Sorry to be offtopic but does someone know of a way to log back into an instagram account?? I was dumb forgot the login password. I appreciate any tricks you can give me

@Landon Raylan Thanks so much for your reply. I found the site thru google and I'm in the hacking process atm. Takes quite some time so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

@Landon Raylan It did the trick and I actually got access to my account again. I am so happy:D Thanks so much, you saved my account !

@Cesar Yael no problem :)

Clarence Peterson Likewise. I watched Tom grow through the Ron Paul era.

I've seen Tom Woods lectures as far back as 2004. It's amazing how much he's changed. His ideology is the same but he's more confident in speaking and uses more banter.

Clarence Peterson Absolutely. He has the skill of breaking down tough academic material and redeliver it to the masses in brilliant form.

Ha ha! I just discovered him a month or so ago and my objective is to watch as many of his videos as I can.

I think I have seen them all too, as well as ALL Contra Krugman and Tom Woods Show episodes.

magnus4g63 very articulated speaker. Pacing is perfect too

Agreed :)

Jeg er helt enig Magnus! Han er dygtig 👍

get rekt

It's called fashion

Yes, this, we can see this happening in real time in Russia and Ukraine.

This comment is confusing, would you mind explaining it?

@@obviouslykaleb7998 The maker of the video Curt is referring to made a common mistake about the Austrian school. Austrians will use actual economic data for historical analysis, when appropriate. But Austrians say that the economic data by itself doesn't 'prove' anything--you have to have an economic theory that the data is illustrating. I'm not sure I'm explaining it very well. This article may help: mises.org/wire/do-austrians-really-reject-empirical-evidence

That would imply pension and client deposit account funds etc would be auctioned off to cover the losses that the bank did on real estate speculation in the event of bankruptcy. Absurd beyond belief.

depends more important for whom, if your income comes directly or indirectly from labour, you are employed or run a small business where most of your customers' income comes from labour, then unemployment and underemployment is the most important thing to control because your livelihood is bound to the disposable income of the median family, if your income comes from financial speculation, then inflation impacts on your profits while the increasing need for credit to keep up with the quality of life will increase it.

@@imccc The internet is amazing! All the niches assemble! Damn! Thanks "MikeC"!

this random comment is epic

Tom in Puerto Rico The fed should be abolished, and bank runs were a healthy check on fraudulent fractional reserve banking.

FDR gave them fast economic growth.

Improvement of the economy takes more than simply spending more. So poor people spending all of their income doesn't *really* do much to help the economy, because the goods and services need to be produced before they can buy them with their money. Of course, with redistribution of money, or better yet, monetary inflation by a central bank like the Fed, the poor can pay more money for already existing goods and services (price inflation), but that's clearly not going to help the poor or the economy in general. And I'm assuming that you don't hate the poor, but actually want to help them, right? What's really needed to improve the economy is capital accumulation and investment to increase production and productivity. Increased production means more stuff for people to buy, and increased productivity means increased wages so that workers *have* more money to spend. How do you accumulate capital to reinvest it? By people who defer their present consumption for later, i.e. savings. That's what people with more income do, they save and invest money that they aren't spending now, and businesses borrow that money and use it to increase production and productivity. So if you redistribute money from the wealthy to the poor, you're actually hurting the economy by limiting production, productivity, and workers' wages. We're *all* poorer, not richer, with redistribution, even the poor people. Your second point is a little more murky. What exactly do you mean by a "more equal society"? A society where incomes are more equal? Where rights are more equal? Where the distribution of goods are more equal? There are many ways of looking at equality, and it's not clear which way you are referring to. Furthermore, how do we "know" more equal societies grow faster? Do you have references or links to data that shows that? I can't address your second point until I understand it.

@@macsnafu Thanks for your response. I appreciate you trying to reason through what I said but the conclusion of your reasoning is not supported by evidence. So somewhere along the line your reasoning is not correct. Perhaps I was being a bit brief and the terms I was using have specific meanings, but suffice to say there is a large body of research on taxation, inequality, drivers of economic growth and output fluctuations and a quick google search using these terms would answer some of your questions better than I could. But on inequality, here you go: "(IMF) Research indicates that increased inequality can erode social cohesion, lead to political polarization, and ultimately lower economic growth." www.imf.org/external/np/fad/inequality/ I.e. contrary to your claim, the evidence shows less inequality makes people better off. Note this says nothing about the morality of it. Personally, I'd rather give some of my money away so a guy doesn't starve or a mother can immunise her child or a guy on the streets can have a beer. And thankfully governments recognise that having a society which looks after indigents, sick people, old people and so on is probably a better basis than an Ayn Randian society. But hey, you can also reduce inequality so the economy can grow faster.

@@gazesalso645 Hey, thanks for the link. It looks like the IMF was focused on economic inequality, but I'll need to read it over to get a better understanding of what they're saying. However, I don't see where you countered my argument that more spending per se doesn't improve the economy. And I'm sure I don't see how reducing economic inequality in itself necessarily improves the economy. Last, I'm not sure why you threw it in, but I think you fail to fully understand how the government works. Would you say that someone who first broke your leg, but then gave you a crutch is 'helping' you? Yes, the government provides quite a bit of welfare in various ways. But there are two important points. One is the traditional anti-welfare arguments that a) you're stealing money from productive people to redistribute it to unproductive people, thus limiting the productive capacity and charity of the economy, and b) you're not really helping people if you simply give them the means to survive another day. As the saying goes, "Give a man fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." What they really need is the opportunity and means to support themselves, something government welfare rarely provides. The second point is all the regulations and policies that limit those opportunitities and means in the first place. Taxation, licensing, protective tariffs, minimum wage laws, government-granted monopolies, and more all help to limit jobs and job opportunities, increase unemployment, limit wages and wage increases, and make it harder for people to support themselves and their families. Thus, government is helping to *create* economic inequality and many of the needy people who can only survive with government welfare. In all fairness, some people are truly unable to care for themselves and would need support from other people regardless of the government's policies, but the government is making things worse, not better. I'm not sure why you specifically said "Ayn Randian" society, instead of Objectivist or libertarian society. But if such a society isn't *creating* inequality and helpless, needy people, I don't see how that's not a better basis than our current society.

@@macsnafu On your point "spending per se doesn't improve the economy". Well, that's not what I said. What I said is "that poorer people consume more of their income which is better for the economy than more speculative applications (by billionaires)". Here's the economics of it: More money in the hands of poor people is associated with higher levels of economic output (GDP) because the less money you have, the more of it you tend to spend because you have less discretionary spend. Compare this to people with more money who tend to save more and spend more of it on speculative applications. Like say derivatives.. Why does spending matter? Because *GDP is spending* By households, firms (investment) government and foreigners (net exports). If everyone saved, there would be no consumption. Think about the opposite. If you consume on credit, you are dissaving. Is that bad for the level of economic output? I'm not really debating this with you. It's basic economics and you can refer to Nobel prize winner Joseph Stieglitz's very accessible books on this. On your claim that goods need to be produced first before they can be consumed appears to be you reasoning things through. While this is admirable and makes sense thinking about individual firms, I'm not sure why you would want to reinvent a square wheel when you could just pick up a first year textbook. Firms respond to their stock of inventory. We might as well be talking about which came first - the chicken or the egg. It doesn't matter once you've got chickens. On anti-welfare arguments that "you're stealing money from productive people to redistribute it to unproductive people, thus limiting the productive capacity and charity of the economy". This is crucial point to your argument against reducing inequality. Except I said nothing about welfare which is but one application of government expenditure. But since you've raised it, I'll ignore the well established benefit of government expenditure on public goods such as roads, defense, education, research, public health etc. and address this point you wish to focus on. As I've mentioned earlier, poor people because they spend proportionally more of their income, do more for economic output. And money used to meet basic food requirement is probably more productive than just about anything else you could care to think of. Once you are meeting your basic needs you can think about being creative, innovative, an entrepreneur or whatever. Welfare allows you to do this. So to be clear, your claim that redistribution is shifting resources from more productive uses to less productive is wrong. Which is why the IMF data shows inequality harms growth. This leads to addressing your second point that welfare creates dependency. Well, it doesn't have to. It depends on how you structure it. The Progressa programme in Mexico is a famous example where welfare was tied to things like getting children immunised and keeping them in school etc. which benefits everyone. You can think of it like an investment. Not really much more to say on that. You can check James Heckman for why investments in early childhood development generate more money than is spent. So instead of welfare only, you could have welfare with teaching somehow to fish... And on regulation. Well, you can over regulate for sure. And some regulation is bad, agreed. But the need for some regulation is hard to argue against. I don't want lead in paint, cocaine in my coca cola, roads without speed limits, just anyone owning a gun, misleading advertising, BPA in my soda bottles, nuclear proliferation etc. Saying there are problems with regulation and therefore we shouldn't have government (if i understand you correctly) is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Economists spend a lot of time thinking about unintended consequences of regulation. And again, this is basic and not controversial stuff so I'm not debating this with you. On your claim that governments create inequality through regulation, I'm not sure what you evidence is for this claim. I could at least understand the claim that without regulation one could have higher levels of economic output. But saying that not having regulation would lead to both higher output and less inequality? This is central to your argument but at best its reductionist at worst its hopelessly ill-informed wrong. Think for a moment about regulation of pollution. Or what happened when glass-steagall was repealed. I think what you also need to consider is the problem of regulatory capture. That is, corporations influencing government in ways that benefit them. So for example, government granted monopolies don't come from nowhere. Take for example the health care industry in America. It has the most expensive health care system in the world. Is this the fault of government? Well, yes. It is precisely the outcomes we would expect with the policies in place. But now ask yourself does government on it's own want this or is it that government is acting in the interest of a certain group as opposed to the public interest. Well, lobbying exists for a reason. And this brings me to my point on this: government at least is supposed to act in the public interest. Corporations act in the interest of shareholders only (or at least they're supposed to). If you take away government do you think companies would act in a more socially responsible way or in a less socially responsible way? If companies weren't required to not pollute would they? If companies weren't required to not use bribes to win contacts would they? Well, we know the answer. All one has to do is look at how companies behave in countries where these regulations don't exist. Try Shell in Nigeria, Zara in Bangladesh, BAE in South Africa, Cambridge Analytica in America and so on and so forth. So I've addressed some of your key points. One can make a strong argument for a smaller government, or considered regulation, or certain types of welfare. But making a case for no government, no regulation or no redistribution of wealth is much harder and deserves its place as a fringe idea. It appears to me people work backwards from their beliefs and then try and find evidence for it. My starting point is that my success has had a lot to do with my hard work. But it also has a lot to do with the support that I've had from others and also a great deal of luck, starting with birth. I could've been born in a place where being a child soldier was a real risk. Thus, Ayn Rand's novels for me have no bearing on the world we live in. Even as works of fiction they are hardly plausible nevermind using it as a basis on which to structure society. I'm going to have a stab it and say that your starting point is that you don't want lazy people mooching off your hard work. I'm sympathetic to the observation that governments have problems. It's like Richard Wolff remarked about the revival of "socialism" - it's just a response to the problems in society rather than a real understanding of socialism. And so I think it is with anarchocapitalism. It's a response to the problems in society. But even basic exploration of its principles show that it will quickly run into problems like who pays for things that are non rival and non exclusionary in consumption. You don't have to be trained in economics to see problems in society. But to select among the different ways in which we can organise production one should surely understand why things are the way they are before just rejecting them? If you're gonna argue against redistribution of wealth, it helps to know what economists know about this and why it's done. Surely? If you've read this far, thanks for taking the time to engage. I'd be interested to hear how a laissez faire society would address issues poverty, marginalised people, people who, without support would starve. How would we deal with the under production of public goods by markets? Who would produce non rival non exclusionary goods? . As is it, there is tremendous concentration of wealth and hence power. How do you see this being prevented without government? How would a system deal with the losers not just incentivise winners?

​@@gazesalso645 Woof, that's a long comment. I don't know if I can be concise in my response. "What I said is "that poorer people consume more of their income which is better for the economy than more speculative applications (by billionaires)". What's the difference here between "improve the economy" or "better for the economy"? And are you assuming that billionaires invest only in high-risk, speculative ventures? Yes, it's clear that poorer people consume their income as fast as they get it, with little or no income saved. That's why they live paycheck-to-paycheck. But is that really better for the economy than saving some of your income? I'm not talking about billionaires, but about anyone, at any income level. Savings are absolutely necessary to improve the economy, because deferring consumption is the only way to divert existing resources towards capital investment, so that production and productivity are increased. That's pretty basic economics. People who save some portion of their income, regardless of how much their income is are allowing for this capital accumulation and investment to occur. The wealthy may indeed engage in high-risk speculations that in themselves don't really do much for the economy. But much of the money they don't spend is stored in much safer, more standard investment vehicles that the financial institutions loan out to businesses for business improvements and expansion. In other words, much of their money is being used, just like anybody else's savings, to improve the economy via capital accumulation and investment. And since wealthier people have more savings than poorer people, it seems clear to me that this is doing more to improve the economy than simply spending all your money. "If everyone saved, there would be no consumption" Well sure, but who's going to not consume at all? You save what's left over after you've satisfied your needs and desires. Nobody starves themselves to death just to have savings. It's a question of how much you can afford to save. Wealthier people can obviously afford to save more, and thus are doing more to increase the wealth of the economy, which ends up helping everybody, rich and poor alike. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a flawed and dubious metric of the 'health' of the economy. Instead of trying to explain here, allow me to provide a few links explaining its flaws. You can read them at your leisure. mises.org/wire/gdp-growth-not-same-thing-real-economic-growth mises.org/wire/how-gdp-measures-help-create-illusion-money-pumping-grows-economy mises.org/library/how-gdp-metrics-distort-our-view-economy mises.org/library/gdp-tool-politics-not-economics There are more, but that should be more than enough to consider here. As for regulation and welfare, allow me to respond to those comments in a second post, so this one doesn't get too long.

@vahidfarsi812 You actually can, with Japan having little in the form of natural resources and the US having a multitude of natural resources and the US historically having more capital than Japan ever did. Japan's economic growth in the latter half of the 20th century is miraculous, being in spite of natural resources and worse, animosity from its Asian neighbors due to several war crimes back in World War 2 their nationalists continue to deny.

I can . To not be part of this system is in fact to become beast like at the whim of power and guns . There are no monopolists without the state . There is no starvation anything . The only starvation we have to fear are people who view the free and open exchange between consenting adults as evil . The market isn’t evil . The market just allows man the freedom to exchange. Are you against free exchange ? Am I the beast for demanding freedom or are you for opposing it?

taxation is theft.

Fiat is fraud

Spend and pretend.

Hocus and pocus.

It’s posts like this that make me want to be an economist. Well put. But if I might give my two uneducated cents, it seems like the Austrian model would disavow the banks’ printing money given that banks are private corporations and printing money is effectively giving money. Again, I’m not educated on the matter. I’m just blowing a few KZfaq videos out my @$$. But I think I may parade around your proposal, it’s a really good one.

I think the Austrian school of economics is with you railing against the Fed. Tom Woods certainly has many podcasts about it.

Keeping money constant causes deflation over time. Same dollars chasing more goods due to population growth. Real issue is no one can control money supply. Fed cannot even define money anymore. Overseas banks can issue debt denominated in dollars and the Fed can do nothing to stop it.