by trod1234 | 2025-08-05 21:18:32+00:00
As a person coming to this fresh you need to understand the basis for money and economics before you can reason about it properly (and understanding what's missing to understand what's broken). You do so by building understanding based off past works that you know to be true, and where in-retrospect certain things are wrong how they were wrong (i.e. LVT in Adam Smith).

Austrian Economics which was previously just more classically called "Economics" prior to Keynes and the 1960s does just that following a first-principled approach, whereas the current state of academia for Introductory Economics does not, and instead creates a blindspot with contradictory material meant to confuse in a by-rote teaching strategy that fails objective measure in most cases.

We are talking about economics, and economic systems, its important to understand how such systems have previously failed. Facts don't antagonize opinion aside from when that opinion is wrong and must be discarded; it may antagonize the person who doesn't want to discard such an opinion. The facts are simply just the facts and they hold a supreme position in rational decision-making and related reasoning which is most accurate when based on objective facts (philosophy's metaphysical objectivity/identity/definition), regardless of individual personal belief.

The economic calculation problem is certainly the one that gets the most fanfare because quite a lot of the smaller still un-solveable problems eventually culminate in it with the chaotic whipsaws described, but there are many others mentioned in those 22 chapters; especially for the variants like Syndicalism, or surrounding logistics or transportation that are equally damning as well towards failure. Basic rational thinking says you don't want to use systems you know to fail in a way you can't control, perceive, or measure (after-the-fact i.e. hysteresis).

Its not antagonistic to Socialism unless you consider Socialism a devout belief, in which case I'd ask why one believes in something that isn't true and causes destruction for everyone; by definition believing and striving towards something that isn't true blindly is delusion, or non-hyperbolic evil (whichever you prefer, blindness leads to destructive acts which are evil acts).

The objective facts are what matter, and while many of the things that are now associated with Socialism in the common mind are quite right to aim for, they are hard problems and not solved, and it must not be done so blindly or in a way that will destroy oneself, their children, or their legacy/future as people of the money-printer seem to ignore. Cascading failure problems are the most difficult problems to tackle.

The facts are simply that those failure domains exist, and remain unsolve-able because of mathematical properties in the dynamics, and once the circumstances are created, there is very little control to avoid the downsides which is why it should be learned objectively; and any form of money-printing eventually over the currency's lifecycle will collapse to non-market socialism in the ways described, which is a worse problem when your population is at a level where the chaos of order breakdown causes Malthusian reversion by Catton.

If your food production suddenly fails from something that is generally predictable (having foreknowledge of these dynamics), and you can only grow enough to feed 1/5th of the global population, who decides who lives among the Nuclear powers? Combined the countries involved make up more than 1/5th of the global population.

> The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of WW2, at which point economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.

That is misleading. Austria was occupied and Annexed by Germany during the Anschluss of 1938 and the leadership that remained were loyal to Hitler throughout the War. The economists, academics, and the like all had people flee to the US during that War. The communists found a great friend in Keynes, but today the intelligent and educated know the errors of Keynes.

It would be a clear misrepresentation saying that they were kicked out by Austrians, when your home state is annexed by a Fascist State, and the material in question applies specifically to Statism or Central Heirarchies of which Fascism and Communism both apply by structural definition.

There is a reason quite a lot of those papers weren't published until well after WW2.