Friday, November 6, 2009

KA-POW! #5 - Vox Day

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Vox Day for “Extend, pretend and defend" :

There is always a fraudulent aspect to democratic government. There are things the electorate does not want to hear, so any candidate who hopes to win their support quickly learns to avoid subjecting the voters to uncomfortable truths. Once safely in office, it seldom serves the interests of the elected official to tell the people whose interest he nominally represents anything that will highlight the divergence between what is good for the legislator and what is good for those who will be subjected to the legislation he helps create.

... However, in times of crisis, the people tend to find themselves belatedly inclined to begin paying attention, and occasionally a sufficient number of them will even realize that it is the past actions of their leaders that have brought them to their present, imperiled state.

This is what has begun happening in the United States. For generations, Americans have stood passively by as their financial authorities have slowly and methodically destroyed the value of their money in the process of erecting a prison of debt from which neither they, nor their children, nor their children's children can reasonably hope to escape. But now, as the system threatens to break down and collapse under the weight of the very debt it created, Americans increasingly find themselves beginning to wonder why the nation's fourth central bank should not go the way of its three hapless predecessors. ...

...

... They [political and monetary authorities] simply refuse to understand that the real danger to the Federal Reserve system is not a political one due to the understandable fury of the American people or even an accounting one stemming from uneviscerated audit legislation, it is an economic one based on the simple fact that a fundamentally flawed system [central banking] is once again approaching its inescapable reckoning.

Honorable mention goes to student Daniel Krawisz for "How the Free Market Works" :

As the economy improves, therefore, so will the productivity of labor, and hence so will its price. This does not necessarily mean that the price of labor will rise in terms of gold, dollars, or whatever money is in use; but rather that the price of labor will be exchanged for a larger amount of real wealth in an advanced economy than in a primitive one.

It is a common error in economics to believe the opposite, that more-productive labor will have a lower price, due to the fact that the same quantity of consumer goods can be produced with less labor. However, there is not some specific set of goods that is appropriate under all circumstances; the production of consumer goods is a decision limited by what is economically feasible.

Therefore, if labor becomes more productive, people will not simply go on producing the same goods they did before; they will produce more goods, and of a greater variety. Since an entrepreneur in a more-advanced economy stands to lose more production when he loses one employee, he will necessarily be more willing to pay higher wages to keep him.

...

The laborers, necessarily, are always paid immediately in any venture, whereas the landlord and moneylender must wait. The laborers, in addition, take on no risk in the venture. For each pay period, the laborers are paid the same amount whether the venture shows a profit or loss. Attempts to give the laborer what would otherwise have gone to the entrepreneur or moneylender reduces the incentive of people to become entrepreneurs or moneylenders.

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