Yet that still amounts to a lot of unnecessary suffering,

At the risk of sounding like a Buddhist, suffering is inside you.

There are good reasons for fighting poverty.

Subjective suffering isn't one of them; because people suffer not because they have problems (which everyone does), but because they don't learn to deal with them.

I'm not telling poor people not to try to ameliorate their material condition; but I'm telling them that if they think being richer would make them stop suffering, they're going to be disappointed.

I *strongly* insist that it is compared to other First World nations, based on simple empirical observations with the great de-regulation trends and drive towards privatization that has occurred since just before the Reagan and Clinton eras, as notedhere and here for starters. The latter is even an instance of a capitalist-friendly pundit bragging about American deregulation and calling for more of it. 

Really?

OK...

I'm against the Federal Reserve. I consider its creation one of the worst things the US government has ever done. I'm against the tenets of what passes for central banking today, led worldwide by the Federal Reserve.

I'm against fiat money.

I'm against fractional reserve banking.

All the examples are of deregulation (some are regulation changes more than deregulation proper, but I won't get hung up on that) in the financial markets. If you wanted to make a more "1%" argument, you couldn't have. Financial markets do have wide effects throughout the whole system, but are a very small component of the economy. The real economy is the enterprise. And the enterprise has never stopped being regulated or even had its regulations reduced. And you should know that's what I mean a regulated or deregulated economy.

In G8 perspective, Britain is almost as financially deregulated as the USA. In the enterprise economy, Canada is certainly less regulated than the USA; and Germany is at least debatable.

All of these trends are interconnected with the economy, because all have a lot to do with a failure to distribute resources free of a price tag

No, they don't.

These trends are new. The failure to distribute resources free of a price tag is not. Your independent variable doesn't vary.

and thus precisely in the amount actually needed

Ludwig von Mises wants to know how you calculate that.

A capitalist free-for-all is not the way to achieve that, since it allows the capitalist system to operate with no restraint on its emphasis upon greed and single-minded pursuit of profit

In order to increase profits you need to sell more. In order to sell more you need to have more clients. If the potential new clients can't afford your product at its current price, you need to make it cheaper.

Rinse and repeat. It's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner

Libertarians consider anything that impedes greed and selfishness to be a "fallacy."

Everytime anyone says "only the state can..." (or more often, "but without the state, who would...") that's false. Every single time. No exceptions.

I think we can all do better than stubbornly hold onto an archaic system that is past it's time when modern technology allows for a far more advanced economic and social order.

Well there you got us in agreement again!

We just differ on which one is the archaic system past its time.

;)






Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail