Any economics blog with a comments section which becomes sufficiently popular will attract a sizable troll population of gold bugs and conspiracy theorists until the value of its comments section shall approach nil.
I am glad I'm not that popular. It's just sad to see economics blogs that I once liked become so over-run with trolls that they are virtually unreadable :-(.
- Badtux the Economics Penguin
Note: I've now updated my compendium of economics theory postings. Catch up on all the economics theory you missed the first time around, and watch as my thinking evolves over the past six months!
why would anyone want something so prosaic as gold?
ReplyDeleteWhat I dislike about econoblogs is that the comments sections are usually encrusted with libertarians, hard-core followers of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand cultists. They dominate the conversation and make it unpleasant for anyone who does not follow the Doctrine of Selfishness. If there was an Internet in the USSR during communist days, it would have been like the obverse of that, with ideological dogmatics who kept on saying "Our system is PERFECT! It's just that it has not been fully enacted in this human sphere."
ReplyDeleteI used to have more libertarian leanings on the economics philosophy side. That sort of system would work great, if everyone was healthy, wealthy, well-educated and honest. But people aren't. These "I got mine, Jack -- screw you if you don't have yours" types fail to take humanity into account. People who are sick, people who aren't smart go-getters, they can go die, as far as many econoblog commenters are concerned.
And their ideology fails to take into account the obvious fact that many financial people are thieves. "No regulations" means lots of rip-offs, but that's their core principle. I think it's as stupid as saying "There should be no regulations on the roads. Drive whatever kind of vehicle you like, trust your petrol supplier to be giving you good fuel, don't have traffic lights, and the free motoring market will resolve things via the occasional fatal car crash."
As far as gold bugs, I've got a bit of that disease, but I'm not fanatic on it. I've read your opinion about gold, Tux, but I tell ya, I rest a lot easier knowing that I've got a few dubloons in the money belt. Better to have it than not, I say.
Another annoying facet of the eco-loonies is that, on the rare instances that they actually do raise a salient point, it becomes so encrusted in their tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories that the original point becomes tainted or lost.
ReplyDeleteTake the Federal Reserve, for instance. When libertarians point out the essential silliness of our Congress ceding its exclusive right to print money to a private bank that is unaccountable to the taxpayers, they have a valid point. However, this is usually followed by wacko fantasies about Bilderbergers, Elders of Zion, Illuminati, Freemasons, etc, etc...
Such conspiracies are not only crazy, they are completely unnecessary. Why go to elaborate flights of fancy in order to explain the simple phenomenon of rich assholes trying to make more money by ripping off the rest of us? They've been doing that since, oh, roughly the beginning of recorded history. No further explanation required...