The Cult of Mises was started by Lew Rockwell.
People like Jason like to believe they support free-market capitalism, but they have been so programmed to not even understand what free-market capitalism is. Here are some of the gems programmed into the mind of Jason and here are my responses.
Jason:
The fact is capital goes where its treated the best.
Me:
Capital doesn't do anything. Capital isn't alive. Capital can't decide.
Individuals of mankind decide what they do with their property — their right of ownership in chattel, works of the mind and future obligations. Individuals decide whether or not to put their property into production.
Jason:
The market will adjust.
Me:
Markets are abstractions. Markets aren't alive. Markets can't act. Markets can't adjust.
Only individuals are alive. Only individuals can act. Only individuals can adjust.
Jason:
By capital we mean individuals, which in mass consist of the market.
Me:
Capital means property put to production. That is all it means. Capital doesn't mean individuals. From where did you accept that stupid, false belief?
Jason:
The market is a living organism, an adaptive complex system.
Me:
Markets are abstraction. Only individuals exist who can act to try to trade property in pursuit of profit.
Jason:
Man is the economic agent. The market is living in all but name, comprised of millions of individuals. This is why the "market" fears, has greed, euphoria and pessimism
Me:
You have let metaphorical speech of mantras muddle your mind. Thus, you have accepted a slew of false beliefs.
Jason:
I can't hire anyone I want at what wage I want. The state interferes in my right to work and to hire.
Me:
An enterpriser is free to hire anyone resident of the USA and free to pay at whatever wage rate he can negotiate at or above lawgivers' minimum.
If you stopped and then started to think, you would see that minimum wage might cause some products never to come to market.
But also, you would see that absent welfare, no employer could pay minimum wage because no one would work at a loss. Wages must at least equal costs in the absence of welfare subsidy.
All welfare paid to Americans who work, whether EIC, or otherwise ends up being a subsidy to employers who pay minimum wage. If you rid Americans of TANF, SNAP, Section 8, Pell, and so forth, you can have unrestricted immigration.
As it is the American system of welfare and compulsory taxation means that current workers who pay taxes to Congress and who can't get out of compulsory taxation through write-offs in effect subsidize enterprisers who pay wages below costs of living.
Subsidizing enterprisers means inauthentic capitalism. It's crony politics.
Unrestricted immigration would only make that worse.
Jason:
Jason:
I don’t really care if they are illegal or not.
Me:
Your support of illegal aliens is a kind of crony politics. Do you not know what illegal means? Enterprisers are not free to hire those who are not residents of the USA.
While hiring illegals is good for an individual business owner who now can enjoy unearned profits by free-riding on everyone else, if enough firm operators do so, it's disastrous for all.
Jason:
If the illegals work for cheaper, then let them bring down labor. That makes it cheaper to run a business anyhow.
Me:
No one will work at a loss. Americans won't work at jobs where the pay rate fails to cover costs (i.e., living expenses).
Wage rates are prices and get set by double auctions — English auctions for would-be employers and Dutch auctions for would-be workers.
Illegals, whether from Mexico or elsewhere, beat Americans at wage auctions. The can offer lower bids for wages for work done because their costs are lower. Illegals avoid huge costs incurred by Americans who must pay income taxes to Congress and their states' lawgivers respectively.
It's not that illegals don't do the work that Americans won't do. Illegals do the work at below cost, below break even. What they do is akin to the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s known as dumping.
Jason:
The fact that people will bid wages down is part of capitalism and would happen in an unhampered economy regardless.
Me:
But in an unhampered economy, wages never could fall below break even. Firms couldn't exist that today rely on the welfare system to subsidize their low wage workers (wages below break even).
Jason:
Jason:
You are interfering with natural process in the economy.
Me:
I am not doing anything.
Illegal immigration is a boon to crony-political pseudo-capitalists and not free-market capitalists. Firm operators who employ illegals enjoy unearned profits. Without illegals, many would be forced to exit the field of competition.
Having immigration laws and welfare and then having enterprisers cheating by hiring illegals harms everyone else.
Illegal immigration is a boon to crony-political pseudo-capitalists and not free-market capitalists. Firm operators who employ illegals enjoy unearned profits. Without illegals, many would be forced to exit the field of competition.
Having immigration laws and welfare and then having enterprisers cheating by hiring illegals harms everyone else.
Jason:
But, but, but, the higher wages are, the higher costs of production are. The higher costs of production are, the higher prices are.
The higher prices are, the smaller are the quantities of goods and services demanded and the number of workers employed in producing them.
Me:
If what you claim is true, then explain residential realty in the 2000s. As house prices went up to records every year, record employment in construction went up.
If what you claim is true, then explain medicine. Medicine is at an all-time high in demand with the highest prices employing the most it ever has.
Jason:
If there were suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten to surge.
Me:
Prices get set by winning bidders and not by suppliers. When there were record car sales in the USA — record supply of cars — prices were highest.
Prices have nothing to do with costs. Prices get set by winning bidders of purchase and sale in the face of what is on offer. That is my Law of Prices.
Costs arise from the sum of sales on prices set by winning bidders. If the sum of sales of a producer fails to cover costs, that producer goes to ruin. That is my Axiom of Profit.
If costs set prices — which is Ricardo's fallacy by the way — then no firm would ever go out of business. When costs would rise, firm operators would simply put up prices.
Jason:
Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones.
Me:
There you have committed the Fallacy of Non-Sequitur. A flood of immigrants that causes the prime working age growth rate to accelerate will cause a fall in wage rates as wage rates are prices.
A fall in wages causes a fall in prices. A fall in prices kills the return on capital. Future capital spending gets curtailed as no one invests to lose.
Flooding a country with illegals suppresses capital spending because enterprisers can't get suitable returns to capital in the face of cheap labor. With capital spending suppressed, wages are suppressed. All of that causes an economy to go into a death spiral.
A country can't have a growth rate in prime working-age population outstripping the spending rate on capital. If that happens, wages fall and thus prices fall.
On falling prices, even less capital gets deployed. On less capital, per capita productivity falls. Returns to extant capital fall. This is a spiral of capitalism death.
Unrestricted immigration under a system of welfare leads to a capitalism death spiral as few can gain increasing returns to capital when working age population growth exceeds capital spending growth.
With your wrong-headed support for illegals, you are advocating for the economy to die, Jason.
The empirical facts of reality affirm me. The flood of illegal and legal immigrants suppressed wages. When the edifice of capital built on over-extended credit collapsed as returns weren't forthcoming, millions were thrown out of work. Since 2008, the economy has shrunk.
The empirical facts of reality disprove you, Jason.
Jason:
Where have I heard this argument before? Oh wait, its been repeated every 30 to 50 years by the spoiled classes every time new immigration waves come and do jobs for cheaper. It’s the Germans, the Jews or Irish and now it’s the Mexicans.
Immigration made us great in the 19th century and will do so now. 1800s immigration settled the Great West. You blame immigrants like everyone did back then.
Me:
If I were to blame anyone it would be past and present members of Congress. It's obvious why foreigners flee their countries. No one should blame them for doing so.
It should have been obvious to you that before 1914 when immigration hardly was restricted, not only was there immigration but also there was emigration. Many who came left soon thereafter as they couldn't make it in America.
Subsequently, a natural flow of wages existed whereby employers had to pay at least break even. There was no welfare to subsidize their inefficient operations.
It's likely, that most Americans between the ages of 40 and 90 would agree the best years of American life, economically, happened between 1940 and 1990. And in all those years, immigration never exceeded 8.8% of population.
For the first 70 years of the USA (1790 to 1850), immigration constituted 2.61% of population on average in any decade. For the next 80 years (1860 to 1930), immigration raced at 13.7% on average in any decade. For the next 60 years (1940 to 1990) immigration clicked at a reasonable 6.8% on average in any decade. For the last two decades (2000, 2010) immigration ran at 12% a year.
For the first 70 years of the USA (1790 to 1850), immigration constituted 2.61% of population on average in any decade. For the next 80 years (1860 to 1930), immigration raced at 13.7% on average in any decade. For the next 60 years (1940 to 1990) immigration clicked at a reasonable 6.8% on average in any decade. For the last two decades (2000, 2010) immigration ran at 12% a year.
Jason:
You just think illegal immigrants are stealing jobs and money.
Me:
You don't even know what money is. You have no idea that you are living under a fiduciary system.
There is no money. Money is coined metal by weight and fineness. The Romans said so. It's their word.
Cash is bank credit circulating in perpetuity. Cash isn't money.Money can exist without banking. Cash requires banking. Legal tender cash requires both banking and enforcement agents of lawgivers, or that what most unthinking call government.
Jason:
But he Austrian school of economics teaches against you. If you don't belong to one of the approved schools of economics, you can't be right.
Me:
Academia economics is wrong. Economics is a false dogma. Academicians in the field of economics falsely attempt to explain the phenomena of commerce through a faulty lens of scarcity and utility and marginalism.
The reality of commerce is far different. Commerce deals with the trade of property — right of ownership — in pursuit of profit.
Economics is wrong. It doesn't matter if someone is in the Cult of Keynes or like you, in the Cult of Mises. That one has wrong beliefs and so do you, Jason. What you believe is false, a mythology, the stuff of your cult.
Academia economics is mythology and fails to comport to reality. Academia economics, regardless of neoclassical school, fails to deal with the phenomena of trade — property and profits. Instead, academia economics focuses upon utility and scarcity, both of which have nothing to do with commerce.
The worst bit about contemporary economics is this: the field fails to find its basis in commercial banking and jurisprudence. Yet, the entire economy has as its basis commercial banking and jurisprudence.
Neoclassical economics is false dogma. It doesn't matter what school. Believers in economics as a field can't accurately describe commercial reality precisely because they don't have a science. They have conflicting ideas and false definitions.
Jason:
The Austrian School is the correct one.
Me:
The "Austrian School" was a school of neoclassical economics and thus arose from the same fallacies as all of the other neoclassical schools, which in turn arose from the classical fallacies of Smith and Ricardo.
It's unlikely that you know that at one time, the Austrian School was known as The Psychology School. The entire theory of the school was predicated on pseudo-scientific psychology never proven in reality and not needed at all to explain the trade of property in purchases and sales in the pursuit of profits.
There is no room for psychology in an accurate, authentic theory of commerce. An authentic theory gets predicated on property and profit. The application of psychology in the art of commerce is another field. That is called marketing.
The Austrian School has been defunct for decades upon decades. The founders of the school all died long ago. Menger, Böhm-Bawerk and von Wieser are all dead.
Jason:
I suggest you read Von Mises book.
Me:
Those connected with Mises.org go to great lengths to proclaim the Austrian School (and rightly, it’s the Austrian School of Neo-classical Economics, replete with many fallacies of Ricardo and Mills) as the one true school. They worship Mises in a cult erected to him by Lew Rockwell.
Mises wasn't really part of the Austrian School. And neither was his disciple Murray Rothbard, an American from New York City.
Mises earned a degree in law and didn't even work as an economics professor. NYU administrators let him teach but never paid Mises. A board of trustees member had to dig into his own pocket to give Mises private subsidy, in essence. Mises was little better than a sociologist.
Mises was a mere copycat. Mises lifted his economic thought from guys who preceded him by decades.
Mises spewed a silly, false theory around time preference to explain interest. Mises swallowed hard on a giant waste of time, the work of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Even Carl Menger, the father of the Austrian school of Neoclassical Economics had this to say:
“The time will come when people will realize that Böhm-Bawerk’s theory is one of the greatest errors ever committed.” ~ Carl Menger
Mises did not understand banking, at all. In his lecture, Mises said, “The best proof that inflation, the increase in the quantity of money …” and thus Mises believed, wrongly, that an increase in the quantity of money is inflation. Mises could hold this false belief only if he did not understand banking, which is quite clear that he did not.
As well, Mises did not understand interest whatsoever. His “originary interest” amounts to off-the-deep-end foolery. Mises throws out the window the Law of Prices when it comes to interest and instead throws in some crazed false belief called originary interest as his driver.
Mises pushed a rather stupid, false theory on interest that idiots today parrot. Mises time preference theory of interest is quite wrong.
Both Mises and his disciple, Rothbard, were talking shop academicians who never worked in commercial enterprise in their lives. Mises and Rothbard made many errors because of being lifetime academicians neither ran any business much less a profitable one. Without proper entrepreneurial experience, Mises and Rothbard lacked referential experience to understand how capital works.
Rothbard and Mises suffered from a slew of false beliefs about commercial banking. Neither Rothbard nor von Mises understood commercial banking. Rothbard was paid by taxpayers and thus collected what amounted to high-paying welfare.
Rothbard was such an idiot that he believed there was double claims on deposits. Rothbard didn't understand commercial banking. There isn't any such double claims.
Anyone who knows about Commercial Law knows that a banker is a trader who buys cash and debt by selling bank credits. In a purchase and sale, a customer, known as a depositor sells property in cash or receivables to a banker and buys property in bank credits.
With property in bank credits, the bank customer has a right of action to demand an amount of cash from his banker at a future date. Evidences of such right includes checking account bank statements and passbook savings books. In commercial banking law, a deposit isn't a depositum, but actually a mutuum in law of a purchase and sale of cash for deposits.
In a deposit transaction, which is truly a mutuum, so-called depositors buy bank credits and sell cash, other bank credits or debt in a purchase and sale. Depositors get deposits as evidence of their right of action against bankers when in a purchase and sale, selling their cash, other bank credits or debt.
There are no double claims. Bankers own deposits. Depositors own rights of action.
Jason:
I don't care what you say. We're right. It's all on Mises.org.
Me:
Mises.org is a little more than a superstitious cult. Because of fear and anguish over their lives, many look for someone they can claim is authority to explain why things are the way they are. Such ones need a pontiff, a Wizard of Oz.
For Miseans in the Cult of Mises, Mises is their wizard, their pontiff.
Jason:
Your policy is fundamentally anti-labor and anti-poor people.
Me:
First, I don't have a policy. Second, the truth of what I say is free-markets capitalism.
What you advocate is anti-worker, anti-citizen, pro-criminal and pro-crony politics.
You support property-destroying illegal activity. Hiring illegals is no different than cheating on the claimed weight of content in products.
Worse, advocating for hiring illegals is akin to advocating for having your unprofitable work subsidized by others. Enterprisers who can't break even unless they hire illegals are inefficient and wasting resources. They are bringing to market products that not enough want to warrant profits.
Those who don't want to trade property honestly in pursuit of profits and who can't enjoy otherwise higher rates of profits hire illegals.
Jason:
Obviously, you are not an Austrian. Neo-Keynesian? Monetarist? Classical?
Me:
Unlike you, I advocate for free markets, free enterprise and free individuals. You want illegals and crony politics to reign supreme.
Jason:
You are just a collectivist!
Me:
It's laughable that you accuse me of being who you are — a collectivist. You want everyone else to subsidize your illegal aliens and in so doing, subsidize your faulty business.
Jason:
You can't have unrestricted immigration but you must eliminate welfare.
Me:
And now you have agreed with me. Thanks for playing.
The converse of that is, you can't have unrestricted immigration and welfare. Illegal aliens are engaged in illegal, unrestricted immigration.
I have said it above, both ways.
——
Jason believes in hiring illegal aliens. Jason believes that decreeing anyone illegal interferes in his right to hire whom he pleases. Jason doesn't understand jurisprudence so Jason doesn't know what right means.
Through his stupidity, Jason has advocated for a collapse in capitalism.
Most capital gets bought on credit with expected rates of return. Most capital gets used for more than one year. When working age population suddenly increases, wages fall and thus prices fall. The returns on extant capital fails to materialize.
If there are not increasing returns to capital, no one will invest in capital. Without capital there are no wages. Without ever increasing returns, there can be no advance in true wages.
Massively increasing the prime working age population, roughly 18-54, both depresses wages and leads to a capital death spiral. When the prime working age labor growth rate exceeds the capital spending rate, wages fall. Falling wages necessitates a fall in prices. A fall in prices causes a fall on the return to capital.
When wages fall for everyone, prices must fall. Falling prices on extant capital bought on credit require adjustment by enterprisers to maintain their return. They cut workers.
When workers get cut, there are fewer who can buy. Fewer bidders can bid lower to win products. Prices fall gain.
A new round of falling prices leads to a new round of less capital as returns aren't there. If there are not increasing returns to capital, no one buys capital. No one goes into business to lose. The economy goes into a capitalism death spiral.
To understand this more: SOPHIE'S CHOICE OF CAPITAL OR LABOR. A FREE-MARKETS LIBERTARIAN BECOMES AN ANTI-CAPITALIST AND PERPETUATES AN ECONOMICS MYTH
All should favor free immigration, but then also should favor the end of welfare and income taxation. You can't have the former without the latter.