Famed economist Milton Friedman died this week, and in pondering how best to eulogize the Andy Warhol of post World War II economics, I was reminded of another recent death — that of the comment spam that plagued HA on and off for most of the past two years. For if Friedman is a father figure to free market advocates everywhere, then spammers, comment or otherwise, are surely his rightful heirs — the logical online manifestation of a selfish and mean-spirited ideology that looks to Friedman for its economic scholarship and Ayn Rand for its moral philosophy (such as it might be.)
From the moment the blogosphere exploded into existence, harnessing the power of the Internet to create an historically unparalleled marketplace of ideas, the spammers descended, guided by pure, individual self-interest, aggressively seeking to exploit this new market for personal, economic gain. This is in many ways a perfect illustration of an unregulated free market at work, a market in which comment spammers seeking to up the Google ranking of say, a bukkake video website, would willingly bring the entire blogosphere to its semen-drenched knees… if only they could find a way around the latest anti-spam measures.
In upgrading HA last week I effectively stopped the spammers… for now. But this isn’t the first time I’ve managed to achieve the upper hand, and it won’t be the last time I’m forced to do so. I have spent untold hours filtering, deleting and combatting spam — hours I once billed out at lucrative rates to lavishly funded dot.coms, before that market collapsed under the weight of its own manipulations. The spammers have cost me time, they have cost me money, and they have caused me much hard work and frustration… all in pursuit of a vocation for which I receive little or no monetary reward. This is a war of escalating innovation, in which spammers relentlessly develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade bloggers’ increasingly sophisticated defenses.
Now some might argue that this “competition” is an example of perfectly balanced forces at work creating a more efficient market, but then these are the same sort of people who would ridicule me for complaining about the volume of email spam I receive, arguing that if I’m foolish enough to publish my address then I “get what I deserve.” (As if encouraging my readers to communicate with me privately reveals some sort of Darwinian weakness.) Yes, these are same sort of people who deride victims of identity theft for not being more responsible with their personal information.
But the main problem with the notion that competition always leads to greater efficiency is that it is wrong. Blog software developers could be devoting all of their energies to creating better platforms for engaging in public debate, but instead must divert valuable time and resources towards fighting the thousands of spam-bots that threaten to flood our threads with ads for payday loans and penile enhancement products. And there is absolutely nothing efficient about the fact that during the time it’s taken me to write these first five paragraphs, 47 new comments have been snagged by my filter, and that I must now manually scan through a list of spam hawking “big black cocks” and “online Texas hold’em” in order to rescue the occasional legitimate comment that gets inadvertently caught in the dragnet.
Comment spam should be illegal, whatever the prospect of actually enforcing such laws. Hell, if anybody deserves to be handcuffed and repeatedly tasered it’s the sick, vicious bastards seeking the top Google ranking for the phrase “dad fucking daughter.”
But no, there are those free market purists — those who lionize Friedman as some mythic hero — who would argue against any sort of government regulation or interference, however economically distorted or dehumanizingly cruel the market may be. Multinational corporations market powdered baby formula to new mothers in nations that lack a safe drinking water supply. RJ Reynolds, fully aware of the toxicity of its product advertised that “doctors prefer Camel.” My local filling station drops the price at the pump by 75 cents a gallon in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, only to raise it 20 cents in the days after, even as crude oil prices fall. If there’s something wrong here, we’re told, the market will sort it out. The market is always more efficient than the government, and always corrects itself in the end. Or so the theory goes.
I’m sure there are those who are prepared to argue that my analysis is a gross misreading of Friedman’s work, but… well… I’ve hardly read Friedman at all. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what Friedman wrote or what sort of economic policies he actually advocated, for in striving to become the most famous economist of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Friedman’s influence has been mostly symbolic. Indeed, if we were to judge Friedman’s impact purely by the lasting economic policies he directly shaped rather than those he merely advocated, history would long remember Friedman primarily from his Keynesian days, as “the father of federal tax withholding.”
But that’s not the Friedman eulogized by his most ardent admirers, many of whom have never directly read his work either, and who would lack the economics training to properly understand it if they did. No, the Friedman they eulogize is the one of popular culture, the Prometheus of free market ideology… the patron saint of Enrons everywhere.
It is this Friedman that free marketeers look to for inspiration as they fight government regulations of all stripes. It is this Friedman a comment spammer might point to in defending his right to grind my blog to a halt if a buck can be made in the process.
Our nation’s Calvinist ethos survives today in a cult of the market that seems to equate individual economic prosperity with the will of God. But it must be remembered that the unfettered “free market” these ideologues passionately advocate is in theory amoral at its very best, and often deeply and disturbingly immoral in practice.
It is this ethos that fills our mail boxes and comment threads with spam, and as such, is as appropriate a tribute to Milton Friedman as any.
Ayn Rand was a sixth-rate author read by no one except high school kids who wear horn-rimmed glasses and ties.
You’re one of the Real Jesus’s generals, Goldy. Even if earthly rewards for this work do not come your way, you surely will receive your reward in Heaven. Whereas freeloading bums like Mark the Welsher have only Hell to look forward to. Thank you for riding into battle on behalf of Jesus, Humanity, and Rabbitdom, Goldy!
Hmmmm … I momentarily forgot you’re Jewish. Oh well. No problem, so was the Real Jesus. Hey, if someone doesn’t believe He was the Messiah, he was still a rockin’ dude, man! ‘Cuz He fucked with the Pharisees, who were the Republicans of his time.
Open and Fair Markets shouuld be our rallying cry.
Free to be screwed is theirs.
Ain’t it funny that Milton Friedman’s biggest boosters are the very people who hate competition the most! I’ve never met a “free market” businessman who actually LIKES competition! The objective of all businesses is to ELIMINATE competitors, not encourage competition! Businessmen HATE competition. They want to be the only company in town. Competition is something they’ll put up with only if they are absolutely forced to — and in the absence of government intervention, invariably their reaction to competition is to try and talk the competitor into (a) dividing sales territories, (b) fixing prices, and (c) keeping out others. This is known as the “Mafia Business Model” a.k.a. “organized crime” which is a good description of unregulated business. If you want to see what “capitalism” without government regulation looks like, take a gawk at Russia’s gangster economy.
history would long remember Friedman … as “the father of federal tax withholding.”
Ohhhh … so heeeee’s the motherfucker who put government’s hand in our pockets … I’ve been wondering who was responsible for it … now I know …
In eastern Washington, a “free market Republican” is someone who expects the government to give him free grazing rights, water, and electricity.
Roger Rabbit Theory of Economics
“Free market” refers to things people expect to get free so they can market it at a profit.
OK, where’s MY Nobel Prize? Friedman got one for his horseshit, so when do I get mine? Huh?
Checking the unsound noise machine, I see that Stefan is still salivating over Rubberstamp’s re-election victory. He’s attempting to out-drool Reagan, bragging that Reichert actually INCREASED his victory margin from 2004. This is true, btw — Reichert got 51.50% in 2004 and 51.54% in 2006 — a gain of FOUR HUNDREDTHS OF ONE PERCENT in only two years!!! In the immortal words of krm at 04:48 AM on November 19, 2006 …
“That alone is progress. If the attitude of ‘hey, it was close but we lost’ had prevailed in 2000 or 2002 or 2004, the country would have been much better off and there might have been greater ability to focus on fixing some of the obvious problems instead of keeping the ‘base’ all frothing for the next round.”
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’m pretty sure this wingnut’s references to “the base” and “frothing” is intended to refer to the Democrats. Of course, Rossi and his fans did nooooooooo frothing for the base in 2004 … nooooooooooo ….
And Stefan deludes himself into thinking people are gonna take (a) him and/or (b) his commenters … seriously? C’mon, get serious. Hey Stefan, if you wanna be taken seriously, you better clean up your blog starting with throwing the jihadist terrorism-huggers off your board. Just friendly advice, know what I mean?
Ugh. This post is really distasteful, in a way that only an “I don’t know this guy, but people I don’t like like him, so I’m going to try to impeach his character by linking him to something bad, like spam maybe, even though he had nothing to do with it” post can be.
If Goldy would have taken a moment to talk to an economist — do you know any economists, Goldy? — he would have found out that just about all economists, on the left and on the right, have the same view of spam. It arises because the marginal cost of sending (or posting) a spam is just about zero, and the right fix is to move to a protocol that imposes a cost for sending an email (or post). The cost needn’t be large; a penny or a few seconds of CPU power would be enough to destroy the spam business model. The difficulty is just in coordinating a move to a new protocol.
I can’t think of anybody — economist, computer scientist, or otherwise; liberal or conservative — who believes that laws that attempt to illegalize spam have or can be successful. Does Goldy even believe it?
As long as we’re wasting electrons on the sucky little jihadist blog, lookee who’s alive and posting over there:
” … There are 44 fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats running the House….not Pelosi. Everything goes thru them. Frankly, I have more confidence in them than the spineless, shallow losers posing as Republicans. Posted by Mr. Cynical at November 19, 2006 09:49 AM”
http://tinyurl.com/y24r24
Roger Rabbit Comment: It’s been so long since Mr. C has posted on HA that I felt certain Mrs. C killed him and cut him up with a chain saw in the bathtub into more pieces than Captain Rolf, the father of modern West Seattle.*
* For details, see http://tinyurl.com/yfofyg
10 Hey David — do you mean “really distasteful” in
the same sense as, e.g., this letter in today’s Vancouver Columbian newspaper?
“Every terrorist on the planet is very happy, why? Because they too wanted the Democrats to win.” — Richard LaValley, Vancouver (http://tinyurl.com/y5zpf8)
Fuck you, you sanctimonious wingnut hypcrite! If you guys can do it, why can’t Goldy?
Here is a link to a post on Friedman by a classier left-wing blogger, the economist Brad Delong.
It is true, by the way, that as a young economist at the treasury department in the 1940s, Friedman worked on the introduction of the withholding tax. It is also true that, as an academic economist in the 1960s and 1970s, he was responsible for developing and advocating the monetary policies that were used to eliminate stagflation and keep inflation low since that time. He also was one of the first people to propose a financial derivatives maret, so if you’ve ever bought an option or a futures contract on a stock or stock index, you can thank him. Oh, and the list of economics prizewinners who credit Friedman with giving them the idea that became their Nobel work strikingly long.
David @ 10
This is nothing new for Goldy. In general, you can expect those like Goldy and Roger and others to use caveman logic (“ugh… GOP bad… Democrat good…”) for anything. They are utterly blind to any middle ground or common sense. They like to throw around names like Clinton-era fraudsters Enron (who peaked in the 90’s) and somehow presume that anyone who believes in free markets endorses outright fraud, as happened in that case.
Roger @ 12: Yes, distasteful like that.
What, you expected me to say that isn’t distasteful?
Goldy,
So where does your admitted Googlebombing fall into the mix? It was the trashing of a system for personal gain…
Pot… Kettle… Black.
David @ 15
It doesn’t matter what you really say, David. Roger only hears the voices in his own head — his nightly MorOn.org brain download of talking points.
David @10,
Distasteful? Do you read the comment threads here? Do you read the posts? Are you out of your fucking mind?
This doesn’t impeach Friedman’s character at all. It doesn’t even mention his character. Hell, it barely references his work as an economist. I specifically state that I’m referring to Friedman as a symbol to the free market ideologues who oppose all regulation. He’s nothing more than springboard to a discussion of a larger issue.
If you truly think this post was distasteful and personal then I strongly suggest you stop reading HA. Man… I once accused a sitting state senator of fucking pigs, and you call this post distasteful? What world do you live you in?
re 10: Great idea! You mean the way the cost of postage stamps has eliminated junk-mail? Yer a genius —NOT!!!
peewee @ 19
Eliminated junk mail? No. Does it SEVERELY curtail the amount of it? Yes.
Yet again, something about which you know nothing.
Goldy @ 18
You’ll have to forgive David. I’m sure he didn’t realize that he’d wandered over to the “kids’ table” of political discourse.
Free market economics — like this machine http://tinyurl.com/yyk2xg — looks great on paper, but can it fly?
1. The tendency of competition is to eliminate less successful competitors, leading to eventual monopoly.
2. The functioning of free markets not only fails to prevent but encourages transferring costs to other segments of society.
3. There is no assurance that free market pricing reflects the true costs to society of producing goods and services; for example, in the absence of government regulation, free markets may achieve lower prices by exploiting children for cheap labor.
4. Unregulated free markets encourage ever-increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands.
5. Free market philosophy incorrectly assumes that economic values are the only worthwhile values.
6. The functioning of free markets typically is short sighted and fails to consider the long-term costs of pollution, resource overexploitation, or damaging the health of workers and surrounding communities.
7. “Market failures” occur with distressing regularity in unregulated markets.
I could go on, but this is enough to make the point that “free market economics” works better in theory than in real life, and government regulation is not merely necessary to prevent market failures and free market excesses, but is necessary simply to have free markets because free markets are self-destroying.
13 He also was one of the first people to propose a financial derivatives maret, so if you’ve ever bought an option or a futures contract on a stock or stock index, you can thank him.
How about all the people and pension funds who got ripped off by derivatives traders, should they “thank” Milt too?
1
Ayn Rand wrote one book I rather liked — “Anthem.” As I remember it was a piece of more-or-less pure science fiction. I’ve never been able to get through any of her philosophical doorstops. I gather I’m not missing a lot.
Speaking of science fiction, if you can find it I highly recommend a short story by C. M. Kornbluth entitled “The Marching Morons.” Its thesis is that as society dumbs itself down, the smart people (you and me) are going to be increasingly burdened, because they are going to be the ones who clean up after the morons (wingnuts) and keep society running because the morons (wingnuts) are spending all their time trying to put their M&Ms in alphabetical order.
15 David Wright says: Roger @ 12: Yes, distasteful like that. What, you expected me to say that isn’t distasteful? — 11/19/2006 at 2:19 pm
Yes (since you asked). Maybe you’re a cut above the typical wingnut. The problem is, liberals need an effective strategy for dealing with the Dickhead LaValleys of the world, and being polite won’t get the job done. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got jihadists coming at me from one side, and wingnuts coming at me like jihadists from the other side. Gotta use my powerful hind feet and razor sharp claws on ’em. Can’t see who’s who in the dust. Scratch ’em all and let God sort ’em out!
YKM @ 24
Ummm… You’ve got the parties reversed. The smart people are going to be burdened by you — the unwashed, navel-gazing, government-teat-sucklers who spend their time protesting the Cause Du Jour.
Face it, David … this is a liberal blog and dickheads come here looking for a fight. HA isn’t a genteel debating club, it’s a saloon brawl! If you want to read material at a higher intellectual plane, click here http://tinyurl.com/nzr8 and here http://tinyurl.com/6ez42
16 The Real Mark says: … Pot… Kettle… Black. — 11/19/2006 at 2:19 pm
What a load of horsesplftrzzz!!! Goldy doesn’t spam other people’s websites, boogerbrain.
17 The Real Stoopid Mark says: Roger only hears the voices in his own head — his nightly MorOn.org brain download of talking points. — 11/19/2006 at 2:22 pm
I’m a partisan hack. I cut and paste. If you’ve got a problem with it, why are you still here?
Reminder to all wingnuts: Reading HorsesAss comment threads is a VOLUNTARY activity … unless the judge ordered you to do it as community service.
18 Goldy says: I once accused a sitting state senator of fucking pigs, and you call this post distasteful? — 11/19/2006 at 2:31 pm
As I’ve been saying all along, Goldy, you’re waaaaay too nice to these fascist pigfuckers.
30
And way too mean to pigs.
SURREAL MARK THE (RIGHT WING) CENTRIST IS BORING US TO TEARS WITH HIS “ANTI-GOLDY” BALONEY. SORRY MARK REPUBLICANS THESE DAYS ARE BAD. THE PEOPLE JUST SPOKE TO THAT. YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE A TIN EAR.
SOME OF THE NEW “BLUE DOGS” YOU SEEM TO WORSHIP SUPPORT THE ELIMINATION OF THE PATRIOT ACT (TESTER) AND WANT TO PROMOTE FAIR TRADE POLICIES (WEBB). CLOSING OF TAX LOOPHOLES (100 HOURS) AND A RETURN TO THE CLINTON ERA TAX RATE ON THE WEALTHY SEEM TO BE IN THE CARDS.
IF YOU CRAVE “ADULT” CONVERSATION THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULD WANDER OVER TO (UN)SP. SOME REAL GROWN-UPS THERE.
GOLDY’S POINT WAS ABOUT THE CULT OF THE MARKET. MARKET FAILURES DO EXIST, HEALTH CARE BEING THE MOST EGREGIOUS. FRIEDMAN WAS A BIG ADVOCATE OF SCHOOL VOUCHERS WHICH ARE A LOUSY IDEA AND FAIL WHERE THEY ARE TRIED. FRIEDMAN IN FRONT OF CONGRESS FOR YEARS RAILED AGAINST THE FEDERAL RESERVE FOR NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO HIS MONETARISM. THEY TRIED IT IN THE LATE SEVENTIES UNDER POLITICAL PRESSURE AND IT WAS A DISASTER. VOLKER AND THE REST OF THE FED GOVERNORS HAD CONTEMPT FOR THE MAN.
THE INFLATION AND STAGFLATION OF THE SEVENTIES WAS BROKEN BY SUSTAINED HIGH INTEREST RATES, NOT MONETARISM. WHEN THE FED STARTED LOWERING INTEREST RATES WITHOUT INFLATION COMING BACK, FRIEDMAN’S MONETARISM WAS JUST ABOUT DISCREDITED. I CAN DIG UP SOME JUICY QUOTES IF PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED.
27
Judging by #26, all TRM posts is horsesplftrzzz.
14 The Real Mark says: They are utterly blind to any middle ground or common sense. — 11/19/2006 at 2:15 pm
Oh … so now you guys want to negotiate and compromise — now that we hold the cards? You’ve finally decided to get reasonable after the voters kicked your asses out of power? Too late.
20 On which planet does the cost of postage “severely curtail” junk mail? I fill a dumpster with junk mail every two weeks. 97% of my mail is junk. Know why? Because our wingnut government make us subsidize junk mailers with nearly-free junk mailing rates, that’s why. Remember what I said above about cost shifting? Chalk up another market failure to wingnut economics.
26 The Real Stoopid Mark says: … The smart people are going to be burdened by you — the unwashed, navel-gazing, government-teat-sucklers who spend their time protesting the Cause Du Jour. — 11/19/2006 at 2:59 pm
Hmmmm … that’s quite a spectacular trivializing of the notion that politics and policies do matter, and of people who choose not to remain passive in the face of misjudgments like, say, the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
IF YOU CRAVE “ADULT” CONVERSATION THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULD WANDER OVER TO (UN)SP. SOME REAL GROWN-UPS THERE.
Yeah, like (sarcasm) this guy:
“Congratulations Speaker Pelosi, now let the bombs fall where they may. My prediction: terror attack on domestic soil passenger aircraft within the next six months. Casualties in the 2-300 range. And, unfortunately, maybe that’s just what we need. It’s obvious people don’t remember what happened 5 years ago. Posted by FullContactPolitics at November 8, 2006 10:52 AM”
http://tinyurl.com/ydlfwu
Friedman’s monetarist theories were rejected by the Federal Reserve, and the wingnuts say the economy is doing great … so who’s wrong, Friedman or the Fed?
re 20: Evidence please.
BunnyBoy @ 35
You are so far outside the world of reality on this one that it isn’t even worth arguing.
The only subsidized rates are for non-profit mail. Every other discount is available to anyone that chooses to do more work than just drop a letter in the box.
The discounts exist because individuals and companies DO PART OF THE WORK (pre-sorting the mail, etc.). But your union mentality doesn’t allow for that…
Speaking of “free markets”, I believe ou most recent election could be characterized as a “free market”. It spoke, so the Real Stupid Mark doesn’t need to.
Listening to the Real Stupid Mark try to discuss economics after the collosal deficits the idiot-children in 109th Congress and the Chimpster authored is like listening to a retarded cocker spaniel attempt to fart the Star Spangled Banner.
Where the Hell were you when all this fiscal mayhem was being commited in the last six years? Just shut up, sit down and stay out of the way while the adults attempt to clean this mess up.
Goldy @ 18: A while back, you made noises about wanting to elevate the level of discussion around here. It’s true that many of your posts are just rhetorical reat meat for the faithful, but occasionally you do make an insightful and original point, so I had hope.
I take it you have rejected the elevated-discussion plan? Was that decision politico-strategic (one gets more votes by being shrill)? Or economic (one gets more ad impressions by being shrill)?
By the way, I missed your allogation of bestiality. Why weren’t you sued for libel?
Weewee @ 19: As another poster point out, the ratio of junk-to-real postal mail is much lower than the ratio of spam-to-real email, precisely because it costs money to send postal mail. (Unfortunately, our government-sponsored postal mail monopoly does offers discounts to bulk mailers.)
Even more interestingly, a protocol fix would allow us to introduce mechanisms that simply aren’t practical for real mail. For example, different people could declare different prices to accept email. Or different prices for different people. (For example: free to my family and friends, $1 for anonymous senders, $10 for those annoying politicians always hitting me up for donations.)
Goldy, aren’t you glad we have a free market economy where you are allowed to have a blog even though you are jewish?
Roger @ 38 says: “Friedman’s monetarist theories were rejected by the Federal Reserve, and the wingnuts say the economy is doing great … so who’s wrong, Friedman or the Fed?”
This is simply wrong. I challenge you to find any fed govener from Volker on who doesn’t credit Friedman. Friedman was always thinking up new ways to implement anti-inflationary monetary policy (from commodity-backing, to fixed-rate rules, to inflation targeting), but the idea that money supply is the one crucial factor is something which essentially all economsists and fed goveners now accept, and before Friedman’s work they didn’t.
Roger, you really need to talk to an economist before making such embarrasingly wrong statements. Don’t trust me; find yourself a friendly left-wing economist to talk to. I assure you, on this point he or she will give you the same answer.
BunnyBoy @ 27
Goldy’s endorsement of Googlebombing is the moral equivalent of spamming — the trashing of a system for personal gain.
By the way, Goldy, I notice that some of your pages from the time of the campaign are mysteriously gone. Hiding something?
David Wright @ 45: Friedman advocated rigidly fixing the growth of the money supply in order to control inflation. The Federal Reserve doesn’t do this, and hasn’t done so since Volker crushed inflation in ’82 by running interest rates sky high and ending inflation on the backs of the poor and the lower middle class (read: recession). In fact a Fed Reserve Official just stated this in recent remarks. Even now, the Fed is injecting massive amounts of money into the system, but inflation is low. ‘Splain that, please.
Friedman himself backed off this postulate later in his long and distinguished career. Perhaps the marvelous outcomes experienced by the junta in Chile that bought the ‘Chicago School’ nostrums lock, stock, and barrel taught him some humility. One can always hope.
Goldy: When you get a moment, read Thomas Franks’ “One Market Under God”.
PS: The internet owes its very existence to the initial effort of our helpful government. Great post @ 22, rabbit.
OMG! Is anyone looking at that sunset? Stunning!
Ass @ 47: “The internet owes its very existence to the initial effort of our helpful government.”
Yes… It is called defense spending (see: ARPANET).
Well, the market is like the population: Overpopulation will even itself out as well. . . people will eventually die from disease, toxicity, thirst, hunger, vermin (varmin?), infestations of just about anything . . . so don’t bother to regulate. In the end, it will be the end.
The fittest will/may survive and the process will start all over again.
We really don’t need brains at all . . . seeing as how we really don’t use them very much.
Dave Wright: “…the idea that money supply is the one crucial factor is something which essentially all economsists and fed goveners now accept.”
This is laughably untrue. Even republicans don’t believe this. Read Dick Cheney’s tomb “Deficits Don’t Matter”. Oh wait, that’s still at the publishers.
However, assuming you still hold to this, we can rest assured that you will not claim the Bush tax cuts brought us out of the 2001 recession, since, per Friedman for dummies, fiscal policy not only doesn’t work, it can’t work.
Is NASA part of the Department of Defense?
As someone that routinely gets a few hundred pieces of SPAM every day, I can certainly sympathize. My worst time with SPAM was when a Florida-based ink cartridge company hijacked one of my domain names to send out spam.
If you clicked the link in the e-mail, you went to their site. If you just hit “respond” and sent a pleasant “fuck off and die, scum!!!!” (quoted from one of those responses), it came to me, as did all the incorrect and invalid responses. At one point they were coming in at a rate of hundreds per hour.
Needless to say, I have a rather low opinion of SPAMmers. I’m opposed to capital punishment in general, but I admit to being tempted to change that opinion for SPAMmers.
Washington actually has one of the strongest anti-SPAM laws in the country, but as most of us here already know, it really hasn’t helped much.
There was a rumor running around years ago that there would be a tax on e-mails. Maybe the time has come for there to be some sort of charge for sending an e-mail. It wouldn’t need to be large. Even a one-cent per recipient charge would foil the SPAMmers. In my business, I send a lot of e-mail. On a busy month, I might send e-mails to a couple of hundred recipients. I would pay the few dollars with a big smile on my face if it made the SPAM go away.
For the person mentioning that such a charge hasn’t stopped folks from sending bulk mail, I would ask when the last time he or she got two hundred pieces of junk mail in a single day.
I get that much SPAM every day.
Also, thanks for including Ayn Rand in your rant. She seems to get rediscovered every decade or so . . . I’m not for book burnings but she might cause me to reconsider . . . just once.
Real Mark,
“it’s called defense spending…”
Funny you should mention that. When Reagan told his funny about the frightening words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you”, guys like you split a gut. Obviously, you do not feel this dictum applies to the Defense Department. Yossarian would disagree.
Nonetheless, you exhibit here the full flower of conservative hypocrisy, since you clearly feel defense spending is necessary and should be a public good. Thus all your splittle flecked spluttering about “the government” is simply a case of special pleading.
Try reading “The Conservative Nanny State” by Dean Baker. You can download it free. You might actually learn something.
BTW, sure like your new format! Congratulations!
By the way, I missed your allogation of bestiality. Why weren’t you sued for libel?
The truth is an absolute defense against libel.
Goldy’s endorsement of Googlebombing is the moral equivalent of spamming — the trashing of a system for personal gain.
What personal benefit did he derive?
PTBAA @ 47: Adjusting the money supply to control inflation is precisely what the fed does. The way the fed achieves those interest rate targets they announce is by intervening in the bond market to adjust the quantity of liquid money.
Friedman (or any other economist I’m aware of) never advocated freezing the money supply, so the fed isn’t repudiating Friedman (or any other economist) when they allow the money supply to increase at a rate consistent with low inflation. Friedman advocated using the money supply as the handle with which to control inflation. And while the fed has not always used whatever protocol Friedman (or any other economist) throught was best at the time (e.g. rule-based or inflation-targeting), they have all, since Volker, recognized the truth of Friedman’s insight that controlling the money supply is the key.
What you don’t seem to understand is that, before Friedman convinced Volker, this insight wasn’t widely accepted by fed goveners, or even other economists. There is a wonderful scene in one of the “Freedom To Choose” programs from the early 1970s, when stagflation is just starting. Friedman is arguing with a predecessor to Volker, who says he isn’t sure the money supply is so important, maybe we should look at fiscal or industrial policy. To any economist today, that scene is surreal; it’s no longer possible to imagine a fed govener who doesn’t believe its his job to reign in money supply growth when inflation takes off. And Friedman gets the credit for that.
PTBAA @ 51:per Friedman for dummies, fiscal policy not only doesn’t work
Sigh. I guess you must have only read “Friedman For Dummies”, because you seem very confused about basic economic concepts. Friedman insight was that fiscal policy couldn’t be used to control inflation.
Neither Friedman nor any other economist I’ve ever heard of has claimed that fiscal policy (i.e. government taxation and spending) can’t effect economic growth. It is on the question of how to use fiscal policy to do this — via counter-cyclical spending or counter-cyclical tax cuts or not at all, that left-wing, right-wing, and libertarian economists part ways.
skagit @ 52: “Is NASA part of the Department of Defense?”
Is this just a random question?
David @ 43
We both failed to consider one thing in the ratio calculations — nobody loves either weewee or Rabbit, so their junk-mail-to-real-postal-mail ratio is massive. The only thing they get is their gov’t. check. And if that is direct deposited, the ratio is x/0.
ATJ @ 57: “What personal benefit did he derive?”
The emotional benefit of the results of the election.
The financial results of increased business for his political
scheming,skullduggery, err… “consulting” practice.The financial benefit of fatter gov’t. checks for BunnyBoy & his ilk — resulting in a greater chance that someone will pick up Goldy’s tab @ a DL event & therefore lessen his expenses.
Seriously, though… You think that Googlebombing is morally right? Then what about political spamming?
PTBAA @ 51, in regards Dick Cheney’s “Deficits Don’t Matter”: Even though Cheney probably intended to make a statement about the political consequences of deficit spending that is, sadly, all-too-true, I find the callousness that his remark reveals distrubing. I can assue you, the day that Dick Cheney gets an economist secret-decoder ring is the day I will turn in mine.
Ass @ 55
National defense IS one of the roles of federal government. Do a bit of reading on expressed powers in the U.S. Constitution.
Friedman’s free market theories put into practice are the basis of much of the economic and political freedom realized in most of the world. Disagree? Then you libs will have to repudiate Robt Rubin, Corzine, Soros and Clinton because their policies (particularly those that have made them rich and free) are based on Friedman’s theories. Read your economics and think well upon the recently passed.
Don’t worry about our future my fellow citizens…
We will soon have Alcee Hastings, one of only 6 Federal Judges ever impeached, in charge of Intelligence!
John Murtha, ABSCAM CROOK, will be in charge of ETHICS!
And Lord knows what other Demo-scumballs will rise to the rim of the toilet.
Wright @ 58: Sigh, yourself. Targeting interest rates may or may not “control” the money supply. You are sadly out of date. I did not say Friedman advocated “freezing” the money supply. In its more extreme forms, monetarists say the rate of growth of the money supply should be fixed, and that playing with it to manipulate aggregates such as GNP (stimulus or ‘putting on the brakes’) would be useless due to rational expectations. This was all in the context of the widely accepted (but now somewhat discredited) concept of the Phillips curve which posited a trade off between unemployment and inflation.
Friedman attacked Keynes postulate that fiscal policy could be used to stimulate aggregate demand. His success in this endeavor is, to say the least, mixed.
Sorry David, you’re the one who is confused.
Mark @ 64. You missed my point entirely. Alas, what’s new.
“5 Myths About the Midterm Elections
MYTH: Joe Lieberman’s victory proves the netroots don’t matter.
REALITY: The netroots had some key victories.
MYTH: Democrats won because they carefully recruited more conservative candidates.
REALITY: Democrats won because their candidates were conservative about their message.
MYTH: The losses Republicans suffered this election were no different than what you usually see in a President’s sixth year in office.
REALITY: Redistricting minimized what might have been a truly historic shellacking.
MYTH: The election was all about the war.
REALITY: It’s the dishonesty, stupid.
MYTH: Republicans lost their base.
REALITY: The base turned out, they just got beat.”
Quoted from Time magazine under the Fair Use doctrine; for complete article and/or copyright info see http://tinyurl.com/ydyvga
Who’s Getting the Money
“While the percentage change in average real household income between 1990 and 2004 was an increase of 2 percent for the bottom 90 percent of American households, it was 57 percent for the top 1 percent; and shot up to 85 percent for the top 0.1 percent; and up to 112 percent for the top .01 percent. That is, the richest are getting richer almost twice as fast as the rich.”
Quoted from NY Times; for complete article and/or copyright info see http://tinyurl.com/yjq33k
Milton Friedman’s contributions to Economic theory are huge. Milton Friedman’s contributions to the layperson’s general knowledge of Economics are deplorable. And, we can trace this to a single issue: while Friedman was excurciatingly careful about distinguishing between normative (what should be) and positive (what is) Economcs, he failed miserably to distinguish between the two in his popular writings. As a concenquence, people who didn’t really understand that distinction took Friedman’s normative statements as having equal weight as his contributions to positive theory.
Whether or not Friedman should take the blame for this misunderstanding is debatable. That the misunderstanding exists is not. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the cases where people cite Friedman in support of the normative notion laissez-faire ideology.
Part of the problem lies in the fundamental tenet of laisez-fair ideology: that markets are efficient. This belief is stated in the language of positive science, but it remains an article of faith. Why? Because nowhere have we actually observed markets that are efficient. How many times to people have to explain away market failures as being caused by “exogenous variables” before we cast away this article of faith and adopt the more obvious conclusion of imperfect markets?
So David Wright & Real Mark I have a question for you.
How long before you graduate from junior high school, or are you still in grade school ?
Just curious because your postings here reveal your actual mental maturity level despite the fact that you are busy trying to convince readers that you actually have a clue about the topic at hand.
Miltie was such a scumbag appologist for greed & selfishness. I`m sure he doesn`t doesn`t want for warmth these days.
PTBAA @ 68: I granted the point you harp on even before you made it. Yes, at one point Friedman advocated a fixed rate of growth of the money supply, and the Fed never did this. As I also pointed out, at other times he advocated commodity links, fixed rules, and inflation targeting, none of which have ever been used by the Fed either. (The last one, though, has been adopted by the Bank of England and Ben Bernanke is known to advocate it.)
What you seem to have missed, and what I keep trying to point out, is that the people Friedman was arguing with at the time had not even understood that the money supply was the key. There were people suggesting that maybe deficit spending caused inflation, or maybe union wage demands. With such people in charge of the Fed, you’d prefer a fixed rule, too!
Friedman’s achievement was to make everybody understand that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Now that everyone has understood and accepted that, it’s just quibbling to worry about which is the precisely best protocol for applying that knowledge. Central bankers now know what they have to do to stop inflation. Before Friedman’s work, they did not.
Don Joe @ 72: I agree.
You think that Googlebombing is morally right?
I don’t give a damn about googlebombing. It was used by Republicans against Democrats in 2004, and Democrats used it against Republicans in 2006. Big whoop.
You think googlebombing is the same as spamming – morally or otherwise? If so, you’re delusional.
Re #63,
Also, when you say “Seriously, though…”, you’re admitting that your arguments are not serious.
70
You don’t have to look any farther than 1998 to realize that Myth #3 is a lie. Not that Time’s analysis isn’t spot on.
re 66: We don’t care if rich , influential fatcats are “free”. All we care about is ourselves — and so should you.
OK.
Re: David Wright, TRM.
Friedman–>Pinochet.
Nothing more needs to be said.
ManofTruth says:
Miltie was such a scumbag appologist for greed & selfishness. I`m sure he doesn`t doesn`t want for warmth these days.
11/19/2006 at 7:20 pm”
My guess is you are a loser who never had the courage to risk capital. You are probably a union douchebag who lives off the efforts of others.
I agree with your comments on comment spam 100%
I’ve gone through the same.
Milton Friedman DID think up witholding from workers’ paychecks as a way to insure the government got its revenues first. That way government had “first lien” on what workers were paid.
Freidman was responsible for the idea, but he regretted it very much.
Just out of curiosity – how many of the commentators here, discussing Freidman’s theories, have actually read any of his books? Or that of any other serious 20th century economist? Or even Karl Marx’s books on socialist theory (The Communist Manifesto doesn’t count, it was Engal’s political rantings, not real economic theory).
Personally, I have to admit that I have read no serious economic writings from serious 20th century economists. I tried to read Laffler, but gave up after the first chapter or so after concluding that it was a waste of time. As for the other economist theories, I generally rely upon statements made by others who “condense” and “explain” it to me. Are there any others out there who are not in the same boat?
Prior to paycheck withholding, taxpayers would fill out their forms each year and send in a check to the government to pay the taxes for the year. It was up to the taxpayers to save enough from their paychecks each year to make the payment by April 1st.
It wasn’t that big a deal at the time, because during the 1920’s and the 1930’s most Americans didn’t have to pay any federal income tax.
But with the economic recovery fed by war contracts in the early 1940’s, and wages increasing dramatically, suddenly hundreds of thousands of workers who never paid federal income taxes would find themselves owing huge tax debts, just at the time when the government needed that money (and a lot more) most to finance the war effort.
But what we forget is that in order to make this work, the government had to “forgive” an entire year’s worth of taxes. For example, they couldn’t collect payroll deductions for 1943 at the same time the taxpayers were trying to pay off 1942 taxes. So one year’s income taxes were essentially “lost”, in order to obtain the higher taxes and more reliable tax income which withholding provided.
Sorry, I should have said April 15th.
Re: all the M. Friedman comments. Friedman’s monetarist ideas were out of date the month before he published. One of Greenspan’s largest difficulties was dealing with the money supply: there are now 3, perhaps more coming. The idea that the Fed can reduce or restrict the supply of cash is absurd. Any person in N. America can add to the “M” with the various credit cards–Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, etc., are simple monetary sources that effectively step around Fed policy, the printing of money & the laundering processes of T-bills, bonds & notes. Also, the ability to set up & use loans against home equity is another source of funds that defies the Friedman-esque logic, such as it was.
It’s a joke. Friedman’s silliness did advance various theories of economics–by stimulating & re-inforcing the numerous contrary, adversary & reactionary research, studies, theories & effective antidotes. Even among the most ridiculous conservatives, Friedman’s views are losing any credibility, as well they should.
So what do you guys want? Total re-distribution of wealth? Everybody get an equal share?
I’m not an economist. But a contributor to the Guardian UK named Richard Adams has written a long piece crediting Friedman for his theoretical work but pointing out the weaknesses of his real-world policy prescriptions that contains this, on monetary policy:
Mr. Adams also follows up with responses to his commenters here if this kind of economic discussion is to your taste.
My impression is that Friedman is a conservative icon because his academic legitimacy lent gravitas to his support for various conservative ideological positions. As such, he has been crucial to the conservatives’ palming themselves off as “serious” despite their many lunatic ideas.
@74. A nice orderly retreat, David. Way to go.
Man I love the way you write!
Friedman can kiss my left-wing ass!! He was an unapologetic libertarian (amoral, anarchist, butt fucker) that philosophy exist no wear cuz it doesn’t work.
HI !!!