The problem is, the Fed is not doing a good job, it was for a while then we replaced a good Fed Chairman with a terrible Fed chairman and we see prices going up. The problem is the actual paper currency itself, it is too easy to make paper currency and its too easy to expand the money supply, all the Fed has to do is print more notes with more zeros on it and the currency we hold is devalued, it is a way of stealing from us remotely, just because actual physical currency isn't flowing out of our bank accounts and strong boxes, doesn't mean that we aren't being robbed by our government! If the currency is gold, the government can't make more gold easily. You could print $1,000,000 on a gold coin and it is still worth only what the amount of gold in it is worth, that is the beauty of it.
What Is Wrong with "Trickle Down Economics"?
- Thread starter Knight Templar
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The problem is, the Fed is not doing a good job, it was for a while then we replaced a good Fed Chairman with a terrible Fed chairman and we see prices going up. The problem is the actual paper currency itself, it is too easy to make paper currency and its too easy to expand the money supply, all the Fed has to do is print more notes with more zeros on it and the currency we hold is devalued, it is a way of stealing from us remotely, just because actual physical currency isn't flowing out of our bank accounts and strong boxes, doesn't mean that we aren't being robbed by our government! If the currency is gold, the government can't make more gold easily. You could print $1,000,000 on a gold coin and it is still worth only what the amount of gold in it is worth, that is the beauty of it.
The asteroids have plenty more gold than is available on the Earth's surface, gravity and the pressures that build quickly with depth greatly limits our ability to dig deeply into the Earth, on a weightless asteroid, that is a different story.
That is not cost effective. At all.
I notice going out into space is your go-to solution for everything. If only everything could be so simple.
I imagine it's because he actually does live on Mars, because his brain is clearly not receiving enough oxygen.
How are we supposed to bring the asteroids to us? The closest asteroids of any significant size to yield a substantial amount of resources are hundreds of thousands of miles out into space, beyond the orbit of the Moon. Most are millions upon millions of miles out into the depths of the solar system.
Are we supposed to develop some unmanned probe or craft to fly out into interplanetary space, shoot projectiles at these things to point them in the right direction then "push" them ever so slowly in the direction of Earth? And then what, assuming these asteroids get to Earth orbit? What's going to prevent them from being dragged down into the atmosphere by the planet's gravity and crashing somewhere on the globe with horrific consequences? And even IF you could keep them in a stable orbit, we don't yet have established, viable methods for mining in the vacuum of space while wearing protective suits and gear.
There are so many things wrong with this idea there's just no point taking it seriously. Not now. Not in the near future. Not when he wants the whole currency-and-gold standard thing solved when we can supposedly reap the benefits from it.
Are we supposed to develop some unmanned probe or craft to fly out into interplanetary space, shoot projectiles at these things to point them in the right direction then "push" them ever so slowly in the direction of Earth? And then what, assuming these asteroids get to Earth orbit? What's going to prevent them from being dragged down into the atmosphere by the planet's gravity and crashing somewhere on the globe with horrific consequences? And even IF you could keep them in a stable orbit, we don't yet have established, viable methods for mining in the vacuum of space while wearing protective suits and gear.
There are so many things wrong with this idea there's just no point taking it seriously. Not now. Not in the near future. Not when he wants the whole currency-and-gold standard thing solved when we can supposedly reap the benefits from it.
Actually, not quite, otherwise coins wouldn't have been worth more than their metal value, and a $20 wouldn't be worth more than a small piece of printed paper. It's also dodging the question of what the gold in the coin is really worth, which boils down to the same answer that the $20 paper bill. It's worth what someone will pay for it.
To me, gold is only worth a few dollars an ounce, at most, because it's just not very useful for making bullets. It's very dense (great ballistics), but it would still have to be jacketed with copper or molybdenum because there's no way to chemically clean gold residue out of a gun barrel without destroying the bore.
As soon as everybody else realizes this, gold will probably drop to around $5 an ounce, at least once girls quit wanting gold jewelry because it's <girl voice> pretty </girl voice>.
Yes, you're actually trying to tie the money supply (the stuff that pays for pickup trucks, guns, bass boats, nuclear missiles, and Intel processors) to the supposed constantcy of Kim Kardashian's fashion sense.
And then, of course, to expand the supply of gold to keep up with economic expansion, you suggest mining asteroids, which could change the supply of gold, and thus the perceived worth (or the amount of gold per household) by a factor of perhaps several thousand, even a million (if we dig into Mercury's core). Essentially, the supply would expand in some arbitrary and unpredictable manner. We could have hyperinflation, where you have to take a wheelbarrow full of gold down to the gas station to buy a six pack.
Interesting little tidbit: Western countries recovered from the Great Depression in the exact order that they abandoned the gold standard.
Do you like the value of your money being eroded? My problem is people who should know better, the Fed chairman and the board of governors are eroding the value of money by printing too many dollars, as they think it will help with unemployment, when the problem lies with too high taxes. Yet people don't learn from the past, what was learned in the 1970s and 1980s is being ignored today, and people are making the same mistakes, that is why I trust the value of gold to preserve the value of the dollar better than their judgement.
That is precisely the "head in the sand" attitude that has kept us in the 20th century so to speak. We should be mining the asteroids now, its 2012 people! If you asked someone in the 1980s whether we would be mining asteroids in the year 2012, they would have said sure, read any hard science fiction book from the 1980s and you'll find numerous examples of asteroid mining, the problem is that as time passed and these early 21st century years got closer, people continued to act as if we still lived in the 20th century and continued using the "its impossible" arguments as to why we should not be doing it. we see people bemoaning that were running out of fossil fuels that aren't doing anything about it except saying that we should be using less. There are plenty of alternatives if we'd just get our heads out of the sand and look towards the sky.
The why do you watch Star Trek? That clearly is not realistic, I'd say asteroid mining is a good deal more realistic than Star Trek, don't you think?
Taxes are not too high.
Inflation is also not too high.
Regardless, going back to the gold standard wouldn't fix the economy, it would rapidly contract it and set off a global economic collapse.
So, you know, great idea.
Like Mitt Romney?
Yeah, man, everybody knows Harvard is a terrible school. Totally overrated. I bet if your kids got a free ride to Harvard you'd just throw that shit right in the trash, huh?
Oh, man.
If it graduates students that don't learn like Obama, that aside from being a terrible president, didn't know what memorial day was for, or thought that US troops liberated the Auschwitz death camp, which is in Poland, during World war II, then Harvard needs to graduate better students than that.
So wait... let me get this straight: Mars is not just talking about establishing a gold standard to back currency, but actually using gold as currency?
As to mining the asteroids for gold: wouldn't that pretty much defeat the whole purpose of using gold as a means of exchange?
I mean, gold is only attractive as a currency base, because it has historically held its value so well, but this is primarily due to the fact that the supply is finite, and the material relatively rare. Suddenly tapping a new and virtually inexhaustible supply of gold from space would pretty much end all that, now wouldn't it? It would eliminate the very properties that give gold its stability and value in the first place.
A seemingly endless supply from space would render the material common and with no more inherent value than, well, paper.
As to mining the asteroids for gold: wouldn't that pretty much defeat the whole purpose of using gold as a means of exchange?
I mean, gold is only attractive as a currency base, because it has historically held its value so well, but this is primarily due to the fact that the supply is finite, and the material relatively rare. Suddenly tapping a new and virtually inexhaustible supply of gold from space would pretty much end all that, now wouldn't it? It would eliminate the very properties that give gold its stability and value in the first place.
A seemingly endless supply from space would render the material common and with no more inherent value than, well, paper.
You do understand the concept of fiction, right?
So wait... let me get this straight: Mars is not just talking about establishing a gold standard to back currency, but actually using gold as currency?
As to mining the asteroids for gold: wouldn't that pretty much defeat the whole purpose of using gold as a means of exchange?
I mean, gold is only attractive as a currency base, because it has historically held its value so well, but this is primarily due to the fact that the supply is finite, and the material relatively rare. Suddenly tapping a new and virtually inexhaustible supply of gold from space would pretty much end all that, now wouldn't it? It would eliminate the very properties that give gold its stability and value in the first place.
A seemingly endless supply from space would render the material common and with no more inherent value than, well, paper.
This.
Plus the fact that the technology will probably cost a couple trillion dollars and take a century to develop.
It's a laughable at best.
Actually asteroid mining is already in the works, with one startup backed by James Cameron.
I often debate the Outer Space Treaty's legal points because a few lawyers claim that it bans claims in space, but the treaty has about as much thought as you'd scribble on the back of a postcard, is vague, and has loopholes the size of Saturn's ring.
Even a small iron asteroid contains billions of dollars in metals, making missions potentially highly profitable even at today's staggeringly high launch costs.
I often debate the Outer Space Treaty's legal points because a few lawyers claim that it bans claims in space, but the treaty has about as much thought as you'd scribble on the back of a postcard, is vague, and has loopholes the size of Saturn's ring.
Even a small iron asteroid contains billions of dollars in metals, making missions potentially highly profitable even at today's staggeringly high launch costs.
The day we start strip mining asteroids for gold is the day it starts being about as valuable as a sheet of notebook paper. I don't know how all of his goes clear over Mars' head. These theories have got to be wink-and-nod jokes nobody's supposed to take seriously, otherwise they cease making any sense whatsoever. If not, we're being told that tying a new national or even global currency to a finite resource that we don't have anywhere near enough of on this planet to even do so with is a nostrum to all our currency problems...but if we mine rocks in space for a lot more gold to make up for the lack of it here on Earth then the substance suddenly becomes close to worthless. So our new money then looks like the Zimbabwean dollar where you need a dump truck full of them to go buy some bread and milk.
Tell me where we're wrong.
Tell me where we're wrong.
Uh, that pretty much sums it up.
Aluminum used to be worth more than gold. If we'd switched to an aluminum based currency because of its rarity, can ranchers would be billionaires and would push Italian designer shopping carts - or we all would be pushing shopping carts picking up cans, becasue the currency system would've collapsed when someone mixed bauxite and molten cryolite and applied an electric current.
Lot's of rare earth elements are worth more than gold, but nobody suggests using them to back a currency system because they're not "pretty." Like diamonds, the value of gold started mostly a means of getting laid, because chicks dig it. There was a brief period where nylon could've backed a currency, but then production soared and guys couldn't get laid by giving away panty hose anymore.
From that perspective, the collapse of the housing market could've been predicted from the point where banks were forced to lend to guys who didn't have a job good enough to impress a girl, but somehow owned a nice house, ruining nice houses as an indicator of mate desirability.
Of course, currency exists because you can't take your house to a strip club.
Some economists don't think world financial markets and macro economics can be explained entirely by Hooters, which they often discuss at Hooters over beer and wings while futily trying to catch a girl's eye by non-chalantly wearing their UN World Bank security badge.
Aluminum used to be worth more than gold. If we'd switched to an aluminum based currency because of its rarity, can ranchers would be billionaires and would push Italian designer shopping carts - or we all would be pushing shopping carts picking up cans, becasue the currency system would've collapsed when someone mixed bauxite and molten cryolite and applied an electric current.
Lot's of rare earth elements are worth more than gold, but nobody suggests using them to back a currency system because they're not "pretty." Like diamonds, the value of gold started mostly a means of getting laid, because chicks dig it. There was a brief period where nylon could've backed a currency, but then production soared and guys couldn't get laid by giving away panty hose anymore.
From that perspective, the collapse of the housing market could've been predicted from the point where banks were forced to lend to guys who didn't have a job good enough to impress a girl, but somehow owned a nice house, ruining nice houses as an indicator of mate desirability.
Of course, currency exists because you can't take your house to a strip club.
Some economists don't think world financial markets and macro economics can be explained entirely by Hooters, which they often discuss at Hooters over beer and wings while futily trying to catch a girl's eye by non-chalantly wearing their UN World Bank security badge.
Asteroid mining in significant quantities means tech that can drive large masses toward Earth. Their KE makes these masses the non-radioactive equivalent of nuclear weapons. Frankly, any ideology that advocates private ownership of weapons of mass destruction is not just crank economics. It's merely barbarism with scifi PR.
Having done myself the favor of skipping over the larger part of the thread, I will note that the original question is simply answered. All versions of what opponents dub "trickle down" economics demand policies based on the assumption that wealthy people are not investing their capital because some government policy is lowering their rate of profit. It's true that if there's a lower rate of profit there's less investment but the issue is whether the assumption government policy of any sort has direct effects on the profit rate. Or, for that matter, immediate indirect effects on the profit rate.
The overwhelming majority of orthodox economists do not have an agreed upon theory about the origin and rate of profit. Partly this is because all the favored theories, especially including all the theories promoted by the trickle down theorists, are easily refuted by economic history. Academic economics is not quite as ridiculous as astrology or theology, but it is highly ideologized, balkanized into isolated fields to limit the relevance of what it does finally succeed in discovering and completely unable to excise even the nuttiest crank theories. Austrian economics and neomonetarism are particularly good examples. You can rest assured however that no academic economist is using Marxian economics.
Obviously then the economy is in great hands. Anything that happens in the economy is manifestly an Act of God. Our lot is to accept our lot, lest we be merit eternal damnation (or a death squad, in countries where the divinely blessed rich are politically weak.)
Having done myself the favor of skipping over the larger part of the thread, I will note that the original question is simply answered. All versions of what opponents dub "trickle down" economics demand policies based on the assumption that wealthy people are not investing their capital because some government policy is lowering their rate of profit. It's true that if there's a lower rate of profit there's less investment but the issue is whether the assumption government policy of any sort has direct effects on the profit rate. Or, for that matter, immediate indirect effects on the profit rate.
The overwhelming majority of orthodox economists do not have an agreed upon theory about the origin and rate of profit. Partly this is because all the favored theories, especially including all the theories promoted by the trickle down theorists, are easily refuted by economic history. Academic economics is not quite as ridiculous as astrology or theology, but it is highly ideologized, balkanized into isolated fields to limit the relevance of what it does finally succeed in discovering and completely unable to excise even the nuttiest crank theories. Austrian economics and neomonetarism are particularly good examples. You can rest assured however that no academic economist is using Marxian economics.
Obviously then the economy is in great hands. Anything that happens in the economy is manifestly an Act of God. Our lot is to accept our lot, lest we be merit eternal damnation (or a death squad, in countries where the divinely blessed rich are politically weak.)
Oh, but government ownership of WMD is just peachy.
So how is a company going to profit from being able to smack a small asteroid into the Earth someplace (we can barely control a satellite well enough to miss continents) years after they decide to hit something, and what exactly is the business model?
Privately steered asteroids would be the only Earth crossers up there that aren't at risk of smacking into us.
Of course they're not, because that would be retarded, like having JPL use Earth-centered Aristotlean epicycles to calculate asteroid trajectories.
Please learn to multiquote - it's not hard.
Though asteroids are not weapons, the ability to steer them could be used for harmful effect, but I don't see that technology as controllable, governments will just have to learn how to steer them back if they are on dangerous paths.
One thing academic economics lacks is objectivity, economics is highly related to politics, and one encounters facts that contradicts their favorite political theory, that evidence is ignored. I've seen liberals argue their case for Keynesian economics, they can't seem to see that its not working, they keep on making excuses for it not working, and when someone tries to implement it and it doesn't work, they always say he did not try it quite right, some little technicality such as the way he twiddled his little pinkey caused the whole thing to come crashing down, it wasn't the fault of Keynes now was it, who's theory always worked in theory and on the black board when the professor demonstrated it, but never in practice, gee I wonder why? Would War II was a special case, this was a matter of national survival, and that motivation caused governments to work more efficiently than they normally do and there is no way to achieve that efficiency in government work short of total war. We can't start World War III to get us out of this recession.
Academic economists at least try to develop economic theories that are objective and account for the behavior of humans, governments, and firms. But it's not easy, because economics is not just a matter of supply and demand, nor resources and technology, but a great deal of human psychology and the politics of the moment. Good luck ever developing a fully objective theory that serves as an adequate predictive model.
Besides that, what is the least bit objective about your goldbugging? You have absolutely nothing concrete to base that on.
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