisphere: peacefully. A mass blood letting accompanied the end of slavery only in the US and Haiti, a fact remarkably ignored by the acolytes of Abe, as they defend the necessity of his killing 20% of the southern male population for the good of the Union. I dunno if Lincoln was quite the savior of human liberty that you claim, as he shut down newspapers and jailed some 13,000 of his northern critics without benefit of trial. As he dissolved the Maryland legislature and replaced it with one to his liking. As he issued orders for the arrest of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, something that his own assistants balked at carrying out. Lincoln was what he called himself, a preserver of the Union. Something King George III tried to do 80 years earlier. And King George, like Lincoln, used emancipation as a tactic of war as he swept through the colonies. Lange, unlike the economically illiterate mass of socialist thinkers, understood that he had to find a price mechanism to make even a command economy operate. The price mechanism operates as a feedback loop, with marginal costs being the current readout. Lange couldn't see beyond his command economy blinders if he thought that "marginal costs should be set equal to price". Von Mises argued just the opposite, that marginal costs and pricing are set by the market mechanism itself. One of Mise's earliest books was a 1922 critique of socialist economics, in which he predicted the failure of socialist economies due to the fact that the price mechanism isn't allowed to operate. Of Lange, Mises wrote in his 1963 edition of Human Action: "It is therefore nothing short of a full acknowledgement of the correctness and irrefutability of the economists' analysis and devastating critique of the socialists' plans that the intellectual leaders of socialism are now busy designing schemes for a socialist system in which the market, market prices for the factors of production, and catallactic competition are to be preserved. The overwhelmingly rapid triumph of the demonstration that no economic calculation is possible under a socialist system is without precedent indeed in the history of human thought. The socialists cannot help admitting their crushing final defeat. They no longer claim that socialism is matchlessly superior to capitalism because it brushes away markets, market prices, and competition. On the contrary. They are now eager to justify socialism by pointing out that it is possible to preserve these institutions even under socialism. They are drafting outlines for a socialism in which there are prices and competition." "What these neosocialists suggest is really paradoxical. They want to abolish private control of the means of production, market exchange, market prices, and competition. But at the same time they want to organize the socialist utopia in such a way that people could act as if they were still present." Now, what California is suffering under is a herd of political dolts bred out of the Oskar Lange command economy animal. They did their "deregulation" halfway, so that the cost of electricity to our power companies is unregulated while their selling price is fixed. So that the power companies were forced to sell their generating facilities, leaving them with no fixed production. So that they forbid the power companies to make long term contracts for power, forcing them to purchase everything they need daily in the spot market; hell, even when they were fully regulated the power companies used to make long term contracts for power they didn't produce-- only Langian bureaucrats would confuse the spot market with free market pricing, as if long term contracts at fixed prices were alien life forms to free markets. No, California isn't suffering from too much free market. It's suffering from political idiots. But then we are getting just what we vote for-- for more than 10 years we have built no new power plants, we even halted the construction of a major nuke plant. California is full of childish environmentalists, who think electricity will just magically produce itself even while we discourage every known way of producing it. All we have to do is vote for electricity to make itself available to us, and our political leaders will make it appear. And if it doesn't, we will blame the power companies. Long live the politicians and their professional economists.

To: nihil who wrote (58370)	1/28/2001 10:46:28 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

All of these posts are fascinating. They would have been even more fascinating if I really understood the economics, but they were great anyway. It does seem to me (from my really ignorant spot here on the floor at your all's feet) that all of the theories and all of the predictions and models do tend to overlook what Michael pointed out, there can be no pure models, no truly reliable predictions of anything, once you add in the element of man himself--not only in the area of creativity, but, as you point out, in the strange way people can become completely fanatical, beyond reason about something-- and act in a way that you look back on and say, huh? How do all these intellectuals get around that wild card when they come up with this stuff? I was really intrigued by the idea of slavery as a bubble, and wondered what you think would have happened had it not been burst as it was by the Civil War? Did we need an Alan G. to try to manipulate some soft landing? A Department of Slavery? Is Freddy's idea of a peaceful end to it feasible when cotton no longer required all that manpower? Not long ago someone was saying that the Civil War could have been won had Lee not agreed to lead the South. It seems that so much of history's direction rides on the decision or the presence of one person-- and w enever know when and where that one pivotal person will enter the equation. Civil War family trivia: Dan's great,great uncle was a doctor in the Civil War. He came home, so horrified by the atrocities, he never practiced medicine again. I think he is a character in the book ...And Ladies of the Club, written by his niece. (Dan's great-aunt) My inspiration, as she hit it big in her 80s in a nursing home. There's still time for us all. nihil, CW is going to Seoul this spring. Their paper on algorithms was accepted. He is taking graduate courses this semester in algorithms-- and I don't even know what they are. It's so odd to be watching the way a specific path seems to be unfolding. What does the publication of an academic paper mean, and what does it mean that it's being presented?