A few words of advice for businessmen: Don't take money from the mafia. Shortly after you receive the godfather's bailout, the don will demand his cut, dictate how much you and your executives get paid, and essentially run your company. Don't take money from the government for the same reason.

ahh... finally, they're letting the natural laws of the economics take their course.

Exactly! And it's bad enough that the private businesses that were more than happy to take the dough are subject to government takeovers and compensation scrutiny and limitation but the same applies for those who had the money forced on them.

Would I be overstating it to say there is something insidious in all of this?

Corrupting and attempting to manage the private economy is not the way to go. But leftist demagogues don't see the loss when the tax and job providers become wards of the state and beholding to it. Unless they think that destroying the economy to maintain partisan control is ok.

TARP, the brainchild of libertarian/Austrian/mainstream conservatives like Hank Paulson and George W. Bush, should have never been implemented in the first place. However, if the public owns a majority share of any particular financial institution, the public should be able to run that entity as it sees fit. This is a basic tenet of the market, that if you purchase something you should control it.

It's hilarious reading the commentary from mainstream conservatives, who are still lapping up the spills and foraging for crumbs from their master's table while the master is currently a welfare case. These self-righteous, condescending conservatives have no problem kicking rhetorical dirt in the face of sufferers, bleating and braying about "personal responsibility" and "equality of opportunity" as if equality actually existed, as if the majority of the blame for the financial crisis rests on the backs of the working poor. It's truly pathetic and sad, and conservatives will continue to lose elections into 2010 and 2012.

I can't believe that conservatives are arguing that corporate welfare cases who are currently owned by the public should be able to award salaries and bonuses at 100-1000x the median income, smugly thinking that they're defending liberty and freedom.

Loosely related, I wonder if conservatives even know the history of the corporation, what the corporation used to be and how it in the served the interests of the public or didn't receive special big-government protection. Corporations are by their very nature creatures of the state, being given limited liability and other special privileges, so it's surprising watching conservatives defend them so fiercely. Jonathan Weiler's Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics is a good start to begin understanding how the conservative mind works and why the conservative mind is so subservient to big-government militarism and police power and abuses like CIA torture and foreign occupation, and why conservatives behave like worshipful peasants toward their corporate masters.

Once again, PMA demonstrates his profound ignorance - and alarmingly misplaced confidence to speak beyond what he clearly does not know. (See my comment under "The Incredible Shrinking President" post for more on this phenomenon). The fact is that Austrian economists were uniformly against TARP and related bailout and stimulus plans under the statist regimes of Bush/Obama. How PMA can call the likes of Bush and Paulson "libertarian" or "Austrian" is beyond me - and beyond any stretch of their definitions.

And, just to note in passing, while some conservative (non-libertarian and surely non-Austrian) groups like Heritage hypocritically backed Dubya's TARP plan, other more libertarian-leaning organizations like FreedomWorks led the opposition. And most every paleoconservatives joined that opposition.

The fact is the PMA routinely speaks beyond his knowledge. It is one thing to have a political or economic disagreement. It is quite another to so blithely demonstrate that one doesn't know the first thing about the poli-philosophical lay of the land. It is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

How naïve (or obtuse) is this: “if the public owns a majority share of any particular financial institution, the public should be able to run that entity as it sees fit.”

You’re theory means nothing if our elected officials don’t listen to or represent the people. So, I hate to clue you but we don’t own nuthin’!

Furthermore, “the public” through any government controlled entity don’t produce anything.

If you understand the basics, it’s easy: government takes; private industry produces and gives.

As do we.

PMA, I've cited this before, but it is worth my recommendation again: Pick yourself up a copy of *libertarian* Timothy Carney's book, "The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money."

Whether Austrians or libertarians overtly supported (as opposed to tacitly approving or being apathetic toward) TARP is irrelevant. They continue to bolster and give intellectual firepower to conservatives, and they gave that support to Bush whether you want to admit it or not. Libertarians and Austrians are complicit in these crimes brought about by subservience and worship to economic elites, in fact, Austrians and libertarians want to abolish wage laws and labor laws, ignore externalities in trade, and would be happy with a Feudal regression where moneyed interests control the vast majority of resources and control every arm of government (this is the case in Congress and the Obama administration).

You’re theory means nothing if our elected officials don’t listen to or represent the people. So, I hate to clue you but we don’t own nuthin’!

Furthermore, “the public” through any government controlled entity don’t produce anything.

I share your frustrations, asdf. Our democracy is completely dysfunctional and citizens need to fight against corporate power (and their libertarian, aristocratic, and Austrian acolytes) and exercise control over these functions, particularly if taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize, and therefore enrich private entities (libertarians and Austrians love this).

It's not true that publicly funded and run initiatives and programs don't produce goods and services. Roads, schools, the military, police, and fire protection are funded and produced by the public sector, and it's been ratified through dialogical consensus. Maybe Austrians, Hayekians, and libertarians would like Goldman Sachs and private firms to run the military, roads, schools, police, and fire departments, but most people prefer that those goods and services be controlled and funded through public mechanisms.

This is part of the summary of that book, found on the page from Eric's link

When it comes to the corporations that dominate the US economy, says Carney, there's no difference between Big Business Republicans and Tax-and-Spend Democrats.

I think libertarians and Austrians are good at diagnosing some of the current problems, but their solutions would worsen things. By abolishing wage and labor laws and completely deregulating corporations (which are creatures of big-government), these groups would exercise complete and total control over society (what currently exists in Congress and the Obama administration, and the Bush regime before it). This is how things worked in feudal Europe; moneyed, private interests dominated every aspect of life. Regressing backwards is not the answer, and many of these arguments have given intellectual aid and comfort to conservatives and many democrats who want to increase the stranglehold unaccountable government and private entities have on our country.

He continues to prove my point. PMA clearly hasn't read Hayek, Mises or any other Austrian liberrtarian, past or present. And he clearly has never spent time reading any paleoconservatives, either. And yet he continues to speak out the wrong hole. How else to describe it? Pathetic. I rest my case.

Eric

Do you believe that libertarians, Austrians, Hayekians, and other ideologues advocate complete deregulation, and abolishing all wage and labor laws?

Yes - with maybe a few minor concessions around the edges, depending on the individual.

The fact is, though, that your head-scratching groupings of oil and water and your laughable descriptions have absolutely nothing to do with reality. It is highly disrespectful to so misrepresent a viewpoint that it is bent beyond recognition to any neutral observer and indeed to the adherents of said viewpoint. Disagreement is one thing. That I have no problem with. What I have a problem with is your reckless ignorance, or -- if you aren't actually so ignorant -- your deliberate fabrications and misstatements. I chose to give you the benefit of the doubt, but in this case the benefit is still repugnant.

The clear, demonstrable fact is that, for instance, the Austrians where consistently opposed to TARP and all of Dubya's stimulus and bailout boondoggles (and indeed all of his reckless spending, centralization of power, and expansions of the entitlement state) just as much as they are now opposing Obama's "call and raise me" tactics with public policy. You are clearly in the dark here.

Not only that, if you knew anything about Austrian economics you would know the defining feature - the central tenant that most differentiates their school from every other school of economics, including those of other free market traditions - is their theory of the business cycle. If you knew the first thing about that then you would know, even without having paid attention to events, that the Austrians would have had to strongly opposed TARP and the stimulus/bailout shenanigans of the past two administrations for the very reason that to support such measures would have meant supporting the very type of government interventions in the economy that they (rightly) say is the major cause and aggravator (along with the artificial credit boom foisted on the American people by the Federal Reserve - but the welfare-warfare state depends on such, so I repeat myself) of the business cycle.

So you will have to excuse me if I cease to pay your factually incoherent spouting s any more mind, other than to call out such for the benefit of others.

Yes - with maybe a few minor concessions around the edges, depending on the individual.

Yeah, Misesians, Austrians, and libertarians don't even have a stump to waddle on, let alone two legs, when it comes to ethics or morality. The only thing keeping corporations from reigning supreme as tyrants is public intervention in the form of child labor laws, minimum wage standards, OSHA standards, and other basic human rights positive liberties when it comes to the employer/employee relationship. It's you, and your ideological brethren, who are so far removed from the practical world, living in a pathetic fantasy realm that has been repeatedly proven to have disastrous effects upon the common good (feudal Europe, tyrannical American business empires at the dawn of the industrial age until the early 20th century, your precious Russia of the 90s with her flat tax--all failures). Of course, unlike our founding fathers, you libertarians don't give a sh1t about the common good, only individual wealth maximization even if it's at the expense of everything else.

PMA YOU'VE BEEN SERVED!

The ignorance is overwhelming. But what is most pathetic is the great glee and lack of shame PMA has in splashing around in his ignorance. Perhaps instead of name-dropping a few libertarians in some kind of pseudo-intellectual sham facade -- names he presumably heard about in a Worker's Daily-type rag somewhere -- he might actually try reading them!

But the real hoot of it all is that, just a month ago, PMA was claiming himself to be a "libertarian"!!! See his comments in the following thread: http://www.flynnfiles.com/archives/politics2009/acorn_is_for_nuts.html.

I guess the only question left is: Why all the self-loathing, PMA?!

Of course, I'm being facetious. PMA has amply proven himself not only *not* a libertarian, despite his earlier claims, but to not have the slightest clue what libertarians (or paleoconservatives, or Austrian economists, etc, etc) actually believe and stand for, and where they have come down in recent policy debates -- nor certainly why they have made the stands they have. He demonstrated it in this thread, and he demonstrated it over here: http://www.flynnfiles.com/archives/politics2009/the_incredible_shrinking_president.html.

The comedy is overwhelming; surpassed only by the outrage of his reckless utterances of obvious falsehoods.

You have completely failed to substantively address the effects of abolishing wage and labor laws, have completely failed to address the effects of total deregulation with regards to the big-government creatures that are corporations who are responsible for our current calamities and the destruction of the U.S. middle class, nor justify the ethical egoist roots of royal libertarianism. I am a proud small "d" democratic libertarian, not a royal libertarian. There's nothing comical about protecting the positive human rights liberties of every individual and advocating for additional positive liberties (like universal health care, which all U.S. seniors currently receive through Medicare and which should be treated as a condition and not a commodity, the validity of which will be confirmed by history).

I don't mind the ad hominem, but you would be doing yourself a service and respecting your dignity as a human being if you were a bit more consistent and a lot less wrong. Since you haven't done your homework and are woefully ignorant of what libertarianism is and its varied schools, here's a small article you can read to educate yourself. Good luck working through your issues (I know you're proud of the fact that you've inflicted physical violence on your children) and hopefully you can use this discussion as a learning opportunity.

http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

Oh, to back up that last aside, here's a link where Eric and asdf admit to hitting their children (their lawyerly interpretation of hitting children is called "spanking").

http://www.flynnfiles.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3166

What substance you had above was besides the point, PMA. You made some completely asinine claims at the start of this thread, in a previous thread I've now mentioned here a few times, and throughout the rest of this. I've pointed it out, and you haven't engaged the fact - perhaps becasue of your willful and woeful ignorance.

In other words, you have proven yourself not worth engaging on the substance, since you have repeatedly obfuscated the substance with so much complete nonsense that is demonstrably false.

So, I rest my case and ignore the remainder of your blather. I am beside myself, shaking my head and giving a big horse laugh at the same time. (Perhaps all this could have been averted had your parents loved you enough to spank you. Alas...)

So when all else fails, we hit our kids?

Exsqueeze me?! And that is relevant how?

Unless that too is the brainchild of libertarian/Austrian/mainstream conservatives.

Oy vay.

LOL! Did anyone see the baseball bat finance guru video on youtube? Please watch and be prepared to laugh; after all the bad news and the disaster that is the Obushma administration it was a much needed release.

"Hell, It Takes Even Eli Manning Six Years to Make a Hundred Million Dollars!"

http://www.monkeybusinessblog.com/mbb_weblog/2009/10/hell-it-takes-even-eli-manning-six-years-to-make-a-hundred-million-dollars.html