This category covers posts with economic content.
Chapter 3 of the book is titled “Anarcho-Communism,” so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin’s great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.
What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.
Detailed notes available here.
Responding to an interesting but occasionally misguided video by Tim Cain, called “Do Devs Know What Gamers Want?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA-P3p7PdEc
Tim makes some good points about how some of the feedback game developers get can be vague, open to multiple interpretations, and/or contradictory.
Get a copy of my outline for this video here.
Check out Fuller’s talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZYAFaHSsZY
Normally the Mises Institute’s Austrian Economics Research Conference has interesting and novel talks. Usually they’re a bit dry and directed toward an audience that knows Austrian economics quite well.
However, this year, Edward Fuller brought the house down with a lecture on Keynes that is not only fascinating, it is a fantastic example of detailed historical work, hunting down and confirming original and nearly-lost sources, showing evidence to people and getting entirely unexpected responses, and several other staples of a really good mystery or thriller.
It starts off a little slow, mildly threatening to be the same kind of “Keynes was a socialist” talk you’ve probably heard before, but after a few minutes, Fuller dives into some unexpected sources and makes some new points on that front, before going into a detailed investigation of an extremely prominent economic model and its true origins.
It unfolds like a detective story–to the point where I was afraid of putting spoilers into my recommendation for it. If you like economics or mysteries, go give it your time–you won’t regret it.
My video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Thumbnail image is a caricature of Keynes by David Low
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keynes_caricature_Low_1934-1.jpg
Pre-order my new novel, releasing April 7th:
Pursuit of the Heliotrope
https://a.co/d/7eWrZeh
Kropotkin’s second chapter is a doozy. He makes a variety of really bad extrapolations, a bunch of incredibly ignorant anti-economic points, and then goes on to demand total expropriation of all goods, both capital and consumption, “private” and personal.
He bases this mostly on floppy definitions of “need” and “live,” as well as the usual incorrigible envy that motivates most actual socialists and communists.
Even worse, the next chapter is supposedly his argument for “anarchic” communism, but considering how he simply papered over the confiscation of all goods with some utopian nonsense, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a good argument, because it doesn’t look like one is coming.
Full show notes here.
Welcome to the first episode of my examination of Peter Kropotkin’s book “The Conquest of Bread.”
Episode notes can be found here.
This video can be found on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Kropotkin is a prominent example of the so-called anarchist strain of communists, which believed that social revolution would lead to the abolishment of private property in the means of production, further leading to a stateless method of organization through communes and labor associations.
The preface and first chapter, however, do not begin by explaining how to enforce the abolishment of private property without a coercive state. Kropotkin instead decides to open his book with a combination of bad economics, misread history, blindness to incentives, rhetorical flourish, and misunderstanding stemming from over-aggregation of the capital structure.
It isn’t a good start, but we’ll see where he goes from here!
Cited articles:
Ludwig von Mises, “The Rise of Capitalism”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/rise-capitalism
Lipton Matthews, “The Problem with Guilds: They’re Monopolistic and Wasteful”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/problem-guilds-theyre-monopolistic-and-wasteful
Robert P. Murphy, “Why Austrians Stress Ordinal Utility”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-austrians-stress-ordinal-utility
Murray N. Rothbard, “Ten Great Economic Myths”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/ten-great-economic-myths
Ludwig von Mises, “Planned Chaos”
https://mises.org/library/book/planned-chaos
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/use-knowledge-society
Intro music edited from a piece by Paul Yudin, courtesy Unsplash:
https://pixabay.com/users/paulyudin-27739282/
While I spend a little time reading making notes on Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread for my next series of videos, I figured I’d make a random fun video about an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while.
You can just watch the video if you want, but I’ll put a text summary below if you prefer that.
The final section of Rothbard’s book is an extended discussion of Rothbard’s concepts of the Gross (or Net) Private Product, and an argument about how to calculate government depradations against the private product remaining in private hands.
The appendix contains a number of tables of data on economic statistics from 1929 through 1932, providing calculations of Private Product and Depradation as well.
One thing worth noting is that the Table VI in the Fifth Edition is an error. That table is supposed to contain government expenditure numbers but the receipt numbers from Table VII are reproduced there mistakenly.
The corrected content of Table VI is as follows:
| Federal | State & Local | Total | |
| 1929 | 4 | 9 | 13 |
| 1930 | 4.2 | 9.7 | 13.9 |
| 1931 | 5.5 | 9.7 | 15.2 |
| 1932 | 4.4 | 8.8 | 13.2 |
My reconstruction of Table VI comes from combining appropriate figures from Tables IV and V.
For my full show notes, go here.
This video is available on Odysee, BitChute, and YouTube.
References
Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/compendia/hist_stats_1789-1945.html
NY Tax Foundation, The Tax Burden In Relation To National Income and Product
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/tax-burden-relation-national-income-and-product/
(pdf direct link)
https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/ra4.pdf
Fabricant and Lipsey, The Trend of Government Activity in the United States Since 1900
https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/trend-government-activity-united-states-1900
(specific section cited by Rothbard)
https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/trend-government-activity-united-states-1900/appendix-d-data-government-purchases-payrolls-transfers-and-expenditures
Chapter 12 is the wrap-up, about the last few months of Hoover’s term and Hoover’s unwarranted confidence in his actions. Along for the ride are some overall statistics from the start of the depression until he left office as well. There are also some ominous references to FDR’s incoming New Deal.
See my show notes here.
This video is available on Odysee, BitChute, and YouTube.
References
Saloutos, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West…
https://archive.org/details/agriculturaldisc00salorich
Fisher, 100 Percent Money
https://cdn.mises.org/100%20Percent%20Money_Fisher.pdf
Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars…
https://books.google.com/books/about/Fifty_Billion_Dollars.html?id=Ql8UAQAAMAAJ
https://archive.org/details/fiftybilliondoll0000jone
Clark, Central Banking Under the Federal Reserve System
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/central-banking-federal-reserve-system-314
Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare
https://archive.org/details/economicspublicw0000ande/page/n3/mode/2up
Willis, The Banking Situation
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/will93128-fm/pdf
Angly, Oh Yeah?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Oh_Yeah.html?id=rTWMAAAACAAJ
Kent Cooper, Kent Cooper and the Associated Press
https://archive.org/details/kentcooperassoci0000coop
Ayres, The Chief Cause of This and Other Depressions
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Chief_Cause_of_This_and_Other_Depres.html?id=DpVszwEACAAJ
Phillips, Banking and the Business Cycle
https://mises.org/library/book/banking-and-business-cycle
Davies, Depression and Recovery
https://archive.org/details/depressionrecove0000dale
https://books.google.com/books/about/Depression_and_Recovery.html?id=E8ovAAAAYAAJ
National Industrial Conference Board, Salary and Wage Policy in the Depression
https://archive.org/details/salarywagepolicy0000unse/page/n3/mode/2up
Levinson, Unionism, Wage Trends, and Income Distribution
https://books.google.com/books/about/Unionism_Wage_Trends_and_Income_Distribu.html?id=oamMAAAAIAAJ
Morris, The AFL in the 1920s: A Strategy of Defense
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519356
Monthly Labor Review 35 (3)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/monthly-labor-review-6130/september-1932-608220?page=25
Monthly Labor Review 35 (4)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/monthly-labor-review-6130/october-1932-608221?page=8
Just some quick thoughts on why monetary inflation might look “good” from an econometric perspective, while hiding the negative effects.
The shortest argument seems to be that the “positive GDP” effects of monetary inflation hit immediately, while the “negative GDP” effects hit later. That allows politicians and economists to blame other factors for the downturn.
It’s also worth remembering that GDP makes the mistake of assuming a dollar spent by the government is equivalent to a dollar spent by the private sector, as far as satisfying the actual needs and wants of people.
I’ve handled that fallacy in this article at the Mises Wire.
Most of this part of the chapter is devoted to the efforts and agitation to reflate prices up to their pre-depression levels.
Fortunately, quite a few of these efforts fizzled out, but enough made it into official policy that the economy suffered another blow at the end of the year, after a small uptick.
