{"id":28424,"date":"2017-11-30T06:30:49","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T11:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28424"},"modified":"2017-11-30T06:30:49","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T11:30:49","slug":"it-was-this-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28424","title":{"rendered":"It Was This Big"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"wrapper entry-header page-header\">\n<div class=\"title-with-sep single-title\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cobdencentre.org\/2017\/11\/it-was-this-big\/\">IT WAS THIS BIG<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<div class=\"grids\">\n<div class=\"grid-8 column-1\">\n<div class=\"single-box clearfix entry-content\">\n<p class=\"x_p1\"><span class=\"x_s1\">A theme which frequently pops up in current financial and economic commentary is that of the burgeoning levels of outstanding debt under which all too many nations are said to groan.\u00a0<\/span><span class=\"x_s1\">Typically, reference will be made to the percentage of GDP which this mountain of obligations entails, usually by way of putting it into a context which is deliberately slanted to be alarming. But how valid is this comparison?<\/span><span id=\"more-1487\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"x_p1\"><span class=\"x_s1\">No Austrian will, of course, be insensitive to rising indebtedness \u2013 especially where the majority of these debts are conjured up by the banking system in the form of what used to be called \u2018fictional capital\u2019 or else, having started out benignly enough as the creditors\u2019\u00a0<em>ex ante<\/em>\u00a0savings, they have since been monetized by said banks and so have contravened their originators\u2019 expressed time preference.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"x_p1\"><span class=\"x_s1\">The reader may be aware that the reason we followers of Mises, Hayek,\u00a0<em>et al<\/em>, object to this latter practice is that it allows multiple claims to be simultaneously exercised over the one quantum of goods whose original loan would otherwise have denied their use to more than one person at once.\u00a0<\/span><span class=\"x_s1\">After all, it is all very well for me to lend you my bicycle \u2013 whether you intend to use it in your job as a mail courier or simply take it for a pleasure ride \u2013 but it is no good then furnishing countless others with duplicate keys to the bike lock and telling them they are all free to go ahead and use it wherever they may find it temporarily chained.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"x_p1\"><span class=\"x_s1\">However, much of the contemporary treatment of elevated debt levels rests not so much on such a fundamental objection as this as on a series of half-truths and outright fallacies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IT WAS THIS BIG A theme which frequently pops up in current financial and economic commentary is that of the burgeoning levels of outstanding debt under which all too many nations are said to groan.\u00a0Typically, reference will be made to the percentage of GDP which this mountain of obligations entails, usually by way of putting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7380,195,353,17261],"class_list":["post-28424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-cobden-centre","tag-debt","tag-gdp","tag-sean-corrigan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28425,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28424\/revisions\/28425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}