Robert Shiller: friend or foe of Americans?

Robert Shiller is an interesting guy and I think he is very smart as well.  The problem is that 95% of the stuff he says is correct leaving 5% to be complete and utter bullshit but the BS aspect of it is subtle enough that it will go right over most people's heads.

In a herding species, guys like Shiller command a special and elevated spot.  He has the academic background that impresses and he says enough truth that, in retrospect had he been listened to, you apparently would have done well to listen.  At the same time, he never says "now is the time" to do any given thing.  So most of his advice and wisdom is essentially un-actionable.  Yet still he commands a high salary and societal respect.

Today's article which mentions him is not really any different.  I laughed as he incorrectly expanded the meaning of the hacker term "phishing" to mean anything from password/personal information theft (which it is) to lies in advertising (which it is not) to financial fraud in general to the pump and dump of a Ponzi scheme.  Come on, Shiller, is rape and murder also phishing?  What isn't phishing under your silly definition?  Shiller sounds like the wannabe cool dad who overheard his 'L33T son mention a 'leet speak word and then, in order to appear young, hip and cool, began using it for stuff which it did not apply.

That would be bad enough but that is not what set me off.   Shiller began his little rant with the big lie (my yellow emphasis added), "Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller of Yale University warns that much like a carnival runway, the financial world will never be rid of “fraud and fools” since free markets creative incentives for businesses to "phish,” or sell bad products or peddle misinformation to customers.

“Free markets have generated unprecedented prosperity for individuals and societies alike. But, because we can be manipulated or deceived or even just passively tempted, free markets also persuade us to buy things that are good neither for us nor for society.”.

So, by having the herd listen to the apparently (but not really) iconoclastic "truthiness" parts of his spiel, he gets to slip in there that these things are just basic artifacts of free markets.  Yup, if we want free markets we have to live with these things.

OH this is such bullshit.  First off, we do not have free markets.  Second, mal-investment of capital into products that "are neither good for us nor for society" is an artifact of Keynesian economics and in particular a fraudulent money supply.  There is too much of the stuff running around and thus it causes a surge of unsustainable prosperity which manifests itself into shit we don't need like pet rocks and jeans that come from the factory with holes in the knees.
 
A market is, by definition, a place where people come to trade one thing for another and part of that process is price discovery.  But when one half of the typical trade involves obviously manipulated fiat currency, how can anything that happens in that market possibly be considered "free"??  It's like telling me that US slaves in the south were "free" to do whatever they want as long as it involved picking cotton all day long.  Don't roll your eyes because this is a perfect economic analogy.  The slaves had no real choice as long as they lived under the slave owner's control  The only freedom they ever achieved was by escaping.

Likewise, when everyone's labor has to transit through an intermediate form called fiat currency which is artificially controlled by someone looking to extract some value from it (i.e. theft of your labor for redistribution to the welfare state which uses it to buy votes from those which it impoverished in the first place), how are we in fact "free" and how is the market in any way "free".  IT'S NOT A FREE MARKET if the fake money is controlled by the wizard of ozT.

So please folks, understand that there can be no real freedom, no real ownership of one's own labor, no real property ownership until the energy source of the welfare state is brought down and by this I specifically mean fiat currency and its far worse cohort, fractional reserve lending.  Until these things collapse of their own corrupt weight (there's no need to work to bring them down, they are already teetering on the global stage) there will be no end to the pump and dump Ponzi schemes which are caused and fueled by the use of a fraudulent currency in an economy.

For new readers who doubt that I know what I'm talking about despite having 4000 hours invested in economic research in just this blog alone since inception and thousands of hours before that as well, please feel free to read it in the very clear words of Alan Greenspan.