You appear to be new to this site and have not taken time to understand libertarian ethics nor Austrian economics. I cannot, in this comment, empower you with a lifetime of libertarian contemplation, observation, introspection, and education. I wish I could. It would make my mission so much easier.

In the mean time, I will address a few of your comments.

…businesses could do whatever they want and the people would have no protections

By what ethical theory am I to believe that businesses want to do me harm? All businesses are at the mercy of their customers. Without customers (consumers) they cease to exist. (Unless the gov’t bails them out that is…)

Corporations want to rule themselves so they can make as much money as they can and not spend any money on safety, environment and the like.

Though I disagree with your statement, if I accept it as fact, then why is it that most business and environmental regulations are written by corporations???

You would think that corporations would be lining up behind the libertarian movement. They’re not…why? Big business needs regulations to keep out competition and minimize risk and liability; in turn, these regulations create moral hazard and this begets more regulations and so on…(all the while blaming the free market which doesn’t exist.)

Your Lehman plan might sound like a sound model of survival of the fittest, but it would leave in it’s wake massive destruction, waves of unemployment, a suffering lower economic class, and only the wealthy few would become better off.

Hasn’t your prediction come true? Don’t we have massive unemployment, economic punishment of the poor, and only the wealthy few (Wall Street) better off?

Peter I am confused … so, let me get this straight…

You want us protected from the evil corporatist establishment through gov’t regulation… written by evil corporatist’s to their benefit and in the rare moment when the market is allowed to eliminate some of their members… you want to save their sorry asses and bail them out? Really?

Peter, you will find that libertarianism is pro people and anti-government. Because of our anti-government stance, we are essentially anti-corporatist.

You should consider joining us… (We share the same concerns. It is only in approach and application that we are different.) I wish you luck on your intellectual journey…

But really….

“Businesses could do whatever they want and the people would have no protections.” … there would be no laws at all?

“The days of robber barons and such” … didn’t exist in the first place.

“One role of the government is (ideally) to promote the general welfare of the people, and that requires regulations, laws and oversight.” … actually, the one role of the government is to pay government employees, keep the same people elected and shuffle money to cronies. That means ignoring regulations, break laws and pretend oversight.

“Corporations want to rule themselves so they can make as much money as they can and not spend any money on safety, environment and the like.” … there is much wrong and some right with this statement, but please tell me how government managed to create for example safe cars out of thin air?

“Your Lehman plan might sound like a sound model of survival of the fittest, but it would leave in it’s wake massive destruction, waves of unemployment, a suffering lower economic class, and only the wealthy few would become better off.” … as we are not currently in the throes of massive destruction, waves of unemployment, a suffering lower economic class, and only the wealthy few better of.

“Government is much like Violence. If it doesn’t work, you are not using enough of it.”

I’m pretty sure the road to hell is paved with such post hocs

I liked your post, but I again would like to put in a further comment about “store of value” versus money as a “commodity”. My own view is that it is a mistake to think of money as a commodity, although perhaps we are splitting hairs here (rather than atoms?). I believe that a “commodity” should be viewed as something you expect to actually consume (utilize, eat, play with, whatever) for its own sake. Money is not useful for its own sake, only for what you expect to be able to purchase with it. You can’t always know exactly what use you will put the money to, and when you will want to spend it. Even when you do know (a rental or mortgage payment, a planned shopping trip, a vacation, etc) you hold the money until a specific time, at which point you will spend it, not consume it for its own sake. The point is that between the time you receive it and the time you plan to spend it, you do not want its value to erode. Clearly, your value concepts as to what you want to buy with it can change and change often, but you want the generalized purchasing power of the money itself to remain as dependable as possible. Commodities can be perishable and it is o.k. You don’t usually buy fresh bread this week if you know you aren’t going to eat it until next week, so you keep the money to be used for that purpose until next week. The gasoline in your car is going to get used up as you drive, but that’s o.k. because your purpose was to travel, not to hold onto the gasoline. With any commodity, the consideration is always the use of the item itself, for its own sake. With money, its use is always measured in terms of what else you will be able to do with it besides holding it. Yes its purpose is to be useful for exchange, but if you constantly have to worry about whether it will keep its value, you and others like you will not continue to use it as a medium of exchange.

I think you’ll find the root cause of the German hyper inflation in the Weimar Republic’s over printing, for the dual purposes of paying off the punitive reparations demanded by the French, and funding of their own extension of the Bismarkian centralised planning and entitlement programs.

A few weeks back I had the loan of a couple hundred billion in various denominations of Zim dollars, to scan for posterity. One of the notes was $100,000,000,000 but probably worth less in purchasing power than a single square of toilet tissue. The man who lent them to me, said he knew things were bad, when a single hens egg sold for $100,000,000, and the price went up in the time you were in the shop.

“By mid-1923 workers were being paid as often as three times a day. Their wives would meet them, take the money and rush to the shops to exchange it for goods.”

http://www.usagold.com/germannightmare.html

The exchange value of money fluctuate as well as the exchange value of any good or service on the market. It is not necessary that this money kept its value to continue to be exchanged.
Even if this value go down continually as in the U.S.A, peoples continue to use it as a medium of exchange.

When this value go down faster and faster, peoples tend to exchange it on the market as fast as they can.

2) The corrections are a natural result of monetary manipulation (something which is itself artificial). However, the bust part of the cycle at least brings the economy closer to normal than the boom cycle. In that sense it is good.

3) The Fed, SEC and all of these agencies are government phenomena which have no legitimate role in the market. Sure the Fed can increase its artificially low interest rates to end the boom which will bring about the correction, but the direction of causality and blame stem from the Fed – not the other way around.

4) You are right that economic malaise is prime time for opportunism e.g. Hitler and Stalin and FDR. The correction has to come some time though and we can only hope and inform individuals to be wary of politicians promising quick fix remedies to a hangover they created.

The wealth was destroyed during the boom, by [mal]investment in things like new business parks, which will never host businesses, block and pre-cast plants in quarries to make the building materials for those business parks, new sub divisions to be bought by people who couldn’t afford them, investment apartments in County Leitrim and Bulgaria, financial products based on those mortgages which couldn’t be expected to be paid…

That wealth has gone, now we need to liquidate those mal investments as best we can, people who built the business parks, worked the quarries, manned the pre-cast and block plants, advised people to buy the dodgy investments and sold mortgages to those who had no realistic prospect of paying them, need to find jobs which serve people’s needs (doing things people are willing and able to pay for).

It is not easy, I was working on construction projects, I did my part in building Ireland’s mal investments, I’m having to find a new line of work, salvage what I can from 20 years in a field that no longer exists.

The bust is the painful time, but prolonging it does not make it easier. The ghost estates of half built houses, the empty business parks, the €100,000/acre floodplain land, the block and pre-cast plants now housing nesting pigeons, the brand new bank branch buildings… that’s where the wealth went

Also interesting is the follow-up discussion on the definition of money. The “store of value” is what I was taught, but the “most marketable commodity” is what I have learned. Like it or not we still live in a barter economy trading commodities. We buy products that do not have fixed prices and we trade (sell money) that as a result, does not have a fixed value. We buy money by selling our skills and knowledge, yet these too vary day to day in their value to others. It turns out that the “dismal science” is much more exciting than I ever would have thought possible. I thank Milton Friedman for leading me to Ludwig von Mises, and in turn to the writers and folks who comment on these articles and force me to think ever more deeply on the subject. My “day job” is physics oriented, and the more I learn of physics, the less I believe in the physics of economics. Humans act, particles and planets only react!

That’s wrong. Government has become too big to survive. But they will try to eat everything on their way to extinction….. And you know that even after the breadkdown, they will return like zombies….

That’s for sure and if it would have been nasty in the early 90ies, really bad some 2-3 years ago. It will be nothing if they pile up other “levels” of debt as long as possible. The longer we try to avoid the deserved fate the harder and the uglier it will get. I guess we could have been get away with it without violence some decades ago. I’m not sure if violence will be avoidable these days….

As those investments represent various ends, those ends become frustrated. The bubble necessitates the correction. The correction implies the ceasing of ever increasing investment in unsustainable activities.

No Austrian is “kidding” himself into believing monetary manipulation is good or natural. Take your empty allegations somewhere else.