Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt

[o5iiawah]

Bow tie is gangsta

[jboritzki]

I really enjoyed this book.

[shotsky94]

This was a great book

[will032167]

(cont) Our downfall came from allowing our education system, our media, and our government to be taken over by the corporations. That is not capitalism, but corporatism. This has all gotten so much worse over the last couple of generations. My grandparents survived the Great Depression. They were successful, but they still were very frugal and still grew their own food. It's all in the mindset... the education level... of the people. Public school doesn't provide the proper education.

[OurBoyerFamily]

@will032167 The myth is that government can exist without succumbing to the pressures money (which is what corporations use to influence policy makers).

[will032167]

@iamdk007, the zeitgeist idea of a "resource economy" (RE) is interesting, but what you zeitgeist followers fail to see is that the RE is similar to what would develop in a true free market...with a free market in EDUCATION as well. State-sponsored public schooling churning out obedient little workers and material-wealth-obsessed little consumers (by design) has produced, along with corporatism in politics, this wastefulness you talk about. An educated consumer is the key to preventing waste.

[jaeLAX23]

@will032167 I've come to this same conclusion.

[BadDrafter]

WTF?!! Bruce Willis? The voice is different though.

[joewatson406]

"I wish I'd written this book. What's it sold? Like two million copies?" - Make that Two million and one :).

[swu880]

wow what a long video

[CircleBastiat]

lol the host is kind of a goomba, but still yet he makes it interesting.

[fringeelements]

Man, Tucker is frogging awesome.

[CircleBastiat]

@fringeelements

lol

[jpschubbs]

Man, they need to work on getting people out of the interview room. You can hear people talking in the background, phones ringing, text messages coming through. It sounds like they're sitting in the middle of the commons!

Aside from that, this video is AWESOME!

[omfg4000]

People must be quite uneducated in the US if a college student doesn't consider the damage taxes do to the productive market when taken and doesn't consider "B" but only "A"...Amazing. Well I for sure do consider it and it is clear to me that taxing the rich is better than not taxing the rich. The rich consume items of higher productive value that benifit fewer. So for example by taxing a rich person he might not be able to buy a second large villa but 10 people might get a home.

[savedslave]

@omfg4000 Who even suggests we dont tax the rich? Do you mean people suggest we dont tax the rich at a higher percentage than the rest of us? Can u explain how its moral to tax someone at a higher rate than another? That just seems unjust especially since politicians probly just do it to appease to masses who arent rich but who r essentially encouraging politicians to steal from the rich to give to them.

[o5iiawah]

@omfg4000 So if the government lays a tax of $1m on a millionaire and provides a subsidy to 10 people to buy modest homes of $100k each, you still have a shift in sector demand brought about by the government.The pool and tennis court salesman and contractors are out of work while the general roofer has to hire more people to meet the increased demand. By introducing 10 new buyers into the housing market, you have driven up prices, making things more expensive for those who dont get the subsidy

[o5iiawah]

@omfg4000 If there are 10 homes for sale and 5 buyers, the Sellers must lower prices if they wish to attract the business. If there are now 15 buyers (thanks to your subsidy) they are competing amongst each other for the 10 homes and thus prices can be increased. You gave the 10 people the same amount you took from the millionaire and the created jobs in lower end housing were lost in higher end housing. The loser in the game are the 5 people who could have afforded a home but now cant.

[karkiy]

Thanks for Posting.

[gsapp59]

Is this the same Nielsio of Two Plus Two fame?  Thanks for the upload.

[RunLiberty]

Ron Paul 2012 for President

[dontliethetruth]

you wann see a perfect libertarian society in theory.. go to somalia. minimal government, free arms trade markets and all sorts of other goods with the exception of food.

[AngeloNoel]

@dontliethetruth But in the other hand, their telecommunication system is one of the most advanced and cheap in Africa, there's a lot of great companies and corporations like General Motors, Total Oil investing in their markets, and the private schools (all around the country) are reference in the African continent. Of course, there still existing many problems, but try to compare the economic development with Angola or Mozambique...

[o5iiawah]

@dontliethetruth Except you forgot that in a libertarian system, government is supposed to secure liberty for its citizens. Having armed thugs take your property is not a society of liberty. Weak troll attempt

[zsylvana]

1)Today, most economists readily admit that the equilibrium system of the neo-classicists is totally divorced from reality. It does not take into account the particular institutional framework of capitalism,? which makes quite absurd the notion that wages are determined by “the product of the last unit of his time that the worker wishes to give up rather than devote it to leisure”.

[zsylvana]

 2) It does not take into account the dynamic character of competition and the continual disturbances of equilibrium. which it causes. It is essentially static and brings dynamics as at most an element disturbing equilibrium, whereas in reality equilibrium is only a transient moment in a spasmodic economic movement which is in ceaseless oscillation. It has no explanation to offer either for periodical crises or for structural? crises.

[zsylvana]

3) The neo-classical theory is not only divorced from social reality as whole. It is also divorced from the practical reality of everyday life. Despite all the teachings of the neo-classical school,businessmen continue to calculate their costs of production using “amount of labour expended”

The marginalist theory & the neo-classical school function was, purely to justify the capitalist order as ; to justify wages,prices and profits as the result of exchanges carried out on an equal footing.

[zsylvana]

4)Many economists,was dissatisfied with the answers from the neo-classical school,the problems of investment (the rate of interest),money (the quantity theory of money) periodical crises.Neo-classical began breaking up on its weakest sides,difficulties in formulating a dynamic theory,theory of growth,starting from micro-economic data of marginal value,& difficulty of reconciling the theory of prices from supply & demand with a theory of prices resulting from the quantity of money in circulation

[zsylvana]

5) It can be said that the marginalist school was never able to solve the problem of the “marginal value of money”, and that for this reason it remained dualistic, combining a subjective theory of value with an objective theory of money (e.g. the quantity theory). which correspond to? different needs of equal intensity.

[zsylvana]

6)The quantity theory of money implies that prices rise or fall depending on whether the quantity of currency in circulation increases or decreases, in relation to a definite level of equilibrium.It was in this way that the idea of a rate? of interest resulting from the supply and demand of capital, a rate of interest which rises until the demand ceases because it is excessive, was refuted at the beginning of the century by the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. 

[zsylvana]

7) Knut Wicksell showed that the rate of interest in equilibrium is determined by the relation between saving and investment; and Gunnar Myrdal, a pupil of Wicksell’s, went still further, explaining that this? rate of interest actually depends on the return expected from investments’, that is, on the rate of profit, as also Karl Marx said

[totustuus11]

Yes, Mozart and Bach, Hazlitt and Mises and Rothbard, are all intertwined. After all, as Bastiat would say, "Economic harmonies!" Treatises like "Man, Economy, and State" and "Economics in One Lesson" are as elegant and powerful as musical symphonies.

[evangrogers]

This book is glorious - if you haven't read it, buy it now.

[greenghost2008]

If i had somone from the mises institute over Id want to talk economics the whole time. but then again we'd be talking about their job.

[selfrealizedexile]

statistics that may be suggesting some kind of irrational or counter-intuitive relationship that would be proven as such if they didn't carry as many false a priori assumptions. In this sense, I've seen people call the Austrian theory unscientific even religious, what would be your response?

[selfrealizedexile]

go about devising a path to discover some unknown phenomenon and its relation with other phenomenons.

Now, it can get very a priori in economics because it's a science around what humans will do if they act rational in a repeatable situation. You can answer many questions through simply empathy. And that's what Austrian economics does in a sense and this is considered a weakness by Keynesians because they, at the drop of a hat, won't invalidate their theories based on new empirical

[selfrealizedexile]

But, going back to that pure mathematics proof idea, the reason why you really wouldn't need some kind of empirical, quantitative analysis is because the concepts cancel down to relationships between variables in a simplified sense. I can't remember what kind of anaylsis that's called, maybe qualitative but I'm not sure, but we did it now and then in my physics courses to explore the reasoning behind developing theories of historically significant physicists like Einstein or Newton and how they

[selfrealizedexile]

the issues the Austrian school raises and properly accounts for like this book would.

Are there any other books along those lines? I know I probably should end up reading Hayek and Mises stuff obviously. But, I didn't know if there were any other "no names" out there with hard-hitting stuff.

[JackBlair2]

Milton Friedman, of course. Stiglitz, Sowell.

[selfrealizedexile]

There's no way I'd be caught reading Stiglitz or any other New Keynesian. After reading the General Theory and listening to modern Keynesians field arguments, I can see just how overextended they are in the area of inductive, empirical statistical analysis and the inherent difficulty in controlling and monitoring social, economic experiments unlike those much more feasible in

[selfrealizedexile]

@selfrealizedexile

Like, I just listened to a debate between Walter Block and Bernstein (statist economist currently under employment of Joe Biden) in which Bernstein was trying to claim that the theory of the minimum wage and unemployment was just a theory and the empirical study of the numbers don't conform to it. What's more, he actually straw mans the predictions of anti-minimum wage economists into a

[selfrealizedexile]

@selfrealizedexile

more easily disproven claim. At the end, he cites Stiglitz's (and waves Stiglitz nobel prize as the end-all of economic glory) work and signature of a petition to raise the minimum wage simply because they could grossly misinterpret statistical analysis to provide for a quasi-functional analysis (no different than what Keynes did and other poor econometricians) wherein minimum wage increases the wealth of the affected on net balance.

[selfrealizedexile]

the natural sciences. What's more, it's the only method the natural sciences have; they don't have the benefit of empathizing with a hadron.

[selfrealizedexile]

crystalize it for me.

Anyways, just finished viewing it; very good video, Nielsio. I'll probably end up buying this book. Just got done reading Free To Choose by Milton Friedman and would like something more along the comprehensive lines of Economics in One Lesson. I didn't major in Economics, but I have completed a lot of courses in the subject; so I don't require an introduction. But, the economics taught in college seem to favor Keynesianism without dealing with or comprehending

[Nintendomanwill]

Economics taught in higher education isn't economics. It's like: 'if you give a person $1000,000 then they'll spend that money thus inducing growth in the economy which wouldn't have existed without the stimulus.' That's literally the logical conclusion of Keynesianism, which is a lot of unsophisticated sophistry intended to defend Mercantilism and govt by tricking idiotic students into forgetting what 'growth' actually is: relatively falling consumption to enable expanding reduction of scarcity

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

Yeah, my comments were from 4 months ago; it's amazing how far I've come since then. The fallacy that most stood out in my mind was how Keynes (and several times throughout the book he contradicted himself) attempted to seperate savings from investment. The horrifying, logical conclusions from his propositions is for an economy to regress by stimulated consumption of its capital stock which entails widespread misery as production is violently brought

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

out of align with individual consumption/production behavior and must be followed by a correction in which everyone's standard of living drops. If charlatans like him would be called out (and they have been; it's simply the case that statist apologists and junk scientists are necessarily more palatable to the public who is even less educated by definition) and seen as such, society wouldn't have such volatility and, indeed, higher growth from more sound investments.

[Nintendomanwill]

That's exactly right. The only way the Keynesian idea of 'aggregate demand' driving production and employment works (ignoring its basis in the bad analysis of the fact that goods will tend to be produced less if demand for them is low thus entailing mutually-adjusted production) is if there is a universe with ONE homogeneous scarcity so if demand for current consumption falls so will total production. In reality consumption is deferred contra timepreference & rises when it falls for other goods.

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

That reminds me of the other gross malprescription of Keynes in over-aggregating economics. Economics is logic; it is the study of how individual actors collectively calculate heterogeneous goods and services in a manner that is always particular of relative demand and supply. When you want to aggregate all economic parameters--demand, supply, employment, wages, etc.--you will

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

completely and necessarily miss the causal relationships within each industry and your prescriptions will thus be grossly out of tune. Let's not even get into the matter than legislators are not superhuman, above the 'animal spirits' mentality that must incessantly be prodded for more production by overconsumption.

[selfrealizedexile]

correlation / relationship between the ability to work and the desire for work. The two entities engaging in trade are from the same species. The thing that can, through ingenuity and ability, produce innovation simultaneously has a desire for innovative production of its own. And this cycle is what sustains it forever. I don't consider anything I've written to be anything not probably already proven in some dusty college textbook. But, I'd like to read the formal logic nonetheless to

[selfrealizedexile]

1:11:25 "Labor's scarce, you need to position workers in the most efficient way to maximize output, there's more machinery now, 'great, we can do even more work'."

VERY, Very good way of putting it.

I wonder if any pure mathematicians have made or have any interest in making some kind of proof, defining variables, that proves just why the demand for work is ceaseless. And I would imagine you would go about doing it, after a number of algebraic simplifications, by illustrating a

[Nintendomanwill]

Say's Law is why demand for work is ceaseless, production imputes its own existence, it is not enabled by the demand of others though it eased and induced by its profit margin garnered from purchasers. There can be no general overproduction because if any goods have been overproduced some have been underproduced and this is the central concept of the business cycle, it is not underconsumption but lack of business adjustment to consumer needs (and ability to pay) by gluts fuelled by inflation.

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

Needless to say, reality is on our side; any work done in the Austrian tradition will continue to live on as Keynes and is ilk is relegated to the abyss of bad literature. *That* is the true measure of an intellectual work, not whether a politically-influenced committee has a man crush on you.

Yep. I remember starting out economics and being intuitively astounded how it

[Nintendomanwill]

And during the expansion of fiduciary media, malinvestors who perceive profits from investment in these overproduced sectors whose returns are pushed up with inflation, will spend the cheap credit that enables intersectoral prices to misallocate profit signals from investment until production is saturated and prices crash thus harming leveraged speculators, precisely because the expansion of credit distorts bank interest rates enabling overextended capital structure. ATBC with Say's analysis too

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

could come to pass the services of an engineer were temporarily no longer desired as the market relegates him to being a Wal-Mart greeter (true stories); how is that efficient allocation of resources? What's more, how is it that, on a micro-level, producers are so incessantly looking for cost-cutting, profit-maximizing, and risk-calculating, but then all of a sudden you have macro-scale failure and these two systems be compatible if not there was some poorly-laid

[Nintendomanwill]

I know exactly what you mean regarding your basis of thought regarding the Business Cycle. Mass, synchronised failure arises from profitability!? How could this be if not for some systemic flaw in capitalism? Of course I realised that, ignoring the non-scientific answer, that the order of property rights somehow begot an imperfect distribution of responsibility, the answer lay in erroneous profit signals. Unsound money! Inflation enables distortion of intersectoral pricing enabling gluts.

[selfrealizedexile]

@Nintendomanwill

foundation for rational self-interest by gov't. This is the same ground on which Rothbard began economics and after reading that my instincts were vindicated.

[Nintendomanwill]

Gluts enable profit from uncooperative *over*production which implies corresponding underproduction (Say's Law: the actions of industry do not bring other industries into being, production does not require corresponding consumption, so some businesses can fail for the goods to be used elsewhere i.e. Obama was full of it in the State of the Union when he said government had to step in to keep up demand for business else reduced living standards) so malinvestors suicidally invest in inflated gluts

[rajasmasala]

Maybe the problem *is* the scope of the price structure. Maybe there can be a different scope and meaning to currency. In Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow there's a currency called the whuffie, which is sort of like money and sort of like the rating system on youtube.

[Nielsio]

A price IS a rating. It's a personal rating of what you think is a better deal for what you're getting back than what you're giving up.

[rajasmasala]

I mean that maybe the problem is that monetary transaction is not ubiquitous enough. The social realm is largely divorced in people's minds from the financial, causing tensions between the two. Maybe the two should be more formally collapsed.

[Nielsio]

There are not divorced. Like I said, every person can make a personal valuation of what betters *their* situation.

May I suggest watching "What Is Money?" on my channel?

[omfg4000]

@Nielsio and that is the problem. Economics should depend on the value of the product (such as through supply and demand among other things). By having pricing purely based on ratings economic crisises occure through overrating of products which have little or no value. Its an easily corruptable system. the whole concept of marginalism is just as full of holes if not more the labour theory.

[CircleBastiat]

@rajasmasala

I think you have absolutely no clue when it comes to economics. A monetary price is not simply an insipid unit measure. Prices measure the costs associated with goods, and as a consequence a price is simultaneously a measure of value (a rating system). $5 dollars spent on good A means that at that instant you value it more than any other composite good of up to $5.

The price system is perfect the way it is, and only becomes dysfunctional when the government passes price controls.

[iamdk007]

@CircleBastiat the monetary-market system has produced the most wasteful civilization in the history of the planet. efficiency, sustainability and abundance are enemy's of the monetary-market system. money is monetized debt. to economize means to prevent waste. that is not what this system does. all so called "economists" do when they talk about the market is track the money sequence of value. it does not represent the life sequence of value. please watch zeiteist moving forward, changed my life

[Illyrien]

@iamdk007

Ah yes, zeitgeist. What is not to like about Marxism with Robots :)

[iamdk007]

@Illyrien its not perfect but its a lot better, your obviously happy with getting your "freedom" from the expense of billions of others. stop labeling things just cause your afraid of making real change. thats how cowards and fools argue or debate. its just negative and redundant, i bet if i explained the ideas of that film in better detail you would still go on to say, no no no its marxism with robots.

[Illyrien]

@iamdk007

A real change to today's world would be to actually introduce free trade, which has been sorely missed for a long time.

[phroto13]

@iamdk007 watch stefan molyneux talk about the venus project with the producer of zeitgeist... its a 2 hour discussion about how the system would be implemented and such... very interesting

[phroto13]

@rajasmasala in addition to what nielsio said, in addition to money acting as a rating system from youtube, which represents opinions, real commodity money (gold, silver) represents calculable human labor and real resources. so whereas opinions and ideas are infinite and ever reproducable, this world has limited resources and a hard money represents a proportion of those resources thus it marries the productive opinion of the population with the scarcity of the earth in a system of votes

[ronpaulspanish]

Atlas shrugged, by large...

[kingofmilwaukee]

I bought the book last week and was blown away by it. Hard to imagine it is 60+ years old!

[lilbromarky1]

times change people dont

[flashlightbrown]

This is amazing! The book is amazing too!

[lilbromarky1]

was just reading it tonight actually...

[MrCropper]

I wish I could post videos this long. }:-(

But I'm sure glad THIS one was posted!

[ronpaulspanish]

Wow... I read atlas shrugged and economics in one lesson when I was a kid... how nice it´s out again

[deliciousho]

simple...like how everything should be.

[chaseef]

I didnt know Bruce Willis was into Austrian Economics...

[Shadyhunter04]

He's a neo-libertarian, or small L libertarian. Basically an old school republican who doesn't like the religious right.

So he's sorta libertarian with war mongering tendencies who doesn't mind voting for the slightly lesser of two evils.

[zsylvana]

Paul Samuelson (2009)"A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization "The Hayek I met on various occasions University of Chicago,Stockholm,Lake Constance Lindau Nobel summer conferences definitely bemoaned progressive income taxation,state-provided medical care and retirement pensions,fiat currencies remote from gold and subject to discretionary policy decisions by central bank and treasury agents.Not only is this what constitutes his predicted serfdoms"

[Questfortruth86]

God zsylvana, you pop-up everywhere. I guess it's because you feel your neomarxist paradigm is threatened by the Austrian framework. But there's one thing you should know; the Austrians have already destroyed your would-be theories and ideology. Stop wasting your time man! Start reading!

[PumpkinJoe999]

Why mark zsylvana's post as spam!?

Yes, spam it is, but it clearly displays the servant's inability to grasp the first lesson of economics.

People love to compare Sweden to the United States, but only because it allows them to take advantage of superficial characteristics and labels.

While the tax burden is high in Sweden, the US government as a whole directs the same amount of resources if not more; the US simply avoids the pretense of collecting the tax.

Also: ROAD; one can turn around

[BenjaminWirtz]

I can't watch the whole thing right now but I am favoriting it so I can watch it when I have more time.

[RedOggieDog]

Good post and Hazlitt's book Economics in One lesson is great. Two other great books are, Thomas Sowell's Applied Economics (easier read) and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. If you finish these three books you will understand the economy better than Obama, I promise.

[zsylvana]

How do you blend this thoughs of Chicago School" and "Austrian A prio School" is for me very strange. Milton Friedman recognized that the Austrian cycle is fallacious: in 1969 he concluded that:

"The Hayek-Mises explanation of the business cycle is contradicted by the evidence. It is, I believe, false." He analyzed the issue using newer data in 1993, and again reached the same conclusions.

[jman196]

Friedman was the one who was wrong. Look at his conclusions of gold. The man thought that once fiat money was ushered in that the price of gold would plummet. He was wrong on many occasions yet somehow he labeled as more intelligent because his predictions use math. They are fallacious predictions but oh well. He thought the economy was in great shape during the bubbles (which the Austrians predicted).

[zsylvana]

1)But in fact the operation of the Gold Standard hardly accorded with this idealised picture. The theory was derived from the quantity theory of money as proposed by Hume and Ricardo as well as from the latters theory of international trade the theory of comparative advantage. One of the arbitrary assumptions on which the Ricardian theory was based was the tacit view that all nations were homogeneous; that is, at the same stage of development.

[jman196]

I am wondering why you deem the Austrian Business Cycle Theory as fallacious. Is it solely based on Friedman's word? If you look at what we have today it fits identically unlike any other economic theory. It fit the depression and stagflation crisis' as well. This is unlike any other theory.

[zsylvana]

Austrians often repeat that since the Federal Reserve System was created in 1913, our currency has devalued 98 percent, due to the printing of money. But this is a meaningless statistic. Suppose you need $2,000 a month to buy the necessities of life, but you earn $2,000 a month as well. You're making ends meet. Now suppose that your bills climb to $10,000 a month -- but so does your income. Has anything real changed? Of course not.

[jman196]

And that makes this a meaningless statistic? Sure your living standards can equalize in terms of an expense/wage ratio but this is not the point. Say inflation was at 100% this year and your wages also doubled relative to prices. This would be okay according to your logic but the primary problem lies in the fact that previous wealth has been eroded. Your former labor was not adequately compensated if you did save your money. It also distorts the economy but that is another point to be discussed.

[zsylvana]

The supposed Gold Standard was also based on the proposition that all economic operations are responsive to movements in prices and/or interest rates. This was far from being the case. In its classical period (the last three decades of the nineteenth century) Britain

Additionally, even if the increased supply of gold does bring an increase in the supply of money (by no means an impossible outcome) this will not necessarily produce an increase in prices.

[jman196]

Of course not under a gold standard. This is because gold is also a commodity that can be used as something other than money. Of course paper can too but its uses do not equate to what the designated face-value would be. With gold, an increase in the money supply is almost assuredly due to the increase in production of either mining or otherwise. I think the ideal standard is Hayek's proposal for a denationalization of money altogether.

[zsylvana]

1)The historical fate of the Gold Standard after WW1 can be told briefly. Britain, like all the major countries,practically abolished the Gold Standard during the First World War. Under the supervision of Winston Churchill, restoration of the Gold Standard involved a savage deflation in order to force prices down, jack up the exchange rate and bring about an improvement in the external payments position.The cost, was a price level which made many British exports uncompetitive in world markets.

[zsylvana]

2).The weakness of the restored Standard can be seen in the fact that it could not re-establish the circulation of gold coin (specie). Gold was almost entirely removed from domestic circulation and concentrated in the hands of the state where it became world money, a universal means of payment in the international economy.

[zsylvana]

Which "natural Cycle" do you mean? the mid-20th century, Schumpeter´s business cycle?, Or Kitchin inventory cycle of 35 years ?

the Juglar fixed investment cycle of 711?the Kuznets infrastructural investment cycle of 1525 years or the Kondratieff wave or long technological cycle of 4560 years?Which specific "natural cycle" do you mean?

[zsylvana]

If you say "natural cycle" you must mean there is a such specific one.I gived some exampels of such by famous economists.I also gived you exampel of under wath conditions Goldstandard could work,according to Hume and Ricardo.For exampel Friedman understand that such conditions must be included if Goldstandard should work but obviusly not "Austrians Scolars".If Austrians rejects to accept facts and rely only on A priory reasoning it also goin to be a tiny minority of cultists.Sorry to say!

[jman196]

So you are a logical positivist who believes that the only truth can come from empirical research. Lets try this empirical study shall we. Which economists have been dead on with all of there predictions and which economists have failed miserably in their diagnosis. I suppose being correct is an unnecessary feat according to you. Their A priory reasoning has predicted the depression, the stagflation crisis and the current bubble. And you still think they are wrong? Are you ignorant?

[zsylvana]

No.What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression.I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed.One feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way.What I do is suggest other ways of looking at it.I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought.You thought that there was one possibility or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities

[franz9z]

"This is one of the problems with Friedmanites — they have no political theory of the nature of the state. They think of the state,and this is true of Milton and the whole gang as far as I can see, as another social instrument. In other words,there is the market out there and then there is the state,which is another friendly neighborhood organization.Well lets see,we feed the thing through the computer.We find that the market usually wins out, that the market is usually better."Murray Rothbard

[zsylvana]

LOL!Maybee Rothbards right!Tell Milton´s followers,not me.I have no membership in his Fan-club´:) !

[jman196]

Yeah calling them cultists is really good for this country. They are akin to brain surgeons that have healed all of their patients back to health while your brain surgeons fumble and kill all of their patients. Yet you still abide by your surgeons simply because you like the way they operate. I find this incredibly ridiculous to say the least. I cant wrap my mind around it.

[zsylvana]

I not ignorant and respect your view,and not claim you.But for the market, one has to distinguish between the hypothetical market and the real market. The hypothetical market operates according to purely objective laws of supply and demand that put pressure on prices and thus behavior of rational and egoistic individuals. But in fact, this hypothetical market has never existed and most certainly does not exist in the world-system.

[jman196]

The hypothetical market dissected in Hazlitt's book does exist to a degree. There are universal truths that come from what he states in his book (such as minimum wage laws cause unemployment). I am just wondering why you disagree with the Business Cycle Theory considering what just happened with the two major bubbles.

[zsylvana]

Talk about this hypothetical market is, subsequently, ideological rhetoric. The market doesnt actually work that way and any sane and wealthy capitalist will tell you that. Free market economists wont tell you that, but no capitalist believes in the autonomy of the market.

[jman196]

How doesn't it work that way? Are you saying minimum wage laws do not cause unemployment? The sane wealth capitalist is not operating in a free market so how would they know?

[zsylvana]

What works?Do you mean Friedman's scientific position is that the realism of assumptions is irrelevant if you want to know whether a theory is "good". It is only the approximate conformity of its implications with observation that counts. Moreover, Friedman claims, if you want such conformity, quite often you will be successful using unrealistic assumptions. Assumptions should be abstract, that is, only depict the main features of the process modelled, ignoring less relevant details?

[jman196]

If these 'assumptions' based on deductive reasoning are correct then why would you discount them? You are arguing over methodology as opposed to the results. If a methodology works then why not utilize it? Friedman believed that only empirical research could by used to get truth but what is math? Math is based on logic, not empirical research. How do we know a line is the shortest distance between two points? It is LOGIC.

[jman196]

I do not understand this logic at all. So even if the ends are predicted correctly every time you are still going to criticize the means by which to predict those ends? Friedman's scientific position was often incorrect as a market cannot adequately be measured by use of formulas. Such formulas use the unemployment figure as a bad figure when in reality it is quite arbitrary (what if everyone was agrarian and did not work or trade? Would this be a depression because of the unemployment figure?)

[zsylvana]

I don´t belive in that.I agree the most notable critic of Friedmans Methodology as P.A. Samuelson, who claimed no meaningful distinction between "theory", "assumptions", and "implications" can be made, and these terms al refer to exactly the same thing, the model used. It does not lead in to seruios study of and still be a hypthotetical market i am a fraid use his methods.

[zsylvana]

2)The theory was also static, a fact indicated amongst other things by Ricardos view that it was perfectly possible for countries to invert their specialisms. Both Smith and Ricardo wrote in the period prior to the introduction of mass production and the possibilities of taking advantage of the economies of scale.The assumption have been a part of the nineteenth century it was increasingly undermined by the penetration of mechanised forms of production into more and more areas of the economy.

[truevoice08]

I already know about the fallacies of Keynesianism so I know Obama's plan will make things work but people in school still won't believe me. I believe in free markets and want to rebutt all their economic assumptions. Thanks for the advice!

[TheLogicJunkie]

I just bought Hazlitt's book, and I like it very much.

[stupidtreehugger]

Good post, some interesting points and considerations, but watch video.google The Money Masters - its a FAR superior introduction to the most important things about economics and its the most vital history lesson available, one we all should have had at school and didn't.

[TruthHidden]

Thank you for posting this! Always good to hear Hazlitt speak.

[TruthHidden]

(not sure if you caught the joke)

[lukarocknrollx]

Damn! 3:28:45 long video!

Great job.

[NickyTheHeel]

Thanks for posting this, man.  Excellent stuff.

[minnesotachris]

I don't think they made any MP3's available, but WMV files can downloaded at the Mises Institute website mises [dot] org.

[kimochinews]

Is a higher quality (audio) version of this video available?

[Bustersword07]

I don't know if he can fit a higher quality version of this video under a GB, lol

3 1/2 hours, wow!