Human Action

What Hacker News says

1. trod1234Jul 2025
   To start, you need to have a correct grasp of economics.

   Hazlitt (Economics in 1 lesson), Mises (Human Action/Money and the Theory of Credit), Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Thomas Jefferson's letters to Thomas Cooper, Carl Menger (SVT) to start.

   Adam Smith provides the requirements for factors and producers to operate in a market, also describing markets pre-fiat in a five volume set. The observations made are invaluable when comparing against the non-reserve modern monetary mechanics where they departed from fractional reserve in 2020 under Basel3.

   In terms of actual monetary debasement/inflation, going back to the unobscured calculations before manipulations began occuring, its been much higher than 2% YOY, and the interest rates have been manipulated to a point where the delayed dynamics are in full swing and can't be prevented. Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio/Bridgewater Associates provides useful data, but his conclusions are rose-tinted.

   The objective point of failure to non-market socialism from money-printing is where national outflows exceed inflows in debt growth to gdp, and in the private debt market that's likely already occurred we have a few years yet before another true-up. It gets to that point through concentration of business which concentrates bad decisions, and legitimate entities can't compete with slave labor, eventually leading to hyper-inflation then to deflation, or directly to deflation. Damned on both sides, with the safe shifting path dependent on lagging indicators amid chaos.

   Each boom bust cycle started small on adoption to fiat, but has increased exponentially every 10 years where the banks are forced to crisis from bad investments, and seeking bailout during a true-up. Penn Station Bailout (1970s), Savings & Loan Crisis (1980s), Dotcom Bust (2000), Lehman CDOs 2008, the next will be the CDO equivalent for business (but that bubble hasn't burst yet) QE 2010-2022? (pure money printing to those banks), etc.

   There is a third-party in the economic process, the money-lenders friend who receives preferential rates, allowing them to lower prices below cost to drive businesses out of business where leveraged buyouts aren't an option.

   You are right 2% isn't sufficient by itself to cause whipsaws. Its not just business in isolation, its the entire monetary cycle in aggregate.

   What about the petrodollar abandonment, and the loss of foreign demand for a pool of money we printed up to meet that demand over 50 years. Where's it go? What about paper warrants of commodities, where the ratio is now greater than 300 non-existent paper: 1 physical, where everyone starts requiring physical delivery (taking it out of the vault). Synthetic shares through options contracts.

   The deficit spending of the government, or unfunded liabilities (social security), where the debt on that to pass the budget must be almost completely borrowed (and the associated interest rate risk).

   Lets not forget the swap lines between other central banks and ours, and the carry trades happening, or the preferential swaps of existing already purchased treasuries for existing current rate treasuries 1:1 (no discount); blackrock and others.

   One thing, would slow it down, but the magnitude of each of these things fuels it moving forward chaotically as it unwinds; and people don't have the capital to draw from anymore because its been systematically debased for decades.

   Keynes has historically failed to properly account for the business cycle under fiat; a notable recent example being the housing crisis.

   Real markets require money meeting 3 properties (stable store of value...), adversarial independent decision-making based on a cost constraint, and working visible price discovery to function (aka economic calculation), with little regulation/interference.

   When these can't happen with money-printing, distortions naturally occur chaotically starting with the first rung of spending from that bank as a small blip, and growing to tsunami heights. Lets not forget what that AI may zero out most white-collar jobs, already having profound disruption in the factor markets, which whipsaw to the producer markets in a spiral.

   You may want to also read about the economic history of Argentina and how Milei turned everything around with almost 100 years of poverty caused by the same policies we have been doing, and how he made such giant strides to fixing it within 1 year; by firing the parasites, removing the regulations, and letting the market do its thing.

   State-controlled entities cooperate because they depend on the debt for continued existence, however indirect/laundered it came to them it originated in money-printing, and its not given to them for free; coercion and malign influence is well documented in many areas related to this. (i.e. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which may or may not be fictional; but the details match up, some of which weren't validated until recent releases.

   I'd say you have quite a bit of reading ahead of you.

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2. chillbillAug 2023
   Ends don’t justify the means.

   And this has nothing to do with institutional problems, and more with the fact that if original author (or you for that matter) don’t like how Twitter became, simply don’t use it and try to convince others not to as well, that way Twitter might change what it’s doing. If you’re going to go along and still pretend like you’re not in agreement, people won’t buy your sentiment for long, especially if you’re building tools to enrich it.

   I’m not saying you can’t build your product, but own what you’re selling, it’s hypocritical to do that while blaming Elon or new Twitter for what you’re building as if you’re not the one who came up with the idea and made the choice.

   I would recommend you look into a Ludwig bin Mises book called Human Action, where he discusses purposeful behavior as distinguished from reflexive behavior in that an observer imputes a goal to the actor. For an action to occur, the actor must be in a state of unease, imagine a more satisfactory state, and believe that purposeful behavior can reduce the uneasiness

   So back to my original point, if you’re going to “hate the system” yet participate not only in existing in it, but producing tools to empower it and it’s methods, then you are part of it and it’s hypocritical to complain about it.

   As for your own comment, I think your ideological hold is roaring, calling my comment a waste of energy just because you disagree also shows high tendency for being shallow and oppressive. What you think is the point and the actual problem might actually not be, other people can disagree and share their moral value judgments. What you see as division is actually conversation, a way for any human to grow and learn. I hope you grow more eloquent in your methods of expressing yourself in the future.

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3. merlinoaApr 2023
   This is socialist nonsense. The government won't protect anything outside of their interests[0]. Free markets are good and necessary for human flourishing[1].

   [0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614...

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4. amalgamated_incJan 2023
   Human Action

   The Sovereign Individual

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5. tmalyAug 2022
   I found references to what the Fed did during the Great Depression in Mises book Human Action that I found eye opening.
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6. shanusmagnusJul 2022
   > I read parts of it and found it slow and boring but then haven't stopped thinking about it since.

   I can't tell you how much I love this sentence -- captures a similar experience of mine so succinctly. I keep running into books that I tried to read at a "normal" pace and hated, thought were stupid, that nobody really likes it for real, etc. But then, for different reasons, I started reading books incredibly slowly, and it's like I've entered a secret world.

   Some examples, for the curious:

   The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn

   The Varieties of Religious Experience, James

   The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman

   Human Action, Mises

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