America's Migratory Elderly population

[Simon_Jester]

Its funny watching you guys agree with me and not realize it.

Your shock absorbers illustrates MY point. They take the forces and distribute them predictably to avoid catastrophic damage, but they don't make the shocks they absorb disappear, even as forces you feel. You can mitigate the cycle, but you can't eliminate it. Maybe you have some magical 100% efficient shock absorbers on your car, but then you would be engaging in the fantasy I noted earlier.

You are free to guffaw about your clever rhetorical turnaround, but you're missing something.

Competently designed shock absorbers mean that when you hit a bump, you have an adjustment, but you do not have a cycle. The car bounces up, then down, then stops, because a very stiff damping force is absorbing and dissipating the energy that would otherwise go into bouncing the car up and down.

I can imagine some advocate of laissez-faire mechanical engineering designing a car suspension that bounces up and down for ten seconds every time it hits a bump. Because everyone knows "spring cycles" are natural and springs oscillate back and forth, that's what they do, why bother fixing it? But no one would ride in such a car willingly. Because while it's common sense to be aware of cyclic phenomena, it's a poor move to revere them, to treat them as inherently better because they are thus 'natural.'

Description is not prescription. The natural tendency of markets to cycle doesn't tell us any more about how markets "ought to" behave, than the natural tendency of gravity to pull things downhill tells us we all "ought to" go jump off of cliffs.

Engineers understand you can't just wish away the forces of physics, and when they don't people die. Economists worth their salt understand you can't wish away the highs and lows in a market, and when they don't economies and the people in them are screwed.

And you are still fantasizing that people fantasize about "wishing away" something. Because if libruls believed in a sensible thing like "try to mitigate market cycles and treat them as a problem to be dealt with rather than an ideal to think about with grim triumph," it would be harder to argue against them. Much easier to argue with straw dumbass libruls who secretly dream of "wishing away" market forces.

So either you're making up a belief and falsely attributing it to those present... or you're doing "old man yells at cloud" berating of people who aren't here. In which case why don't you go find someone who actually believes the strawman arguments you're setting up?

[Ziggy Stardust]

To circumvent something is to avoid it entirely, which is nothing remotely close to mitigating or managing something, both of which require the active participation in whatever you are applying it to.

In the context of this discussion someone was talking about how artificially inflating housing values was preventing normal market forces ("crashes" as he put it) from moderating home prices. TRR immediately went from that pointing out of a bubble, to declaring the only other alternative was unbridled capitalism and denouncing market cycles (the avoidance of which being what Star Glider referenced as the problem) specifically .

My point, my obvious and well communicated point, is that market cycles are not bad. I said nothing about whether said capitalism should be heavily or not at all regulated, only that trying to CIRCUMVENT (see the definition above in case you forgot what that means already) the market cycle entirely is a bad idea and leads to wore outcomes.

And yet, you still refuse to define how you draw a line between "circumventing" the "market cycle" and "mitigating or managing" the "market cycle". You smugly point to dictionary definitions as if that doesn't further obfuscate the issue. As I said in the last post, you are leaning heavily on broad generalities and buzzwords without providing any specifics. Since you are apparently incapable of understanding this point, I will ask you somewhat more directly:

What actions on the part of the government do you consider "circumvention" of market forces (which you consider inappropriate) and which actions do you consider pure "mitigation/management" (which you do not find inappropriate)?

You just continue to vaguely allude to the fact that there is some certain class of actions you refuse to define that are appropriate, and another certain class of actions you refuse to define that are inappropriate, and acting offended that to everybody else it isn't self-evident what you personally consider appropriate and inappropriate. Yes, I am aware of what "circumvention" means, but it isn't clear what YOU think it means (ironically, if we take your comment about 'active participation' being the defining feature, then the only way to actually 'circumvent' the market is to be completely laissez-faire and let market forces act on their own, because every other possible action involves some sort of active participation, but I suspect this is the exact opposite of the point you meant to make).

Me pointing out there is something between "massive government support for house prices" and "just give capitalism free reign and allow periodic catastrophic crashes" was made in response to those specific comments.

The fact that my comment about allowing market cycles to happen quite specifically mentions both enforcing risk consequences (avoiding bubbles) AND catastrophic crashes makes this clear as day.

As I said in my last post, this just quite simply was not what you said in the post I was responding to. Let's go back to the words you wrote:

"When you actively circumvent its mechanisms for periodically enforcing the consequences of investment risk you are just delaying them so they manfest concurrenty and catastophically vice sequentially and tolerably."

You don't say anything about avoiding bubbles, as a matter of fact. You state ONLY that you can either have "concurrent and catastrophic" crashes, or "sequential and tolerable" crashes.

So, I say again, you are either just backpedaling wildly and shifting the goalposts, or you just communicated poorly the first time around and didn't fully clarify your position. It is not enough for you to bizarrely insist that the meaning of the word "circumvention" suddenly forces us to add a "but" or an "except" to your poorly structured sentence as some sort of caveat. This is like saying "I hate taxes", then saying that by virtue of the definition of the word "hate" you clearly meant "I hate taxes except for the ones that I consider cost-effective and beneficial." It's nonsensical at worst, and a red herring at best.

Both you and Simon just repeated what I said, only in more verbose and inefficient fashion.

So, again, you just double-down on the Homer Simpson routine?

[Zixinus]

I think a mayor point about this derailed argument is a misunderstanding: the desire of non-libertarians isn't to prevent downturns or dips in the market.

The desire is to prevent and/or mitigate catastrophic crashes that not only fail that market, but whose failure is so severe that it crashes other markets (that might otherwise have been doing fine) and has repricussions for both the economoy as a whole and the society that hosts it. That is, severe economic depressions that causes mass poverty and all the societal problems that entail, including the radicalization of politics and ideology. History has shown us that can lead to Bad Things. It is bad for the society suffering that effect, bad for the government and probably bad for everyone. Especially when that crash was due to external influences or some sort of illegal or barely-legal activity in the first place. Or perhaps due to a economic bubble that should have been popped early and wasn't.

It is probably fantasy to prevent all such events 100% of the time. But you can't prevent anything 100%. It makes sense to still try, to still look for common failure mechanisms and make countermeasures. Whether all or some measures are ineffectual or do more harm than good is perhaps a more worthy argument, especially if said measure can be named.