Libertarian Party Goes Crazy

[Cheerful Charlie]

The historic record of currency is reform the currency, debase the currency, reform the currency, debase the currency ad nauseum. The federal reserve helps avoid that. That if not dominated by Republicans works tolerably well. (Herbert Hoover, Greenspan) Avoiding the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20's for example. Do we really want monetary policy set by unelected oligarchs and robber barons?

 

[crazyfingers]

The historic record of currency is reform the currency, debase the currency, reform the currency, debase the currency ad nauseum. The federal reserve helps avoid that. That if not dominated by Republicans works tolerably well. (Herbert Hoover, Greenspan) Avoiding the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20's for example. Do we really want monetary policy set by unelected oligarchs and robber barons?

Do we want Rand Paul in control of monetary policy? Really?

I'd much rather a civil servent who will be judged by his/her results keeping the economy steady than a politician who will do anything to get votes.

 

[bilby]

By the way, bilby is wrong about "strictest rule of law" part.

I just searched the board for "strictest" in posts by me; Three such posts exist, most recently in 2019.

I don't know what you are talking about, but I can assure you that I am not "wrong about" a phrase I have never posted.

 

[Swammerdami]

I also find it hard to understand Libertarianism. We end up arguing against "straw man" versions.

But the Board is fortunate to have a genuine Libertarian. @ Jason — I hope you have the grace to set us straight. What are the practical steps that Libertarians would take if suddenly given control of the country? What are the specific differences between the Mises Caucus and the Non-Caucus (or whatever it's called)?

Too subtle for you to hope to follow.

Sincere thanks for answering some of my questions.
BUT you are allowed to edit and delete any of the questions which are too difficult or too uncomfortable to answer.
What is the point of gratuitous insults? "Too subtle for you to hope to follow" translates to "I don't know the answer so will whine an insult instead."

Please be specific. Repeal of the Civil Rights Act is certainly high on the Libertarian agenda: businesses will be to free to discriminate based on race, religion or anything else they choose. Do Libertarians embrace this openly? Or do they leave the return to segregation buried inside platitudes about "Liberty ... liberty ... freedom ... liberty"? Do Libertarians ever ponder the contradiction between an innkeeper's liberty to choose his customers and a hungry family's liberty to buy dinner?

There is a myth that without government people would start acting racist, sexist, whatever-ist all over the place. I don't buy that myth. I don't think we need force of law to force people to do the right thing. If people were as overwhelmingly racist as you suppose, it would be easy to elect overwhelmingly racist politicians ... well, now I have to eat crow because we did that in Nov 2020. Maybe you have half a point.

Seriously, though, wouldn't you want to know which businesses are run by bigots so that you could avoid them?

Three major errors here.
(1) You seem unaware that racist segregation, especially (but not only) in the South, was common before Brown vs Board or the 1965 Act. Do you need cites for this?
(2) Your "run by bigots so that you could avoid them" suggests you believe consumers "with a conscience" have sufficient economic power to effect change. Wrong! Did Koch Industries, Union Carbide, Dow Chem, Wells Fargo Bank etc. go out of business when their crimes were exposed?
(3) More generally, Libertarians seem to think ALL people are inherently good and that almost all misbehavior would disappear if government would just get out of the way. In fact, most people will act in self-interest — just as a libertarian model suggests they would and should. Even if 98% of humans would behave well, a small minority of miscreants would spoil things for the rest without laws and policing.

What will be used for money? I realize the Magic of the Market will choose among gold, bitcoin and whatever — during transition, customers will seek accommodations that accept their particular variety of cryptocurrency — but if any government persists and collects tariffs what will it accept as legal tender? The FedRes will be abolished, right?

Yes, abolish the Federal Reserve. It is not only unnecessary it destroys the value of currency. Mankind has used money for over 4 millennia and never needed fiat. Since we've had it for over a century people actually have come to think the aberration is normal. You don't need it.

You answered only part of the question. Let me repeat it: If central bank money is abolished, What will be used for money?
The standard Libertarian answer is "Let the Free Market decide. Bitcoin, Gold, Beanie Babies, Wampum, whatever the Free People want to use as money."

And, did you forget to answer "If any government persists and collects tariffs what will it accept as legal tender?"

We have several old threads — filled with misinformation from all quarters — on monetary policies and "money creation." Here I'll just ask if you're aware that Milton Friedman was an early strong advocate of "Quantitative Easing"?

Will there be any way to regulate, tax or pay for pollution? Child vaccines for pertussis, etc. will no longer be mandated, right?

Pollution will be treated as a property right. If you pollute my property you pay. Yes, the available vaccines won't be mandated. You will still be free to choose them.

If Koch Industries pollutes the atmosphere, whose property is that? Are you a big fan of class action lawsuits? Will it be easy to prove that Koch has cost my unborn grandchildren $10 of damage? Do you have great faith in 12 arbitrarily-selected jurors?

About vaccines: Are you aware that some children are allergic and depend on herd immunity? Is it OK for parents, through inaction, to risk the health of their children? (You didn't answer "When do children cease to be their parents' property?")

Please tell us how you feel about the worldwide eradication of smallpox.

The historic record of currency is reform the currency, debase the currency, reform the currency, debase the currency ad nauseum. The federal reserve helps avoid that. That if not dominated by Republicans works tolerably well. (Herbert Hoover, Greenspan) Avoiding the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20's for example. Do we really want monetary policy set by unelected oligarchs and robber barons?

Cite? I think we agree that central-bank fiat money (at least in liberal prosperous democracies) has worked well so far, with the deliberate 2% inflation — decried by whingeing YouTube gold-bugs and morons — harmless because it is ANTICIPATED. BUT the historic record of precious-metal money is that it DID retain its precious value (modulo metal availability!) Florence's fiorino d'oro, 3.5368 grams of fine gold, was Europe's standard of monetary value for centuries. A government which reduced its coins' precious metal content by 5% would soon find its money was worth 5% less.

 

[Swammerdami]

I just searched the board for "strictest" in posts by me; Three such posts exist, most recently in 2019.

I don't know what you are talking about, but I can assure you that I am not "wrong about" a phrase I have never posted.

I, for one, am NOT assured. Please quote the 2019 post so we can adjudicate it.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Roman coinage suffered repeat devaluations. So did many medieval coinages. A British pound sterling was originally an actual pound of sterling silver. The British pound ain't no more. Hard money policies based on gold wreaked havoc in late 19th century America, so that sort of policy demonstrates the entire gold bug ideas now rampant in some quarters is not really trouble free.

 

[Swammerdami]

Read the following NOT as an argument against Cheerful Charlie, but just as an alternate perspective.

IIRC, Rome began minting coins from bronze and other base metals during the Punic Wars — thus this was fiat money rather than precious-metal money. I don't recall any other countries in ancient Europe which created such fiat money: Rome's base-metal coins were accepted as money because of Rome's military dominance.

Britain's coins, OTOH, were precious-metal money. When Edward IV minted "light" pennies with only 80% of the silver content of Lancastrian coinage, these coins would buy 20% less than what "heavy" pennies would buy, whether in England or on the Continent. Thus "debasement" of precious-metal money brought only temporary respite to the Monarch (to reduce his debt, or for purchases he could sneak in before the debasement was noticed).

A brief history of English money may be interesting. If we stipulate that a troy pound of sterling silver was minted into 20 shillings of silver pennies in the 8th century under Offa the Great — the same standard as that of Charlemagne — Henry VI minted 31 shillings of "heavy" pennies from that pound. By the time of Queen Elizabeth I, 62 shillings were minted per pound of the physical metal instead of Offa's 20. This gives an AVERAGE annual inflation rate of 0.14%. (Not exactly "debase ... debase the currency ad nauseum.") That's ZERO point 14 percent with a Z. And — see below — in 1941 20 shillings of paper money would buy a pound of the physical metal! (Admittedly, looking at the British pound is "cherry-picking"; the French livre fared less well, what with the Reign of Terror, Hitler's occupation, and so on.)

It was under Sir Isaac Newton that England switched to the gold standard; the price of a troy pound of gold was set at £51 exactly — close to Elizabeth's silver pound when divided by Newton's 16:1 ratio — and remained at almost exactly £51 from Newton's time until 1930 (excepting during the Napoleonic Wars during which the price of gold peaked at £69 in 1813, and briefly after WWI with gold reaching £68 in 1920). The gold standard collapsed during the Great Depression and London's gold price (but NOT silver price) soared, reaching £101 during the 1940's. Here's an amazing factoid: From 1938 to 1941 one pound in British banknotes would buy almost precisely one troy pound of physical sterling silver. That's right! Measured this way, the inflation or debasement of the pound sterling was zero percent since the time of Charlemagne or Offa over eleven centuries earlier!

Whatever the instruction or amusement value of these anecdotes, the gold standard obviously came with severe problems.
(1) Inflation could be caused by a major gold discovery anywhere in the world. (Britain's retail price index rose over 16% from 1852 to 1855. Was this caused by the '49er Rush in California?)
(2) The LACK of new gold discoveries could cause deflation. Does it seem good to leave an important economic parameter, the inflation/deflation rate, to the happenstance of mining discoveries?
(3) Changes to the ratio between silver and gold values would impact countries on a bimetallic standard. W.J. Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" rants were less about coinage than that Bryan's farming constituents wanted inflation rather than the deflation Republican bankers were enjoying.
(4) Especially important with the economy growing much faster than the gold supply was simply the availability of gold to repay gold promises. IIRC, the Panic of 1893, perhaps the biggest U.S. financial crisis prior to the Great Depression, abated literally when a ship carrying gold from London (or Rotterdam?) was sighted in New York Harbor.

But let's not argue against a possible straw-manned return to the gold standard in this Libertarians are Crazy thread. Our resident expert has not yet chimed in with what he expects to replace the FedRes Benjamins we're used to.

@ Jason — Do you have an answer yet? Gold? Bitcoins? Beanie Babies? The brilliant Free Market will automatically and magically figure this out?


ETA: "Henry VI minted 31 shillings of "heavy" pennies from that pound."
Ooops. The correct figure is closer to 40 shillings. Not only did the pennies of the early 15th century weigh only about ⅔ of a pennyweight, but they were debased with copper or other base metals.

EETA: "a ship carrying gold from London (or Rotterdam?) was sighted in New York Harbor."
No. I doubt that the gold shipped from the Continent. That was in pre-Brexit days when London was the financial capital of the world.
Yes,
Here "pre-Brexit" is used as a sarcastic denigration, akin to the Pond's other side's "Trumpism."

Apology for the hijack. If you want to discuss the purple text, start a new thread, please: Discuss the rise of Stupidism throughout the world. My vague impression — please correct me if I'm wrong — is that stupidism as a political movement is rising more rapidly in Western countries rather than Asian. Obviously China and Russia have made big blunders lately, but I'm not sure if that should be mainly attributed to the stupidist political movement.

 

[bilby]

A big gold strike (eg California, USA in 1849, or Victoria, Australia in 1851) has much the same effect on a commodity money based financial system as would a highly successful counterfeiting scheme. Those two strikes alone are likely the cause of British inflation in the first half of the 1850s.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

This was a problem back in the 80's with gold mining increasing in Russia, South Africa and Brazil. Gold is a commodity and increasing supplies does affect prices.
A decade ago, my brother realized gold would soon accelarate rapidly in price. He then correctly predicted the rapid drop in gold prices and hit the jackpot. Gold is not a stable commodity.

 

[lpetrich]

I remember an economist saying that all that the gold standard does is put monetary policy in the hands of the gold miners.

Alchemical manufacture of gold and silver was outlawed for nearly three centuries in England, likely for this reason.

The Act Against Multipliers, 1404 | by John Welford | Medium

The Act Against Multipliers was signed into law by King Henry IV of England on 13th January 1404. It ordered that “None from hereafter shall use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication; and if any the same do, they incur the pain of felony”.

...
In practice, the law provided a loophole for would-be alchemists in that they could apply for a very expensive licence that allowed them to pursue their dark art. However, it has to be assumed that not many such licences were applied for.

The Act was eventually repealed in 1689, partly due to the lobbying efforts of Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry. Surprising as it might seem, he was also a keen alchemist!

He lobbied for its repeal because he was concerned that this law could have a chilling effect on (al)chemical research.

 Price revolution

The Price Revolution, sometimes known as the Spanish Price Revolution, was a series of economic events that occurred between the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the 17th century, and most specifically linked to the high rate of inflation that occurred during this period across Western Europe. Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

That one person seems to be the only definition you can come up with.

Untrue and you ought to know considering how we've discussed Ron Paul and others belonging in the set. One wonders why you would conveniently leave those people out.

Yes, you have made it clear that if Ron Paul and Rand Paul were the same person (which they aren't) then you'd have a conservolibertarian. Therefore the only one person who actually exists who fits your definition is Alex Jones.

That makes your point about that tweet more interesting. You say he is tweeing to partisan compete for one person.

If this is the kind of "logic" that the Libertarian Party is producing, one can see why the party is imploding.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Libertarian Party of Virginia Dissolves - Independent Political Report

As forwarded to us by several Libertarians: Libertarian Party of Virginia Dissolves Itself ___________ Whereas, it is the proper function of the Libertarian Party of Virginia to serve as a vehicle for Libertarians to engage in the political process in the Commonwealth of Virginia; Whereas, the...

independentpoliticalreport.com

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Thinks - Dead parrot sketch

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

So, the Libertarian party supports rights to run whites only restaurants and whites only hotels. Or for a business not to hire Blacks, Jews, or Muslims.

Their solution to that is "The Market will provide, The Market will provide, The Market will provide, ..."

But The Market failed to provide over the entire era of Jim Crow.

One thing people always forget about Jim Crow is that the phrase "Jim Crow" described a set of laws that codified racism. When we're talking about laws, we aren't talking about the market.

Laws are passed because someone said "I don't like what you are doing so I'm going to make a law to change your behavior." Now what kind of behavior could we be talking about that would result in the passage of Jim Crow laws?

When the Civil Rights Acts (there were more than one although people only remember the last one) were passed, it was government versus government conflict, as one government mandated racist behavior and one government banned racist behavior. It was a government solution to a government problem. Were I alive back then I'd have been advocating for the repeal of the Jim Crow laws, and you'd probably see me saying "repeal those awful laws" and accuse me of trying to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through my actions.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Do today's modern Libertarian parties effectively oppose systematic racism, the GOP's modern day voter caging, voter harassment. Jim Crow 2.0? How? Crony Capitalism? Modern day robber baron Capitalism? How?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Define a few of those terms and then I can attempt an answer.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Let us discuss crony capitalism a bit. Companies have boards of directors. Some people populating such boards are rather friendly to the CEOs et al. Rubber stamping huge CEO salaries and bonuses. Short term policies such as off shoring jobs. Sitting on a board like this can be quite lucrative. Big money for a few days work a year rubber stamping such things. Such people have reputations for being complacent and not challenging robber baron policies. They thus get invited to sit on numerous such boards. If you are not familiar with this phenomena, which has been a problem for decades, you do not have any understanding of how we got to this point of extreme wealth inequalty in modern day America. The cant that the invisible hand gurantees all good things if government would just get out of the way is Libertarian bull doo doo. The invisible hand gets us oligarchs, robber barons, crony Capitalists, and bad policies. How can Libertarianism help except to make things worse by unleashing raw oligarchy on all based on proven bad propositions?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Do today's modern Libertarian parties effectively oppose systematic racism, the GOP's modern day voter caging, voter harassment. Jim Crow 2.0? How? Crony Capitalism? Modern day robber baron Capitalism? How?

I'm pretty certain the Libertarian Party's main and only platform is that the two-party system is corrupt and possibly something something gold standard (or maybe it is Bitcoin now). Which is why they have no actual policies or ideas how to improve or address issues of managing the needs of a population of 330 million because underlying their formal beliefs is "We can take care of this ourselves without the Government" or also known as naivety.

 

[Patooka]

What I find so delightful and delicious is that libertarians are given more relevance in this thread than in the real world. You'd think the libertarians in this forum might be a little self reflective on that but I guess they're comfortable with staying insignificant.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

A good example of that Invisible Hand in action was Russia. With the utter and total collapse of Communism and the USSR in 1997, overnight. Russia went Capitalist. And quickly became a ferocious oligarchy drenched in incompetence, and unbridled corruption. Let this be a warning to us all.