and others who are interseted :

I met – as announced (Comrade Tim) Jared Diamond – last Monday.

We were speaking about his famous book “Collapse”.

There is one lesson to keep in mind : it takes the courage of some governments, institutions, single individuals, … to go against the wind and reform the sytems in which they live to avoid the collapse.

This is called interventionism.

Be well,

JC

Agreed. Gov’t intervention is sometimes required. But there must be a consistent philosophy on when. I’m interested to hear yours. Mine is gov’t exists to protect “commons”, or things which everyone has an incentive to abuse and will therefore never happen. Use of radio spectrum, property rights, individual rights, public defense…those are commons. However, if individuals have an incentive to do the job, gov’t should stay out and let people be FREE. Whenever the gov’t gets involved, in some sense, they’re going to remove people’s freedom to act on their own.

Your trust in a politician genuinely puzzles me. Do you really think a politician listening to a Nobel laureate is in a good situation to make economic decisions? The soviets had plenty of genius economists, it doesn’t matter. Getting the smartest people doesn’t help here. The amount of information is far to vast for any single person or group of people to handle. In addition, they have no incentive to handle this information efficiently (they’re politicians). Better to let the people who have both the information and the incentives to handle it. The actual people involved.

Interestingly, everything predicted by the Austrian school of economics has happened — including our current set of predicaments.

These facts suggest — along with the failure of Government Sponsored Enterprises “Fanny Mae” and “Freddie Mac” — that more government meddling in the economy is not the solution to our problems. A return to sound national fiscal policy, OTOH, would be helpful and very much in order.

Best regards,

D’Artagnon

“So government involvement should always be dynamic, and vary according to current conditions.”

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We all know that when government gets involved they stay involved. They never know when to turn loose. They become the big pig in the corner pen (my apologies to the pigs of the world).

I love irony Thanks.