baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (02/20/85)
There's some kind of misunderstanding or misrepresentation going on here. I'm afraid I'm going to have to address a series of points, and my style tends more toward the open letter to DKMcK than to a speech to a jury. > When someone claimed that there would be no inflation in a > Libertarian country, Baba ridiculed the idea. The claim was that in a Libertarian country there would be no inflation, no unemployment, and no lawyers. I suppose I was too struck by the similarity to what communist true believers used to say about the Soviet Union (or, later, Cuba) to see it as anything other than dreamstuff. > My 'Inflation in a Free > Economy?' demonstrated that there indeed would be no inflation in a Free > Economy. Well, to summarize, you broke inflation down into three factors: changes in the value of the goods that money represents, in the "velocity" with which money changes hands, and in the money supply itself. You then stated that, in a Free Economy (why in God's name do you always capitalize it?) economic growth is always faster than in a regulated one, that increases in the velocity of money don't matter, and that a libertarian state would have no legal currency as such anyway. Or, as I saw it, an irrelevancy, an supported statement, and a tautology. Bergenholms. > In a later article, I explained why minimum wage laws and coercive > unions caused unemployment. Baba responded by claiming that technology has > driven the supply-and-demand equilibrium wage below sustenance; I replied > that this hoary claim has been made for centuries and has been false for > centuries. It is not the same thing to demonstrate that minimum wage laws and unions contribute to unemployment as it is do demonstrate that there will be no unemployment in the absence of these factors. I pointed out one of the other factors in the equation that your article ignored. I have *never* claimed, even jokingly, that "technology has driven the supply-and-demand equilibrium wage below sustenance". I instead posted a quote from Norbert Wiener in support of the notion that, given the potential of technology and the nature of our economic system, the equilibrium wage should *ultimately* do precisely that. Since technology and economics are not the only factors at play (except in a free economy ;-), it probably won't actually happen. I *do* think that we ought to put a lot of thought into the political fudge that we will ultimately use, since, as you and the other libbies point out, *any* government intrusion into the marketplace leaves wounds, so we'd better act like surgeons and not like brawlers. But we'll probably have to use a knife. > Eventually automation may make unskilled labor unfeasible (so > long as pompous fools like Minsky dominate the field of a.i., this > eventuality will remain far off in the future); which simply indicates that > workers should no more plan to make a living as unskilled laborers than > they would to do so as hunter-gatherers. I thought it was fairly clear in the passage from *Cybernetics* that Wiener's claim was that the unskilled labored was *already* obsolete (for excavation (as of 1948)), and that computers have the *potential* to render *highly* skilled laborers obsolete. Once you've taught a machine more than a man can learn in a lifetime, what do you think people ought to do? > Baba suspects 'that social dynamics prohibit the operation of a Free > Economy', recognizes that 'Political forces seem always to interfere with > economic processes' and that 'People find it natural to make tradeoffs > between economic efficiency and political consensus'. I take it that this > is meant as an argument for government intervention! No, it was meant as a partial explanation for why most people accept and indeed often *demand* government intervention in the economy. > Similarly, since > there are immediate and theoretical limits to the number of circuit > elements which can be packed in an IC, we should abandon semiconductors and > return to vacuum tubes!?! No, but only a fool would advocate designing an IC that requires an infinite number of transistors. Do you understand the difference? > And we should forget this nonsense of fuel > efficiency, pollution control, and medicine!?! Ad nauseum. Indeed. Baba
cliff@unmvax.UUCP (02/23/85)
> > When someone claimed that there would be no inflation in a > > Libertarian country, Baba ridiculed the idea. > > The claim was that in a Libertarian country there would be no inflation, > no unemployment, and no lawyers. I suppose I was too struck by the > similarity to what communist true believers used to say about the Soviet > Union (or, later, Cuba) to see it as anything other than dreamstuff. The claim was that in Libertaria there would be no inflation, no unemployment and that the PROWESS of a lawyer would not be the deciding factor in the judge- ment. I made that claim; I stick by it. There is quite a difference between the existance of lawyers and the ability of the sharpest lawyer to win every case. --Cliff