Just me ranting a bit about something I heard the other day. No. Hydrogen is not the solution to our "energy problems." Especially from a libertarian perspective. It may have some uses, but not so much from a libertarian perspective.

Blog post for a link to my notes with citations:
https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=509

"Exploitation theory" is economic nonsense, and too many people are still using it today.
In this video, I break down the reasons why "exploitation theory" is garbage and provide a concrete example of tool rental without theft, aggression, or exploitation.

https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=501

I think Frank Shostak's article, "Inflationary Expectations Do Not Cause Inflation" gets something a little wrong. My thoughts on the subject.

My blog post: https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=498

Sources:
Frank Shostak's article: https://mises.org/wire/inflationary-expectations-do-not-cause-inflation
Relevant section of Human Action: https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/782
GDP numbers: https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/gdp3q23_3rd.pdf
Money Supply numbers: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/20231226/

For the love of God, cite your damn sources, and beware of people that don't cite theirs!

Today I've got some commentary on that Klaus Schwab video that's been floating around social media as evidence that the WEF is running scared...

Turns out it's from 2017, and it's even worse than that, actually! Check the video for details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTaB8jCpaGA&t=437

Also mentioned is the 2018 speech by the same man on the same topic, and libertarianism is conspicuously absent from his list of worries...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whAKOMPrv2g

I recently heard someone making a lot of noise to the effect that they had a right to "freedom from fear." It inspired me to write why such a right is absolute nonsense. My article got published by the Tenth Amendment Center, but I thought an audio/video version might be good, so here we are!

My article:
https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2023/11/30/there-is-no-right-to-a-freedom-from-fear/

My nonfiction blog:
https://marginalnonhermit.com

My fiction blog:
https://rnkfiction.blogspot.com

A recent article by Jon Miltimore about Russell Brand's demonetization got me thinking about the coalition of rich and well-connected people who want to “Own Everything.” Of course, they tell us we'll be happy if they own everything, but I hope no one seriously believes them.

In this video, I summarize the article and talk about some possible countermeasures. If the people can maintain actual ownership and wealth streams, this prevents most of the worst plans of this coalition from coming to fruition. Civil liberties are inseparable from economic liberties, after all.

Miltimore article:
https://fee.org/articles/russell-brand-s-demonetization-is-not-a-bug-of-the-emerging-financial-order-but-a-feature/

Some short thoughts about a recent piece by Doug French at the Mises Institute. Doug is discussing overly-optimistic bank CEOs but the article made me think about the book "The Skyscraper Curse" by Mark Thornton.

Both of these phenomena are caused by artificial credit expansion and both are parts of the Austrian Boom and Bust Cycle. Artificial credit expansion creates malinvestment and malinvestment wastes real goods, not just nebulous "capital!"

Links:
My blog:
https://marginalnonhermit.com

Doug French's piece:
https://mises.org/wire/bank-ceos-have-their-heads-clouds

Mark Thornton's "The Skyscraper Curse"
https://mises.org/library/skyscraper-curse

Recently listened to a couple of episodes of the Bob Murphy Show.
In the first, he invites Oren Cass to discuss trade and economics.
https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/283

Cass did some excellent work against the economic hysteria surrounding climate change, but he seems to have taken a protectionist turn.

In the second episode, Gene Epstein (of the Soho Forum) takes Bob to task for not pushing back on Oren and explaining that Oren's datasets are specifically chosen to sneakily support his point, when better data are available.
https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/289

However, Gene mostly talked about data, so I'm going to look at some of Oren's theoretical ideas and assumptions, because some of them are mistaken, too.

The New Mexico governor's recent unlawful and unconstitutional abrogation of the people's rights to keep and bear arms got me thinking.
We can't keep going this way. Politicians enact absurd attacks on freedom and some of them get smacked down, but others become precedent. The smackdowns *never* result in personal consequences for the politicians.

I propose three principles to help us decide when criminal prosecution of politicians is thoroughly justified. They're a little nicer than I would like, but I've got my "Constitutional Republic" hat on, not my "anarchist" hat.

Some links:

New Mexico Constitution
https://nmonesource.com/nmos/c/en/item/5916/index.do#!fragment//BQCwhgziBcwMYgK4DsDWszIQewE4BUBTADwBdoByCgSgBpltTCIBFRQ3AT0otokLC4EbDtyp8BQkAGU8pAELcASgFEAMioBqAQQByAYRW1SYAEbRS2ONWpA

U.S. Constitution
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution

Heller
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/

MacDonald
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/742/

Bruen
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/597/20-843/

Title 18 U.S.C. Section 242
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242

Detailed fisking of this very economically illiterate article by Caitlin Johnstone:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/08/no_author/de-gamify-the-earth/

Prices and money are extremely useful tools that help us improve our efficiency and weed out processes that waste scarce resources. Johnstone completely misreads the problem of coercive states using money and prices to their advantages, say by taxation, printing, price controls, etc., and instead blames the tools themselves. It's a brain-dead take, and I'm taking it apart here.

Pop “economists” love to ignore the details of investing. The absurd notion that the return on investment is consistently larger than the overall rate of growth ignores losses, cronyism, and entrepreneurship.

Learn the truth, with some Simpsons clips as illustrations!

Adapted from my post at https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=408

Funny how those potholes stick around for months, yet the moment a judge tells the government it can't censor people online, they're like, BAM! Gimme a stay.

Scott Horton Show episode mentioned:
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/7-6-23-matt-taibbi-on-the-judges-new-injunction-against-the-censorship-state/

Full blogpost by me, with additional links:
https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=401

In what kind of video do I get to call Bob Murphy and Jeff Herbener "The New Kids on the Block?" This kind.

It's time for an in-depth discussion on MMT--its good points and its shortcomings. Douglas, the MMT Macro Trader recently published a video in which he claims to debunk Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) and explain the MMT perspective. However, he has some fundamental misunderstandings about ABCT and what would be necessary to debunk it that call for some discussion.

Douglas's video is fairly good and appears to be in good faith, but he gets a few things wrong, and I explain where the MMT perspective is missing out and detail several shortcomings of the MMT perspective, and what we can learn from the Austrian approach that will help us not just understand economics, but understand what we don't know and can't know in economics.

------------------------------
Reference Links
------------------------------
Douglas's video: https://youtu.be/NKOo-v1Vp5Q

Campbell Harvey on Yield Curve Inversions: https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Term_structure/Harvey.pdf

Bob Murphy on Yield Curve Inversions:
https://mises.org/wire/inverted-yield-curve-and-recession

My MMT-and-Bailey Fallacy article: https://mises.org/wire/mmt-and-bailey-fallacy

Master Builder example: https://mises.org/library/malinvestment-not-overinvestment-causes-booms

Per Bylund responds to Wray: https://qjae.scholasticahq.com/article/77380-is-it-money-because-it-is-redeemed-in-tax-payments-a-response-to-kelton-and-wray

Wray's 2016 paper: http://wer.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/WEA-WER-7-Wray.pdf

Mises on Originary Interest: https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/806

Chapter 2, Section 5 of Man, Economy, and State: https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/947

ContraKrugman, episode 92: https://contrakrugman.com/92/

0:00 Opening
1:49 Part One: Basic Ideas
14:42 Part Two: The Austrian Business Cycle
29:19 Part Three: The MMT Business Cycle
45:48 Part Four: Correlations and the Yield Curve
51:25 Part Five: Evaluating More Arguments
1:21:58 Part Six: Conclusion

Provocative messaging is--no surprise--controversial! But exaggeration and shitposting are common on the internet, and I'm tired of people who pretend otherwise. Usually it's just a pose to feign outrage and get updoots.

The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire got in a little hot water because of a few of its tweets in the last few weeks, but I think most of the heat is coming from people who hate liberty anyway, and the rest from people who are mad they don't control the LP anymore.

Like my take? Check out my political commentary blog: www.marginalnonhermit.com
I publish free fiction (and link to my longer works) at rnkfiction.blogspot.com

-----Sources-------------

Hoppe essay on class struggle:
https://cdn.mises.org/9_2_5_0.pdf

"Crops" tweet:
https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1681513987827986433

NH not MC tweet:
https://twitter.com/carynannharlos/status/1686090062994268160

"Return to Africa" tweet:
https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1682468909364985856

The "really scary" tweet:
https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1685263467916193793

End the Etc. tweet (retweeted by LPNH):
https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1683190017340977153

Good L Candidate tweet:
https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1684177614326444033

You may recall my video from a long while back in which I went through a passage in Mises's book "Socialism," in which he specifically knocks down fascism and Marxism.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/EPx1F6jOTBlN/

Well, I was reading the other day and went through another amazing passage in Human Action. It succinctly and beautifully knocks down the arguments in favor of state intervention in the economy, and draws a clear line between state action and the market.

You can find the text here, along with the rest of Human Action:
https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/747

Metaphor and allegory can be useful tools to simplify or clarify an issue, but watch out! Some people like to run off into deep metaphor to avoid making any concrete suggestions, or to just create a vague yet unassailable position to argue from.

If you like this, you might look at my video "The Macro Trick."
https://www.bitchute.com/video/wbE35U9OHfo2/
Over-aggregation in economics is a similar tool that is used to sweep important distinctions under the rug. For example, a million dollars of "capital" might be a small factory or just a big pile of shovels. Which it is makes a huge difference in how they affect the economy.

Just a few quick thoughts about "effective altruism," why it goes wrong, and how to tell if it's going right.

I've read a few responses to my recent review of George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier," and it seems like I failed to get part of my intended message across. So, here I'm hoping to clarify a little on what I was trying to say.

See my original review here:
https://mises.org/wire/review-orwells-road-wigan-pier

Dave Cullen makes an interesting argument in this video:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ddbG6yoQRs76/

However, he misses out on some important distinctions, which I describe here.

The Bloop sound is interesting. It was extremely loud, measured by independent microphones thousands of kilometers apart. The NOAA released a recording of the Bloop that was sped up by 16 times, and people hypothesized that it was some giant animal. But what it really is is a demonstration of how amplitude modulation and frequency modulation can both carry information in a sound. The Bloop is a very low-information sound. Sped up 16 times, your ear mistakes a frequency sweep for information.

But when we slow it back down, it sounds less and less like a creature blowing an enormous bubble, and a lot more like rocks grinding together.

This is a great demonstration of how information is transmitted in sound. Not only does the slowed-down Bloop sound like rocks, it also becomes very clear that there's not much information in it anyway--we have about four little amplitude shifts, and the frequency shift is much less interesting-sounding.

NOAA's site about the Bloop, including the sound file:
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/acoustics/sounds/bloop.html

The tone app I used at the end of the video:
https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

One common rhetorical tactic of all kinds of wanna-be tyrants is to combine things that are not alike under one umbrella. They do this to create confusion which they turn into demand for administrators and experts, all of whom will support more central planning and tyranny. This is something we should all be aware of and oppose as best we can. In this video, I go into depth on several examples and provide some further food for thought.

My video on Law and Morality is here:
https://odysee.com/@MarginalNonHermit:3/wrong-v-illegal:8

Thanks for watching!

Part 1 of 3 of my short essay series on money from a Misesian perspective. This part focuses on the attributes Mises thought were necessary for good functioning money.

For citations and links, see the written version here:
https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=286

A new ad by the Brady Campaign for gun control got me thinking. "Safe storage" isn't actually what they want--it's much deeper than that. The authoritarians want you dependent on the state, and making you unable to defend yourself and your property from theft and vandalism plays right into their hands.

Peeling it back a layer deeper, there is a concerted push right now to infantilize people and create a caste system: rulers, and the ruled. The rulers get safety and the ruled get whatever the rulers are willing to give them.

However, there are many ways to resist this tendency. I go through several ideas at the end of the video.

Ryan McMaken's new book "Breaking Away" is an extremely important book. It provides not only a solid theoretical basis for the pro-secession argument, but also a very large body of real-world data. In a world where people arguing against secession are often unaware of real-world examples, this book provides a solid set of examples and references to even more.

Available at the Mises Institute:
https://mises.org/library/breaking-away-case-secession-radical-decentralization-and-smaller-polities
https://store.mises.org/Breaking-Away-The-Case-for-Secession-Radical-Decentralization-and-Smaller-Polities-P11245.aspx

James Lindsay's recent outline of Gnosticism and its relationship to modern neo-Marxist agitators is an interesting piece. He admits himself he's having some trouble organizing his thoughts on the topic, so I thought I'd give it a shot. In addition to his description of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and its relation to modern Marxist offshoots, he argues that his perspective might give us some weapons against them. I think he's a little off the mark there, but he's worth listening to and considering.

Links:
Lindsay's New Discourses 108:
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/02/gnosticism-in-the-modern-west/

Voegelin's Science, Politics, and Gnosticism:
https://archive.org/details/science-politics-and-gnosticism/page/5/mode/2up

A Course in Miracles:
https://archive.org/details/ACourseInMiracles_201609/page/n29/mode/2up

The Corpus Hermeticum:
http://www.gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm#CH

My website:
https://marginalnonhermit.com