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Mannstein asked me to put this in a new thread rather than derail the old one, so here it is;

Manstein wrote:I have typically found that most people who say "o lord, he wants a gold standard?" can't go on to explain what the difference between a gold standard and fiat currency is.

A gold standard fixes the value of printed currency to that of gold (currency can notionally be redeemed for a certain amount of gold). Fiat currency does not have any underlying value, it's value is dependant on someone else being willing to take the currency as payment for goods or services.

That good enough for you? And do you really think that many people likely to come in on this kind of argument would be unable of explaining that?

The problem with the way people understand how the gold standard works is that they look at it with the mindset of a Keynesian economist (Keynesianism, our current accepted system, has proved time and time again to be bust system that is responsible for the boom and bust cycle of our economy) instead of an Austrian economist.

Except that's complete nonsense and there are countless examples of boom bust cycles before modern capitalism, let alone Keynesian economics, was developed. Tulips, anyone?

For those of you who want a quick read on both schools, just go to wikipedia, the explanations there are fairly good.

It really doesn't do a good job of explaining how marginal, and largely irrelevant the Austrian school is.


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Manstein wrote:What makes you think spending during a recession is a good thing?

Government spending maintains aggregate demand, preventing a single system shock from lowering overall demand and depressing other market sectors. Even the Austrian school doesn't deny that. They just say that it's better to get the decline over with quickly.

Although I don't want to delve too deep into this venue, as it is not in line with the OP, I feel the need to point out that the viewpoint of government spending during recessions is being challenged.

Not on any sensible level it isn't. There's nattering from fringe figures who've been doing the same nattering for a few decades, and that's all.

The Austrian school argues that depressions, when left alone, correct themselves very quickly once bad assets and debt have been liquidated and resources are freed to be applied elsewhere.

But they have little to no substantive evidence of that actually being true.

However, choosing to stay with the system we have today has proven and will prove to continue to be disasterous. Governments can and also will be highly susceptible to the ideas of deficit spending and intentional inflation policies. A gold standard effectively wards off these sorts of policies while insuring a stable value of all currency.

The gold standard doesn't stop governments from deficit spending. It stops them from printing more money, but they are still free to borrow money to fund deficits.

The point of the gold standard is price stability. This is an irrelevant concern, because the independance of reserve banks, the acceptance of the risk of stagflation, and the abandonment of that stupid MM line in 70s has given us effective control over inflation, even with our fiat currencies.

That's a really fundamental error you made there.

Last time I opened a history book I saw the government spend a great deal of money for 10 years and it did no good.

You read a terrible book.

WWII pulled us out of the depression by acting as an artificial agent in which to create demand. When you enlist millions in the armed forces and send resources off to be destroyed then the economy is going to change.

That's deficit spending! Whether it's used to build tanks for war or for roads in peacetime the effect is still the same.

You actually just hit the nail on the head Polonius, but in a different way than you might expect. Hoover was actually heavily involved at first, calling many business leaders in for private meetings and insisting that they not cut wages or let go of workers. Pressure from the Hoover Administration prevented large businesses from expunging bad assets in the form of labor on the onset, meaning that the businesses held on to those assets hoping to ride it out, which, as a result of their not expunging them, they did not.

An asset is a fixed, static unit which carry future economic benefits, intended to offset the initial outlay and eventually exceed it. Plant and machinery, property, all those things are assets. Workers aren't assets, because their cost is incurred daily.

The result of this misunderstanding is almost non-sensical description of the early days of the Great Depression.

To quote Lee Ohanian, Professor of Economics at UCLA, "[Hoover] adopted pro-labor policies after the 1929 stock market crash that accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression."

FDR made mistakes, particularly in setting wage fixes. He was operating in uncharted territory, and it is because sensible people have studied what happened, and what happened in later recessions, that we now know have a much clearer idea of what works to stimulate a depressed economy, what doesn't help, and what actively hurts it.

The argument that FDR did some things that made the problem worse, therefore everything he did and everything done in stimulus plans since, is, quite frankly, a terrible argument. Especially because the overall effect of FDR's plan was overwhelmingly positive.

He is a lecture by Professor Thomas Woods, he isn't an economist but rather a historian. I realized that for some Ohanian's intense economic theory lecture might lead those not familiar with all the terms a bit in the dark, since history reads a lot more like a narrative, perhaps a historian will be easier to understand.

Don't be patronising, you've made basic errors in this thread.

The premise of your comparison is false. Currency is not meant to be like sheep, ever growing and constantly reproducing, rather... wealth is supposed to change form in the medium of said goods. Increasing the amount of money in the money supply only gives the illusion of there being more wealth but inflation always comes afterwards and the products you once paid X for, now cost not Y but rather Z.

You have no understanding of how money works, and how the price of goods is calculated. You are correct that printing more money doesn't create wealth, because actual wealth is the goods and services we produce.

But if the total amount of currency is fixed by a gold standard (and it will be largely fixed because it is very difficult to get more gold), then the constantly increasing goods need a money supply increasing at about the same rate, otherwise you get deflation. Deflation is really bad.

This is something you really need to understand before you can start attempting to make an informed decision to reject economic orthodoxy and embrace a fringe theory like the Austrian school.

That statement sounds great, and if it were possible even I might give a second thought to the usage of fiat currency. Unfortunately, once paper money is unhooked from the gold standard, or a silver standard, you invariably get a snow ball effect on the economy. At first the snowball is small and prices only rise slowly, however, eventually prices begin to rise at inordinate levels and hyperinflation follows. Every fiat currency in the history of mankind, save the U.S. dollar, has experiences massive hyperinflation at some point in its life span.

This is factually wrong. Please point out the periods of hyperinflation in the currencies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. I've just listed those off the top of my head, if you want I can list more.

And in attempting some kind of snowball analogy you've tried to imply that inflation is always increasing, and this is completely and utterly wrong. Inflation can be directly measured by the amount of currency released into the economy, and can be increased or decreased throught the printing of more or less currency.

Central banking through a fiat currency system leads to boom and bust cycles that cause more harm than happiness.

No, that's factually wrong. Boom and bust cycles occurred before central banking existed.

So far we have been lucky in that our busts have been minor, up until 2009 and the ongoing years. Austrian economists, the economists who have predicted every bust that has taken place after 1945, predict that this "recession" is only going to get a lot worse, especially once we hit a dollar crisis.

They predicted each bust, in the sense that they said 'there'll be a bust' and when it didn't happen they just kept saying it'll happen any day now, when it does finally happen they shoutedd 'hahah!'.

This is the Hayek I was hoping for. I am, obliviously, quite disappointed.

Bah, Salma Hayek's attempted contribution to the monetary equilibrium theory were entirely discredited by the papers written by Alba and Lohan.

sebster wrote:Bah, Salma Hayek's attempted contribution to the monetary equilibrium theory were entirely discredited by the papers written by Alba and Lohan.

This sentence makes me want to stab my eyes out.

Have you forgotten?

dogma wrote:Have you forgotten?

The individual females had nothing to do with what I said. The words themselves cause offense.

TO MY CORNEAS.

Ahtman wrote:

This is the Hayek I was hoping for. I am, obliviously, quite disappointed.

This.

Platuan4th wrote:

sebster wrote:Bah, Salma Hayek's attempted contribution to the monetary equilibrium theory were entirely discredited by the papers written by Alba and Lohan.

This sentence makes me want to stab my eyes out.

No. Don't stab yours, stab others. Thats the Texas way.

Ahtman wrote:

This is the Hayek I was hoping for. I am, obliviously, quite disappointed.

The Hayek school predicted big busts, and there you are.

Manstein and Sebster second round!

A gold standard fixes the value of printed currency to that of gold (currency can notionally be redeemed for a certain amount of gold). Fiat currency does not have any underlying value, it's value is dependant on someone else being willing to take the currency as payment for goods or services.

That good enough for you? And do you really think that many people likely to come in on this kind of argument would be unable of explaining that?

Manstein wrote:

Except that's complete nonsense and there are countless examples of boom bust cycles before modern capitalism, let alone Keynesian economics, was developed. Tulips, anyone?

It isn't none sense and the fact you think so just proves my point.

When you argue from something so vague as a "mindset" you are always wrong. Its akin to arguing from "common sense" or "public knowledge". If you cannot deny agency on specific grounds, because that's what saying "you are of X mindset" is about, then you have nothing useful to say.

Manstein wrote:
The Austrian school has accurately predicted the reasons for the heavy booms and busts caused by Keynesian economics.

You cannot predict a reason. You can predict an event, however, which is what I suspect you meant.

Either way, many Keynesians also predicted the various booms and busts of the current system, so clearly that isn't sufficient to determine the worth of any given person's work.

I'm also interested to know how a school of economic theory that, by your own admission, forfeits control for reasons of volatility can be regarded as capable of making predictions.

Manstein wrote:
Regardless of if you think Peter Schiff is an donkey-cave, which I do, he was still right and it isn't someone to cry wolf either.

Yeah?

Manstein wrote:
The fact that an Austrian economist was able to even show the slightest glimmer of being correct one of these matters, and that you still refuse to give the ideas any sort of time of day, hints at willful ignorance or possibly denial of the very likely truth that monetary policy for quite some time has been wrong.

The problem is that when they are correct, their assertions have nothing at all to do with the controversial elements of economics.

When my freshman students answer questions about realism correctly, should I also given their incorrect statements about statistics any credit?

Manstein wrote:
Secondly, the government spends money that is taken from the taxpayers and does so in a way that always has political aims.

Yes, and?

Manstein wrote:
In the end, shorter but somewhat tougher recessions are far better than ones that are long, prolonged, and also harsh.

Possibly, though Austrian economics has not thus proven able to support any of the arguments made in its name with respect to recession length.

Maybe its because Hayek was incompetent, and didn't believe empirical facts were of any use in social science.

Manstein wrote:
Because sometime has yet to become mainstream, does not mean it is not credible and arguing otherwise is a limitation on thought.

At the same time, if many people believe something is stupid, then its probably worth thinking very hard about whether or not it is.

Manstein wrote:
Governments can still spend like you say, however, they can't have a central bank to continuously purchase their debt, print new money, and give the illusion of continued financial stability with a gold standard.

No, that isn't borne out by history at all. I mean seriously, suggesting that central banks are mutually exclusive with respect to the gold standard? Or, by inference, that the gold standard can be maintained without a central bank?

Manstein wrote:
Let's be clear.... the World War was an effort of massive and total destruction that simply shifted financial hardship from one group of people to another.

Yes, which is the purpose of not only war, but economics.

Manstein wrote:
Of the top five greatest industrial powerhouses of the early 20th century, Germany, England, France, and Japan's industry had been virtually wiped off the face of the map. Germany, a country that had greater industrial capacity than G.B. and France combined, saw its industrial sector literally reduced to ruins... Japan's... a smoldering pile of sticks and rubble.

US GDP was far in excess of that of all those nations even prior to war. Indeed, the greatest percent change was with respect to its production, the other great power economies did not fall with respect to their pre-war production levels.

Manstein wrote:
...the people it intends to help, the poor, always pay the biggest price.

It intends to help the poor? No one intends to help the poor, except the slightly less poor.

Manstein wrote:Yup, kudos for knowing the difference. However, still doesn't change the fact that a majority of people can't explain that.

Okay, but the majority of people wouldn’t really care about this argument. Among those who do, I’d be really surprised if more than a handful couldn’t give an answer at as good as the one I gave.

It isn't none sense and the fact you think so just proves my point.

No, it doesn’t prove your point. We know there were periods of increased and decreased economic activity before Keynesian economics and fiat currency were implemented, and we know there were speculative bubbles.

Your argument that Keynesian economics causes these things, rather than that it attempts to explain them is absolutely in opposition to the facts of the matter.

Just because a school of thought is not well known or largely accepted, doesn't mean it is irrelevant. The Austrian school has accurately predicted the reasons for the heavy booms and busts caused by Keynesian economics.

It depends why it isn’t well known or accepted. If it’s because it’s a revolutionary, new idea so that it will take a long time to work through the establishment, then it’s dismissal among

But if it’s because it is a tired, old set of ideas that had their day in the sun, and were ultimately shown as being incapable of explaining a wide range of economic phenomena 80 years ago, then the fact that economics as whole moved is very relevant.

Regardless of if you think Peter Schiff is an donkey-cave, which I do, he was still right and it isn't someone to cry wolf either. Now, to complete my point lets look at some clips from Mr. Bernake, the virtual headman for Keynesian theory:

Bernanke isn’t a keynesian. He’s a new classical (or neo-monetarist, if you prefer that term).

This is a very important thing you need to start understanding. The world of economics consists of neo-keynesians and new classicals. All of them are neo-classicals, when new work done in that field brought it back into relevance.

The monetarists came to prominence when they introduced important arguments and won new ground. If there was any powerful tools with the Austrian school, they would win back the ground they once lost.

So you don't think it is a good thing to get a recession over quickly?

Yes, of course I do. I just reject their argument that removing government spending (or monetary policy) from the equation would cause that to happen. Rather, I go with the almost universally accepted concept that holding government spending level will only increase the depth and duration of the recession.

Have you read Keyne’s General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money? Assuming you haven’t, you can basically sum it up as being focussed on dismissing one old piece of knowledge, Say’s Law. Say’s Law says that products are bought with products, and that every dollar earned will quickly be spent. This idea is at the core of the Austrian school, that aggregate demand will not decline because every dollar paid will quickly be spent. Keynes demonstrated, both explaining the reasoning of the individual actors and showing observed evidence of the phenomena, that facing poor economic times individuals will save more and spend less, so that a temporary system shock can become longer and more protracted, possibly even a permanent state of affairs, when that saving causes aggregate demand to drop so greatly. He then provided the clear solution, to temporarily sustain aggregate demand through government works programs.

It was at the core of Hayek’s speech in 1931 in Cambridge, before the Marshall Society. Famously, the Marshall Society would spend hours debating the issues raised, but this time there was dumb founded silence. After this awkward silence continued for some minutes, finally a question was asked;

‘Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’
Hayek replied, ‘Yes,’ but it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why’

Hayek was incapable of accepting Say’s law didn’t hold, despite the mounting evidence against him. Forced to explain how these apparently stable societies could maintain 4% unemployment one year and 7% the next, he invented increasing convoluted models of ‘intervention’, that became increasingly ludicrous. Meanwhile Keyne’s idea became increasingly clear, and was expanding to explain more and more phenomena.

Hayek’s defeat was absolute, and it was spectacular. Students of Hayek either disappeared from economics, or became Keynesian. This was done and dusted almost 80 years ago. Your efforts here are like complaining that Einstein’s theories are responsible for all those things that have fallen, and that we need to return to Newtonian physics.

Secondly, the government spends money that is taken from the taxpayers and does so in a way that always has political aims. See the bailouts of a few years back. Keynesian centralization is very vulnerable to political influences and leads to bail outs of losers who took knowing risks on the basis that the Federal Reserve was artificially lowering credit, therefor giving the economy false signals of stability.

Of course it is. The stimulus package itself was far less efficient than it should have been due to political concerns, as it included ineffective tax cuts at the expense of effective infrastructure projects, because the former was more politically appealing.

But trying to use that inefficiency to argue for a complete abandonment of stimulus only works if you accept the idea that there’s no overall benefit to stimulus. Which is, again, completely wrong, because we have long since accepted that aggregate demand can drop from the equilibrium level, and that government spending can return it there, despite Hayek's refusal (and he largely came around in the end, kind of siding with the monetarists).

In the end, shorter but somewhat tougher recessions are far better than ones that are long, prolonged, and also harsh.

Maybe, but your argument that by doing nothing you get a shorter recession is absolutely wrong.

People are actually talking about auditing the Federal Reserve and are calling for more transparency. 20 years ago that was an impossibility and very very few people called for it.

That has nothing to do with the economics of either Keynes or Hayek? Are you arguing that somewhere in Keynesian theory he argues that it’s important to not audit the Federal Reserve?

See recession of 1921 and virtually all recessions from Jackson till Wilson (After Jackson got rid of the central bank).

The existence of a recession doesn’t make a thing true. Things have fallen down since Einstein’s relativity, and yet we’re not arguing for an abandonment of Einstein in favour of a return to Newton.

You would need to substantiate how Keynesian economics actually caused that recession, through the Austrian view, and how if Austrian methods had been applied no such error would have been made.

Governments can still spend like you say, however, they can't have a central bank to continuously purchase their debt, print new money, and give the illusion of continued financial stability with a gold standard.

Government’s could still borrow, even though there was a fiat currency. That doesn’t make any sense at all, are you pretending that no king of England ever borrowed money, because there was a gold standard that somehow stopped him from going to the private sector to raise funds?

I don’t think you understand what the gold standard does and doesn’t do.

To think that anyone really has any control over inflation simply via manipulating credit is a fool's errand.

That’s absolute nonsense, and even the vaguest observation of monetary policy over the last three decades would have shown you how much nonsense that is. The amount of money put into the economy relative to the overall economic activity, plus the rising cost of commodities accounts for inflation. These factors are not absolutely known, but we have extremely effective models for giving us close predictions. This is why inflation figures vary from predictions by only small amounts, it is news when projected inflation is five or ten basis points off.

Arguing otherwise is ignoring reality.

Look up Roosevelt's depression of 1937.

Which was caused by, depending on if you take the Keynesian or monetarist point of view, either the spending cuts and tax hikes, or by the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy.

Are you saying you’ve read a book that tried to explain that recession through Austrian thinking? Because that would be one trippy read.

Tooze asserts that the Third Reich's economic policy virtually required it to go to war in order to keep the falls of its wild deficit spending under control.

That’s true. Nazi economic policy was horrible, and completely unsustainable.

All in all, by the time Roosevelt had been elected in 1933 the worse of the initial Depression was over.

This is fundamentally untrue. Unemployment peaked in 1933, and GDP was yet to recover in any substantial way.

My apologies that it is an hour and a half long, but the topic is a complex one, as you know.

I’m at work and can’t watch youtube lectures anyway. It's why I've not watched any of the lectures you've given, sorry I should have explained that.

HOWEVER, the real reason for the American economic recovery was a result of the utter destruction of the production capacity of every single major world economy other than the U.S. Of the top five greatest industrial powerhouses of the early 20th century, Germany, England, France, and Japan's industry had been virtually wiped off the face of the map.

No, the US recovered because massive amounts of government spending lifted aggregate demand, prompting growth and investment throughout the greater economy.

In a world in which only one country can produce good, a recovery was inevitable and bound to cover up the errors of the Roosevelt Administration. But what cost do you place on human life and human property? Europe picked up America's tab on that regard.

Wars only destroy, they do not create.

Please don’t believe the bs peddled by many of the people in the Austrian school you appear to enjoy reading. No-one is saying war is good. But it is a plain and obvious fact, observed countless times, that when you increase government spending dramatically then you boost aggregate demand. This is true whether the government spending is for peacetime or for war.

The war will almost certainly cause more long term harm than good, because that's the obvious result of blowing things up, but the point in relation to economics is that we have observed how wartime spending can increase a nation's aggregate demand, just as we've observed the same thing from peacetime government spending.

I would disagree.

You can’t disagree. It remains a basic definition.

None can argue that a stable pool of experienced and skilled workers willing to work at X wage is indeed an asset to a company. When your "asset" is a pool of workers that are being paid far more than what others in the market, of equal skill and experience, are willing to work for, it is a bad asset.

The first part is using a more vague definition of the word asset, in which an asset is anything which is useful, as in; “Jimmy’s speed is a real asset to our soccer team.” Then you’re taking that definition, reapplying it to concepts that use the more restrictive term, and coming up with a nonsensical conclusion.

The point to toxic assets needs to be understood in the context of balance sheets, liquidity and solvency. Workers do not show up on the balance sheet, because they aren’t paid for upfront, they don’t have a resale value. They are paid for work they do, as they do it.

Do you understand now?

See my last statement. FDR didn't bring us out of the depression, the utter destruction of every other major power's industrial capacity did.

I though you said the worst of it was over in 1933?

There was little to no success in the policies of the Roosevelt Administration and claiming that "he made mistakes, but we are learning," doesn't fly.

Important studies have been done to analyse what worked in response to the depression and what didn’t, so that we now have a far improved understanding of effective responses, then it not only, flies, it becomes the absolutely definitive concept in dealing with recession.

Especially considering we are in another depression as a result of Keynesian loosing of credit and creation of bubbles. To claim that we are "still working on it" (since apparently we didn't get all the kinks out in the Great Depression) when there is a perfectly viable alternative is foolish.

Why are you talking about Keynesian loosening of credit and creation of bubbles. That’d be monetary economics. Do you understand the differences in the two?

You seem to think the division is between Hayek and Keynes, and are ignoring every development in economics since then. This kind of feels like I'm arguing with a time traveller from 1933.

Keynesianism sounds great and it appeals to the sense of humanity in which we "want to help, want to fix it." However, this utopianism ultimately leads to the opposite; the people it intends to help, the poor, always pay the biggest price.

The intent isn’t to specifically help the poor. That’s just another example of you really not getting what Keynesian economics is. The intent is to help the economy as a whole (and thereby help society as a whole) by adjusting for a declining aggregate demand caused by a system shock.

Inflation hurts the poor more than others, bubbles hurt the poor more than anyone

Nonsense. The biggest effect of inflation is the devaluation of money already held, of which the poor by definition have very little. The rich have a lot, by definition, but the bulk of their wealth is in productive assets. This leaves the middle class, who tend to have most of their wealth in bank savings, leaving them the worst off.

(especially when Keynesianism demands we bail out the rich who took the bad risks), and the whole system funnels wealth from the bottom to the top.

Keynesian economics demands no such thing. You’re taking actions undertaken in response to the GFC as definitive actions of any Keynesian response, which again shows how limited your understanding of the issue is.

One of the problems with debate via text is its inability to carry tone and my tone was of good intentions.

Fair enough, I apologise for misreading your tone.

Also, my "errors" are only errors based on the assumption that Keynesianism is correct and that Austrianism is false.

No, you’ve made significant errors even if we accept the teachings of the Austrian school, such as assuming a gold standard would prevent a government being able to run a deficit budget.

Deflation is really bad, but for the above reasons that you just stated I am also for the addition of a silver standard.

Doesn’t change the fact that you have a fixed base for your currency, while the economy (and therefore required base of money) is constantly growing. You can make it a gold and silver base, or you can base it on an index of 94 different commodities, the problem remains that the economy is growing by 3% or thereabouts every year, while the total pool of commodities is not.

Beyond that point, I leave it to the future to discover the correct ways to add materials in which to anchor down the money supply, as spending the time to find raw material that hold actual value is far better than creating a bust fiat currency.

We don’t need the future to answer the problem, the past answered the problem and it did it decades ago – you don’t base currency on commodities. You base it on the universally accepted understanding that other people will take a dollar off your hands in exchange for goods, because they in turn expect to be able to use it to trade for goods.

Having an underpinning commodity like gold or silver doesn't change this, because that underlying commodity is only valuable because the owner expects to be able to sell it for goods, which the recipient accepts because he in turn expects to be able to trade that commodity for goods. The value underpinning gold is the same as the value underpinning fiat currency.

This is basically the revelation that underscored neo-classical economics.

My above statement was meant to also include the inevitable deficit spending that comes along with a fiat currency.

You can deficit spend without fiat currency. Arguing otherwise is complete nonsense. All a fiat currency would do is require you to borrow money (either domestically or from abroad), as you would be restricted from printing money to cover deficit spending.

As for the economies you should listed, you are correct they have never experienced hyper inflation, however, they are no major world economies nor industrial powerhouses. Not to dismiss my ANZAC buds!

Okay, then, the UK. Or the US (other than the issue of crap currency issued for a little while during the revolutionary war).

Cite yourself here please. Also remember that central banking has been around since before the revolutionary war, granted its scope was smaller.

The Tulip bubble occurred in Holland, peaking in 1637, and saw people offering incredible amounts for single tulip bulbs, in the expectation that the ever increasing price will justify any price paid. It inevitably collapsed, as all bubbles do, and the value of the tulips dropped to 1/100,000 of the original price.

As for depressions, these are many and endless documented. In the US there was an extended depression from 1815 to 1821, from 1834 to 1843, another from 1902 to 1904. Those are just the longer ones that I can remember, there’s dozens more.

PHEW! That took some time to work through, sorry it took me a while to respond. Before we continue though, I would like to say that at no point during my response were any of my comments meant to come off as aggressive or any way accusatory. I am interested in a real intellectual discussion, not a "I am right, you are stupid for thinking otherwise" sort of discussion. That is not an accusation, just me saying that anyone who wants to weigh on this with or against me, needs to do so in a polite manner that takes into account the idea that there are other schools of thought. In return, I will do act in kind.

Sure, thing. I endeavour to be polite (but readily accept I don’t always succeed ). But I will always endeavour to be honest, and accept good arguments where they’re made.

The thing you have to understand is that you are arguing for a theory of economics that was roundly defeated in the 1930s. Since then economics has moved on a long way, and even returned to the old theories, where those old theories had managed to improve and explain things in a new light. This is why we have neo-Keynesians and Neo-Monetarists (or new classicals), because classical economics came back with new a powerful arguments (revising the problems they had with the intrinsic value of goods to return with powerful new insights), resulting in everyone becoming neo-classical.

The Austrian school has not achieved anything of the sort. All it’s managed to do is stand off on the sideline and complain about everything the mainstream has managed. That they decry it all as economic mismanagement when the decisions made are, politically motivated and made against the economic advice (such as the Fed’s policy to maintain almost zero real effective rates of interests throughout the late 90s and early 00s) only makes them disingenuous in addition to being ineffectual.