* Posts by mfckr

4 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2015

Adam Smith was right about that invisible hand, you know

mfckr

Re: More on Hayek

"Even Hayek seemed to have accepted the need for a social safety net, having admitted as much at one point."

Interestingly, Hayek actually made an argument for universal basic income (i.e., something like a Mincome floor). He seems to conceive this as something necessary for a truly free society, and as a way to circumvent intergroup conflicts over social justice/perceived 'fairness'. Some excerpts of what Hayek wrote on that subject here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/hayek-enemy-of-social-justice-and-friend-of-a-universal-basic-income/

mfckr

Reading over the 3 cases where Adam Smith mentions the 'invisible hand', it sounds more like he was simply making an epistemological point about seen vs. unseen effects of economic activity.

Parallel to what Bastiat argued here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

Friedrich A. Hayek also talks about this sort of thing quite a bit, e.g.: "Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand."

Facebook shops for ads tech – snaps up product search engine TheFind

mfckr

Never heard of "TheFind" before now, but just tried using the search engine and it actually doesn't seem to be entirely useless for doing price comparisons (I like it better than Google Shopping at least).

But that seems the norm these days—i.e., useful services being bought out/shutdown by larger tech moguls who are apparently driven to disrupt anything that doesn't directly contribute to their own ad-based revenue schemes, etc.

Basic minimum income is a BRILLIANT idea. Small problem: it doesn't work as planned

mfckr

Anecdotes re: US basic income experiments: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf