MenKlash

I’d prefer the term statism, but I agree with you.

I mean if you’re gonna criticize the whole capitalist system sure.

1. The Federal Reserve purchases assets and thereby increasing bank reserves.
2. The banks expand credit and consequently the money supply.
3. All prices are raised, and the rate of interest is artificially lowered.
4. Misleading signals to businessmen starts to emerge, causing them to make malinvestments.
5. Businesses overinvest in capital goods and underinvest in consumer goods.
6. As the “time preference” of the public have not really got lower, consuming is preferred over saving.
7. There is a lack of enough saving-and-investment to buy all the new capital goods.
8. Then, “depression” originates in order to reestablish the consumer’s old time-preference proportions.
9. The banks return to their natural and desired course of credit expansion…

FIAT money is independent of capitalism. Its coercive existence leads to distortions of relative prices and the production system, as government and its central bank will always tend to be inflationary.

Eat the Fed!

If the person renting a home stops paying, the landlord will use force to evict the person.

In this case, the force applied by the landlord is legimitate because the tenant is not performing their contractual obligations over the property of the landlord.

You didn’t pay taxes? Here, lemme force you to stay in prison for a while, also here’s a fine on top of that.

There is no contract between the government and citizen that legitimize the violence of the state. Any theory of a “social contract” will be unilateral by nature. Actually, the state itself is a threat to the Non-Agression Principle.

Not all contracts are voluntary and, more importantly, the workers are almost always the weaker party when it comes to negotiation.

The asymmetries of power between both parties does not mean the contract is not voluntary. In fact, any government intervention in the labor market will make this situation worse, as these encourage poverty and harm those workers who are the less productive in the market.

If you leave it to the market to “self-regulate”, you’ll just get feudalism 2.0, where companies become the new noble houses

As long as private property is not violated by institutional coercion; as long as the system of prices is not manipulated by any government policy; as long as human action and his natural rights are respected: social cooperation through the division of labor will flourish, as voluntary exchange is the source of economic progress.

Indeed, civilization itself is inconceivable in the absence of private property. Any encroachment on property results in loss of freedom and prosperity, as property is the only way to resolve conflicts by the existence of scarce resources.

The market is a process, not an “equilibrium model”. It is not designed, but emerged from human action.

Really, any sufficiently big company will act just like a govt, full of unnecessary bureaucracy

The difference is that having market concentration does not mean being a monopoly. In fact, a monopoly is a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting.

The state can not have direct consumer feedback; it can not act economically. Instead, it collects taxes and spends them arbitrarily following interest groups.

“In a market economy, the range of quality, quantity, and type of goods and services correspond to social needs. These goods are services that are valued by consumers, and hence, they will be provided if it is economically feasible to do so relative to other social priorities.”

lunatics that cry at taxation but orgasm at rent and profiting off others’ work.

The former is only possible through institutional compulsion and coercion. The latter is through a voluntary contract that expresses the cooperation of both parties to work for each other, as they have a property interest in specific performance of the other.

Denying this process of voluntary exchange is, implicitly, denying the free will of the tenant and worker.

Mileiístas (in spanish).

Yes, I voted him, but to defend myself from the state. I don’t think that, in the long-term, he’s going to save our current crisis. In fact, I advocate for the complete abolishment of the state through agorism.

Taxation is robbery. I live in Argentina (+100% in taxes) and I have this problem too.

VLLC!

Easy money is slavery.

The existence of FIAT money (that is, the state monopoly of the money supply) is the mere source of the business cycle and the discoordination emerged in the economy.

Can we afford for everybody to try to live at the expense of everybody?

No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.

It depends on why and how you use stereotypes.

Prejudice only properly refers to judgments formed without consideration of the available information.

Prejudging is legitimate when we do not have all the relevant facts of an object or subject, having to resort to inductive reasoning in order to try to induce and predict its individual characteristics.

It’s all about trying to make new information about someone or something, so we can economize information.

The idea of a “social contract” is flawed in the sense that it is not a contract at all, as it is unilateral in nature.

Voting and taxation do not necessarily imply explicit consent with how government (the monopoly on violence) works.

The politically correct bien-pensants always fail to recognize that stereotyping is a form of inductive reasoning. If you see something repeatedly, but not necessarily without fail, you form an opinion, which is layered with a degree of truth. A subset of the human race, based on ethnicity, inclination, or geography, will spring to mind after reading each of the following words: financier, migrant worker, male flight attendant, NASCAR driver, sprinter.

I’m sure most of us immediately conjured similar images. Yes, it is unfair to impose a group characteristic onto an individual, but we did so nonetheless. To belabor the obvious, each of us is an individual, not a group. When the stereotype is proven fallacious for an individual, move on.

Economists of the classical school were right to define a monopoly as a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting. Predatory pricing cannot be sustained over the long haul, and not even the attempt should be regretted since it is a great benefit to consumers. Attempted cartel-type behavior typically collapses, and where it does not, it serves a market function. The term “monopoly price” has no effective meaning in real market settings, which are not snapshots in time but processes of change. A market society needs no antitrust policy at all; indeed, the state is the very source of the remaining monopolies we see in education, law, courts, and other areas.

Amazon is just another big company that benefits from corporatocracy.

Some people care about the latest thing, regardless if it directly affects them or not.

Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life. For if one agency is going to make the decision: sex education or no, traditional or progressive, integrated or segregated, etc., then it becomes particularly important to gain control of the government and to prevent one’s adversaries from taking power themselves. Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.

Democracies get sick and then die from within.

Representative democracy has allowed for peaceful transitions from one ruling elite to another, but the use of institutional coercion is still there. The government is not the problem, it is the mere existance of the Monopoly of Violence, that is, the State.

“Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty.”

Obviously, this mechanism of peaceful change is an important distinction, but does not absolve democracy of its shortfalls.

Instead of focusing in on how the various Republican candidates for speaker, both individually and collectively, embody how today’s Republican Party is an existential threat to the country’s multiracial pluralistic democracy

As mentioned before, the State itself is a threat. The model of the parliamentary dictatorship, that is, an oligarchy of politicians and public employees, does not serve our interests: it serves elites and violates rights to self-ownership, and efforts to limit governmental powers tend to fail.

Is there a more victemless crime than hording something limited

There is no victim because the scalpers would hold their private property, owned by legit means, that is, buying that limited good by voluntary exchange.

forcing the actual intended customer to buy mine for way more money so i can profit off their misfortune?

The scalpers are not forcing anybody to buy their property. In fact, they’re doing a societal good by helping those customers who value that good more.

To illustrate this, imagine that a famous singer is going to be in a recital with a capacity of 50.000 people and that the ticket’s price is $70. There are, too, 120.000 people willing to buy that ticket, being $70 the minimum price.

1. We’d need to understand that human beings are different and varied by nature. Except for a few innate needs, like hunger and temperature, each one of us has different ends, different ways of how to attain an end, and different order of priorities for various goals.

2. An object is valuable only because there is at least one human being who believes that this object can help satisfy their subjective ends.

Now, if different human beings can have a different priority to one end (going to the recital), the economic value of that object (the ticket) that attains that end depends on how much the individual wants to satisfy their end. Being informal, we could say that the highest your priority is, the more valuable the object is to you.

1. The scalpers, like any entrepreneur, analyze the market to see if they can make a profit. By supply and demand, we can easily see that the supply of tickets is way less than the demand for them, so “they exist” because the equilibrium price was not reached yet in the first place.

As we said before, there would be fans who value going to the recital more, so they would be willing to buy that ticket at a higher price. By consequence, the scalpers don’t create an artificial demand, because the fans would have a different order of priorities for that end, as value is subjective to each individual.

1. The scalpers can make a profit because of those fans. There’s no “misfortune” because those fans who value going to the recital the most are actually being benefited by them.

It’s true that the supplier is the one who sets the price, but the main factor of price determination is the evaluation of the consumer, as every one of them decides in his own context whether the price paid for a good betters their life and well-being.

1. In addition, scalpers absorb the time risk associated with events. Their opportunity for profit is good for the fans because it ensures that tickets will be made available.

Scalpers are hidden heroes at events. They take personal, financial, and legal risk in order to provide a critical service in the hopes of earning a profit from their labors. Many of the aspects of scalping that people decry are, in reality, a direct product of the prohibition placed on the service. The prohibition raises prices, reduces supply, and limits competition. In addition, in the absence of the prohibition of scalping, buyers would have legal recourse against unethical scalpers who sell counterfeit tickets.

But, all models and pandering aside, scalping is simple: Individual sellers have the ownership of a scarce economic good, and they willingly fork over ownership of the good to a willing buyer, at a price agreed upon by both (or all) parties to the transaction. As usual, state intervention in this case means that your property is not your property to do what you want with it.

Is there a more victimless crime than scalping? Of course not. It is capitalism at its purest level. An event is sold out, you need a ticket and the scalper provides you one at a mutually agreed upon price. You don’t need to be Louis Rukeyser to understand the remarkable efficiency of this market.

Depends of how they make a profit.

By voluntary exchange in a free-market setting? They’re serving consumer needs and, by consequence, doing a societal good.

By using government-grant privileges to smash the competence? Nope. They’re doing more harm than good.