[iamaelephant]

Have you ever considered that you have terminal America Brain and that your particular economic theories haven't exactly proven robust or even helpful for the past century?

[csomar]

> Have you ever considered that you have terminal America Brain and that your particular economic theories haven't exactly proven robust or even helpful for the past century?

I certainly don't since America has bailed out companies many times in the past and is considering bailing them again this time.

[__blockcipher__]

Not GP, but banning short sales is known to be absurd by pretty much any economist or financial expert out there. Distorting true price always leads to negative effects.

Now people investing in french companies will pay unfairly high prices for their shares.

Switching to nationalization, it’s pretty clear that that removes the incentive to take on risk and found a company since you are always at risk of the government stealing your assets.

Sorry I didn’t include citations but I would really encourage you to read about rational pricing and healthy market dynamics. Those that think you can just artificially decide the price of a security rather than let the price discovery mechanism play out are doomed to repeat the same problem we see in communist countries: you can buy bread for a “fair” price, but there’s no bread to buy because the price was too low.

[WalterBright]

Government price fixing always leads to some combination of:

1. shortages

2. gluts

3. black markets

[drclau]

You are seriously oversimplifying reality to fit it into your world views, here.

[wbronitsky]

While the GP might have been off base, there has got to be a better way to phrase this argument. The quality of discussion on HN has exponentially decreased in the past few days. It would be cool if we all started to add to these conversations instead of insult each other.

[pbhjpbhj]

Meta: IMO part of the problem is the way the site handles opposition, passive-aggressively making unpopular opinions gradually near-impossible to read doesn't support the concept of high-brow, adult, conversation.

I think pg was wrong to endorse "down-vote for disagreement"; downvotes should be for poorly made arguments, ad hominems, memes [on this site] and other low value comments.

My ideal is something akin to what slashdot has, multi-axis voting that allows users to select to their preferences.

[giggles_giggles]

Wow, say what you will about whatever economic theories you're attacking, "America Brain" (with the obvious implication that you're calling the person stupid because they're American and hold some view you view as stereotypically American) is super racist.

I'm ashamed on behalf of HN that your comment hasn't been flagged or downvoted into oblivion on that characteristic alone.

[iamaelephant]

> with the obvious implication that you're calling the person stupid because they're American and hold some view you view as stereotypically American

Actually I'm accusing them of having their brains poisoned by American free market dogma.

[ogre_magi]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

[elliekelly]

Why is "extreme poverty" the appropriate metric? I'd be curious to see the same graph but for the number of people living in "poverty".