Wake up people hes all talk, and soon everyone will figure out that you cant feed your children or buy groceries by using a speech, you need money not speeches.

OMG people will lose jobs!

Well, because of this we are going to be stuck with terrible blood-sucking businesses until the end of time. How much farking upward mobility can there be when you only allow small companies to go out of business?

If you get rid of the car companies and the financial companies there will be thousands of small businesses (and competent large businesses) jumping in to take their place. You lower the minimum wage so that everyone can get a job and it will not be harmful since prices will be so low.

Saving will take the place of creating bogus money out of thin air. It will just take some time. In the meantime people will be putting their creative juices to work like crazy knowing that they now have the opportunity to take the place of the incompetent nobility that you love so much.

Oh wait, you don’t love it, you just would do everything you possibly can to protect and nurture it whilst saying you hate it.

We are living in a fantasy land if we think that the federal government can spend its way out of this problem. It’s here, and it’s going to hurt, bad. But bad news isn’t like fine wine–it gets worse over time, not better.

Commies and Socialists have one thing in common. MISERY.

To think that government is fair or just is falacy. Apparently anti-American folks think its better to be ruled by men instead of laws. The last thing America has seen in the past 30 years is real free markets. We are more powerful than a government that wastes our resources and money. It is free people that make good things happen, not government. Ask an Iraqi.. then ask a politician where the WMD are.. or why war wasnt declared by Congress..

Dont blame the free market. Blame the cowards in charge.. the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Freedom works. Obviously.

Although, part of this is a definition problem. If you define “free market” as absolutely no regulation or government interference, then, yeah, that’s going to cause problems because it fails to acknowledge that concentration of wealth and/or resources can be just as damaging as too much government action. We have to keep a balance and we have to be vigilant against all the ways the free market can be subverted. But it DOES work. You can’t be upwardly mobile without capitalism. No other system rewards people for making themselves more valuable. And the freer the market, the easier it is to find someone to reward you for your value.

You could also watch him talk about Obama here, if you dare.

Alan, I suggest you do some research on actual upward social mobility. In case you haven’t noticed the last decade or so real income for most Americans has been dropping. Studies have shown that the level of mobility that you seem to be implying is a myth. Other countries have better social mobility than we do while displaying even fewer characteristics of the completely free market than the U.S. The free market is completely amoral. It is a system for relatively simple economic transactions in a world where you know what you’re getting for your money. As soon as you get past that it falls apart. Market forces don’t care if people suffer, live or die. It’s that simple. Austrians and followers of organizations like the Mises Institute are delusional. I consider this post from their site pretty good evidence of that. Business cycles are caused by governments via their central banks?? Exactly how do they explain booms and busts from the time before these institutions? Here is the claim and I’ll address what I put in bold below.

The Austrian School of economics rejects government intervention in economic events altogether. As we will explain below, the Austrians do not accept the standard view—held even by famous proponents of the free market, such as Milton Friedman—that the business cycle is a normal feature of capitalism. On the contrary, Ludwig von Mises and subsequent Austrians developed the theory that the business cycle is an unintended consequence of government intervention in the monetary and banking system. Specifically, the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the United States) pushes the interest rate down below its “natural” level by injecting new money into the banking system. This artificial stimulus sets in motion an unsustainable boom period of illusory prosperity.

Only the Austrians have figured out this basic truth of the business cycle. And they know how to fix the problem. Do nothing. That is, after all, what the sentence I put in bold means. Notice how the article reflects one of the primary characteristics of the free marketeer, which is the shoulder shrug response to human suffering. In fact the article only mentions people suffering from recessions in a dismissive manner that seems to simply consider it the cost of letting things fix themselves. I just don’t understand people so willing to see thousands, or even millions suffer without any attempt to cushion the worst effects in the name of an ideology.

You all just gotta relax. Now I’m not versed in the theory of economics according to Peter Schiff, but I did hear his interview on CNBC that this post is referring to and I’m not sure we should select him to reinvent our economy just yet, bfut he makes some well sounded points.

Every other day the market swings 180* and the producers of that show try to put on guests that highlight the theme of the day. This guy said some important things about how and why our economy has tanked and some of them make sense. Bolstered by the fact that he DID foresee, some time ago, that we’d be in this predicament, it lends credence that we might believe him about the future as he sees it.

I didn’t hear him advocating a drastic change in the way we do business in a free market. His doomsday scenario will be caused by our own demise, not by anything he proposes. I didn’t hear him talk about a new economic model either. He criticized the type of over consumption caused by the never ending availability of credit we’ve based our economic system on over the past decades. What he now says is it’s time to pay the piper or the dance is over!

The free market is by far the best system for setting reasonable prices, delivering goods people want and providing wealth generation and upward mobility opportunities for the greatest number of people. The trick is to get it back up and working, not try to find some new model.

Public works programs are a really bad idea. They simply suck up capital and labour that are needed for a genuine recovery. Yes, they employ people, but so what? The government could (temporarily) eradicate unemployment by paying the unemployed to paint the Interstates blue. I hope you would agree that this would contribute nothing positive to the economy. You say public works would “improve infrastructure”. Sure, but how does the government know where to make investments. Their decisions will be driven by politics, not by the desires of consumers. (Only the price system allows consumer wishes to translate into economic activity.) And I cannot begin to imagine how public works programs would make America more competitive. Massive public spending is the route taken by the Japanese in the 1990s. It didn’t get them very far.

As far as his views on economics goes, Schiff is an “Austrian”, not a Friedmanite monetarist as you seem to suggest. The kind of discipline imposed by the sound monetary system Schiff would prefer would not have permitted the excesses that we have seen in the financial system.

Changing models? Yes please. Let’s allow the market to set interest rates and not have a Fed acting as the “sucker of last resort”, waiting to reward investors for their irresponsible behaviour.

[I]s Schiff actually advocating a complete collapse of our financial system so the market essentially has to reboot from scratch?

Of course not, he’s predicting what he thinks will happen if we continue down the same road of artificial pump-priming and dollar-dumping that we’ve been on for decades now.

I also think it’s fundamentally absurd to blame the credit crisis on free market economic philosophies when it’s abundantly clear that this nation hasn’t had anything resembling that in quite some time.

He also blames over-regulation, which is also not a part of a “free market”.

So I get it. You and so many others are communists. You don’t really believe in the free market. Nows your chance! Now we’ve got to emulate North Korea because “capitalism just doesn’t work”.

We only enjoy the highest standard of living in the world due to capitalism. Lets see if we can fuck that up.