Out of Pod Experience

I don't understand why the military wasn't deployed to Detroit years ago erasing through some of this, root out the gangs and near feral populations to try and restore law and order...

Both were the result of too much regulation and too much of an expansion of money and credit.

The expansion of money and credit allows the bubbles to form, the cost of money goes down, so a lot of over investment occurs, eventually leading to a bubble and the inevitable bust.

Add regulation on top of this and it gets even worse. Regulation forces more money and credit into specific areas than would have other wise occurred. Imagine the economy is like a balloon or a sausage. If you fill it more and more, it'll get bigger and eventually break. Now to imagine regulation, tie a bunch of strings around the balloon or squeeze it in your hand. The bubbles will be forced into other areas. Those areas are no more strong than any other area, but have to hold up against even more pressure.

Too much credit and too much regulation is the problem. The bust after the bubble is the fix. Instead we get short sighted politicians and technocrats that insist on starting up new bubbles and new regulations to get votes from the ignorant voters that are duped into believing that government, who created the problem in the first place, can some how solve anything.

I can see where you're going, but in that case I don't think the problem is too much regulation. more like wrong regulation. 1929 was a an issue of a bubble bursting yes, but it's more akin to the post-war superproduction bubble and subsequently over-speculation, if we can call that, that happened up until the crash.
replace "post-war superproduction" for "toxic credit", and it's pretty much the same thing for 2008, with banks loaning too much money to people that would probably not be able to pay it if something went wrong. However, regulation here was not as much of a problem as it was the lack of overseeing. In both cases all one needed to watch was the real state of things (too much stockpiling in the 1929 case, and too slow economic growth on the 2008 case), to see that things wouldn't go well.
Still, people went all the way till the end because speculation yields the best profit in short-term.

but yeah, I'll correct myself here: it's not a problem of quantity of regulation, it's a problem of quality of regulation.Too much isn't good, but so it isn't the complete lack of regulation. Better have a safety net for harsher times, or at least a mechanism that stops things before crashing down, something that considering how volatile and unpredictable the finance world can be, is nigh on impossible.


As for somebody overseeing things, I can agree that this can go wrong too. Afterall, this is humans overseeing humans we're talking about.

that, in itself, can also be a starting point: if it's going to be flawed then you take into consideration that it is not perfect and you prepare beforehand, because, in hindsight, you will always need a certain level of regulation and oversight in the end. the question is: how seamless or intrusive is such regulation and oversight.

it's fair and I totally agree with you, but I still can't see said relationship to work both ways beyond small-ish environments and well-structured communities. Sociologically, there will always be deviants and, given time and with a little help of Murphy's law, said deviants will end up in positions able to change things.

Don't get me wrong, I'll always be pro-liberty, but mankind and it's story has shown to me that sometimes an iron fist is required, because sometimes people will confuse liberty with wilfulness and debauchery.

Tumahub, methinks due to your being in Detroit, a corrupted state is leading you to judge the concept of a state with a wide brush. Like I've said before, the monopolisation of power is a natural course in many industries through one form or another, and that ultimately it is this lack of accountability that breaks it.

Academically speaking, it seems to me that lack of economic awareness back in the 50's/60's when voting lead towards this. It's a triad, State, business and electorate, lose one of them and one of the other two will soak up the excess influence and slowly kill the other. In Europe its generally been business instead of the state being more corrupt, leading to our perspective over Detroit's.

As I mentioned before, monopolies are created by the state. There is no natural monopoly in any industry and state monopolies are necessarily not accountable to anyone. Hence the great danger of having such a monopoly of coercive power in the form of the state.


You'll have to go a bit further back to find the impetus for states monopolizing industries. During the 50s and 60s there was an explosion of socialist influence into the west. Look up Fabian Socialism and read bout the US and UK proponents of those ideas, they were highly influential academics and policitos of their era.

Despite the fact that many WANT there to be a check on the state in the form of the electorate, there is no such relationship. The state clearly operates to enrich its own interests at the expense of the electorate. This is precisely why I explained that the state necessarily grows a dependent population because people respond to the obvious incentive that working in private business means paying ever-increasing sums to subsidize those who are favored by the state (those who do not produce or who produce primarily for the state). You are right that one slowly kills the other, but this is only a one-way street. States kill business through regulation, taxation, and oppression. Businesses, having no coercive power of their own, cannot fight back against this.

In Europe, as in the US, the state is one with large business. I would strongly suggest you find out just who is in control over your corrupt businesses. By the numbers over 40% of the entire world economy is controlled by international banks based in the UK, EU, and US. These aren't private businesses, but subsidiaries of central STATE banking institutions. They are the problem, not because of their status as "businesses," but because they are granted state power and privilege. Their boards are chocked full of politicians. They donate heavily to political campaigns. They don't exist because of banking. They exist because of STATE banking and the unnatural economies of Keynesian money printing and influence peddling.

There's no bias on my part from the point of view of a businessman. I'm simply honest about the system. We, as supposedly enfranchised citizens have long lost the ability to control the machinery of power (if we ever had such influence in the first place). This isn't because we trade goods on a market, but because we excused the obscene excesses of power in the hands of our supposedly benevolent state leaders.

I get the "murky," relationship between the big banks and the state, but you have to accept that fact that states have coercive power over the population and a guy with a sign outside his door that says "bank," who holds your money and returns you some interests does not have any coercive power over anyone.

So a person who comes into political power from a big bank is just using that big bank as a means to empower themselves through the state, not the apparatus of banking. Fractional reserves, central banking, fiat money printing, these are all creations of state power. A bank that tried to do it absent a state to support it would simply fail while a state could do the same things without using the word "bank," if it chose to do so.

I think this is an important point because what we're looking at is extreme totalitarian power. If people are so easily convinced that 'banking,' is to blame for the problems of autocratic regimes the world over, they're going to be suckered into supporting even more viscous political aggression against themselves just to spite the supposed enemy (banks).

Get rid of the big banks and you still have tyrants in the state. Get rid of the state and you have a bunch of completely defunct banks that nobody will want to do business with.

actually, considering how banks are regulated by the state, they have coercing power over people, since the house renting market over here is quite small, and how large the pre-crisis house prices are vs average salary, means that a large sum of people atm are simply not eating at all just to have a ceiling over their heads. Sure yes, interest rates have been quite low in the last years, but once the interest rate drops, they raise spread rates, usually 2 to 3 times more. Also the state is a bit of a hostage from them too, since they control a large sum of the public debt, and at special, higher-than-average interest rates, because the ministers and secretaries of state who did that wanted to get in one of those bank boards, or they came from there and wanted to have a nice, fat paycheck once their stint in the state ended.

Unions are certainly part of the problem, though I'd like to point back to the issue of State power. By means of corruption, the unions encourage the State to grant them extra privileges.

Unions, in some states, automatically get a portion of each workers pay, in many cases with out the worker's consent. They can only do this by utilization of State power. The list of abuses and poor economic polices is long, from minimum wage laws that were designed to protect unions, to forced dues.

I have no problem with people getting together to bargain with an employer. They have every right to organize. But they do not have the right to ask for and get special privilege from the State.