patrick.net

But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as Poor Richard says, the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt.

-- Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac

Honest Abe says

have you ever heard of anyone "buying up all the farmland and then saying "do what I say or I'm going to let you starve to death".

Um, ask anyone of Irish descent if that could happen.

It's the central fact of Irish history.

It's the central fact of Irish history.

I thought drinking and fighting were the central fact of Irish history.

Debt doesn't have to be slavery. It makes sense to borrow for a first car, so you can get a good job. To a point, it made sense to borrow for college.

However, there are two kinds of debt that are a lot like slavery. The first is credit card debt. People who live week-to-week on credit cards and pay the minimum balance due or close to that, end up paying a lot more for the basic necessities and goods that they consume. Since the interest keeps them from being unable to pay off the debt, the debt becomes self-perpetuating. In this way, the debt is like being tricked into indentured servitude.

The second kind of debt is even more like slavery because it cannot be avoided. Getting a college degree is pretty much a prerequisite for entering the workforce today. Colleges are complete rip-offs, and the tuition they imposed on young adults is essentially a workforce entrance tax. Worst still, this debt is almost impossible to get rid of even through bankruptcy.

The Millennials, through no fault of their own, are stuck having to pay some crappy college a quarter of a million dollars or more for a worthless degree just for the privilege of becoming a tax paying, middle class worker. There is nothing fair about that.

Just to be clear. I'm part Irish myself, so I can make all the Irish jokes I want. I can also make jokes about Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, the English, engineers, Catholics, ex-Catholics, atheists, Floridans, and people with unusually large penises.

Honest Abe says

have you ever heard of anyone "buying up all the farmland and then saying "do what I say or I'm going to let you starve to death".

Um, ask anyone of Irish descent if that could happen.

On a serious note, here's what I don't get. Ireland is an island. It's surrounded by fish. How could people starve in the potato famine when they could head less than 160 miles in any direction to fish. Or if they head in the shortest way, typically less than 50 miles.

My apologies to the publisher and readers of Sheep! magazine. It turns out that, after a Google search, there really is a Sheep! magazine and it's not what you would expect. It's just a magazine for people who are interested in raising sheep. You can find it's website at sheepmagazine.com.

Dan8267 says

On a serious note, here's what I don't get. Ireland is an island. It's surrounded by fish. How could people starve in the potato famine when they could head less than 160 miles in any direction to fish. Or if they head in the shortest way, typically less than 50 miles.

Quotations from http://www1.american.edu/TED/potato.htm

Despite the famine conditions, taxes, rents, and food exports were
collected .... and sent to British landlords ..... English colonization of Ireland forced the Irish to pay exorbitant rents and taxes, and to export their crops ..... a tenure system was introduced into Ireland that gave Protestant landlords control of 95% of the land .... If the tenants failed to pay their rent, they were jailed or evicted and their homes burned ....

To create a fishing industry, you need money for boats. As the English landlords took every penny they could, and the Protestant church also came collecting the tithes they were legally entitled to even from Catholics, there was very little left to live on, and ultimately nothing.

Anyway, there was no lack of food. Ireland was exporting large amounts of food continuously during the famine. The key is that English landlords owned all the farmland and pretty much everything else, and did not leave the Irish any possibility of feeding themselves.

Henry George was very popular in Ireland, for obvious reasons.

BTW, snide comments about anyone's family are just personal insults and will be deleted. Maybe the user account too.

I think I just deleted a dozen comments, even innocent ones.

Anyway, there was no lack of food. Ireland was exporting large amounts of food continuously during the famine.

Wow, that's pretty messed up. The English were bastards.

Potatoes contain nutrients, such as protein, carbohydrate, and
vitamin C, which are necessary for a healthy diet, but lack vitamin
A and calcium. Combined with milk, potatoes supply almost all food
elements required for a healthy diet. - American.edu

I didn't know potatoes where that good for you. I normally think of them as a starchy junk food. I had no idea that were high in vitamin C.

I think I just deleted a dozen comments, even innocent ones.

You deleted my first Sheep! magazine comment. The second comment doesn't make much sense without it. -- But it does make people wonder...

Dan8267 says

Anyway, there was no lack of food. Ireland was exporting large amounts of food continuously during the famine.

Wow, that's pretty messed up. The English were bastards.

The English were just very similar to our Republicans. Georgism is really refreshing in that it distinguishes keeping the results of your own labor vs keeping the results of other people's labor as rent.

Republicans are really confused about that. They seem to think rent from land ownership is somehow the product of their own work. Because they want to feel entitled to that rent.

That's a good assessment. Republicans also tend to think that the executives, who are at best overhead, are the ones producing the goods and services a company sells, when it is really the employees.

I like the idea that people should keep most (say 80%) of what they produce. But most of those in the top 1% income bracket aren't actually producing anything. One could make a case that a celebrity sports player is producing a lot of entertainment wealth, but a financial banker and a CEO aren't.

I wonder what the "tax" employers impose on their employees really is. 5% for overhead costs and another 5% for economic profit would be reasonable, but I think that the real tax is over 50%. That's why it takes two incomes to make ends meet when it used to take only one, even though the American worker is now so much more productive.

Honest Abe says

have you ever heard of anyone "buying up all the farmland and then saying "do what I say or I'm going to let you starve to death".

Um, ask anyone of Irish descent if that could happen.

It's the central fact of Irish history.

The English did not buy up all the farmland in Ireland. They got Irish land in a very government bureaucratic fashion: military conquest.

What the English landlords held in Ireland were town- or even county- sized plots that ran into thousands and tens of thousands of acres! The landlords were the government! Absentee government, as the local Irish were understandably hostile to their English conquering overlords. What the English was collecting was not a rent as we understand today but effectively a tax on the Irish.

What made the Irish situation all the worse was that the leases terms in most of Ireland did not give the Irish any long term security on their lease, and improvements on land would become the landlord's when the leases terminated. That led to a lack of land improvement.

Around Ulster, where tenants had rights to their improvements (because they faced less of the religious discrimination that had been the official policy of English government policy ruling Ireland), the situation was very different; land became much more productive due to improvement. Famine was much mitigated around Ulster. That's why, IMHO, Georgist ideas discouraging long term improvements and reducing the security of land holding are very much counter-productive. The Georgist high government tax on land would function exactly like the English rent collected on vast tracts of Irish land with little consideration to the residents' property rights.

The English were just very similar to our Republicans. Georgism is really refreshing in that it distinguishes keeping the results of your own labor vs keeping the results of other people's labor as rent.

How can you then ever buy anything and hope to keep whatever you buy? Isn't that the fruit of other people's labor? What about lending someone seeds and taking a share of the crop in exchange? What about lending someone tools and taking a share of the product in exchange? What about investing in stocks? What about lending someone money and taking interest? What about lending someone improved land and taking a share of the harvest in exchange? All through mutually agreed terms of course, and all under the assumption that each party has multiple other counter-parties to choose from. Are all these activities all illegitimate in your interpretation of Georgism? How is that any different from the most Luddite version of communism? More importantly, how can anyone in that system ever survive when they are too old to do actual labor?

Republicans are really confused about that. They seem to think rent from land ownership is somehow the product of their own work. Because they want to feel entitled to that rent.

Land ownership is hardly a Republican or Democrat issue. Both Ted Turner and George Soros own enormous parcels of land. Don't tell me they are Republicans (although sometimes things are hard to keep track of between the two parties). Rent is simply a use fee when the tenant has multiple competing counter-parties (landlords) to choose from in close proximity. Small time landlords collecting rent for their service certainly has more moral justification than tax collectors collecting the use fee for doing next to nothing.

Nomograph says

If they were able to borrow some money, they could have created a fishing industry.

If they had access to that money, like during Peel's administration, they'd be better off buying food from North America. Irish fishing industry wouldn't be competitive due to simply geographical reason: the North Sea fishing ground to the east of Britain was much more productive than the deep waters off Ireland.

Debt can be freedom when properly used; ask anyone from a poor family who obtained a school loan to elevate themselves from poverty.

That may have been the case a couple decades ago. Nowadays, taking out school loans just condemns one to non-dischargeable debt.

Nomograph says

Don't be obtuse; the example was meant to be illustrative. They could have started any number of businesses if they had access to credit or other venture capital.

Considering the mass starvation state that they were in, they probably needed food more than credit. In any case, government sponsored credit would just end up trickling through the English government / land lords first, making life even more difficult for the Irish at the bottom of the credit/money flow.

Nomograph says

Deep down inside of every Austrian is a bitter pessimist, trying to get out.

Not pessimistic, just realistic. The graph you provided has two problems:

(1) it is not talking about recent greaduates. Like I mentioned, a degree from many years ago did have market advantage, and they have contributed to the job security shown in the graph for subjects with degrees . . . people have been in their jobs for many years. The stats among recent graduates are very different. The unemployment rate among Class 2009, 2010 and 2011 is extremely high: more than half of college graduates can not find jobs within one year after graduation!

(2) The graph is also not normalized for the background of the kid him/herself before the education-banking establish makes a quarter million dollars off him/her. Many of those unemployed without degrees are simply from much poorer family background or less talented to begin with, which was why they never went to college. The math for any given subject facing the choice of whether to go to college however would look very different.

When looking at charts like these, please remember that correlation is not causality.

For example, from the graph below, we can clearly conclude that having sex with supermodels leads to increase income. I know that's how I make all of my money.

To create a fishing industry, you need money for boats. As the English landlords took every penny they could, and the Protestant church also came collecting the tithes they were legally entitled to even from Catholics, there was very little left to live on, and ultimately nothing.
Anyway, there was no lack of food. Ireland was exporting large amounts of food continuously during the famine. The key is that English landlords owned all the farmland and pretty much everything else, and did not leave the Irish any possibility of feeding themselves.

Goddam those were the good ole days. It has been tenebrious for so long one tends to forget a utopian society can exist! My heart brightens with hope we will see yet another Golden Age of man.

I remember sitting in my Beauchamp near the hearth during a chilly autumn night sipping Cognac from my custom chalice fashioned out of the polished skull of a Taig. Good times.

Ah, the completely unapologetic Orangeman.

Reality says

The English did not buy up all the farmland in Ireland. They got Irish land in a very government bureaucratic fashion: military conquest.

You like to call everything government and then blame everything on it, but the confiscations were a business, where businessmen invested money and got land in return. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventurers_Act

The Act invited members of the public to invest £200 for which they would receive 1,000 acres (4 km²) of lands that would be confiscated from rebels in Ireland.

In the case of my own family, here's a record of 129 acres confiscated in 1642, toward the bottom of the page, look for John Mc William Mc Connor Mc Killilea:

Photo of record

Dan8267 says

I thought drinking and fighting were the central fact of Irish history.

Family Guy is also instructive on this matter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MxwMUd9P7A

Dan8267 says

But most of those in the top 1% income bracket aren't actually producing anything. One could make a case that a celebrity sports player is producing a lot of entertainment wealth, but a financial banker and a CEO aren't.

Very true. The bankster industry doesn't really produce anything. Secondary market investment doesn't really produce much -- buying and selling after the initial funding event is not production.

With the screwed up way governments measure economic prosperity, the U.K. will probably consider the costs of repairs not as an expense, but rather as a contribution to their GDP.