Anyone know why Keiser exudes so much hostility towards Lew Rockwell, Butler Shaffer, Ron Paul and other libertarians? He has said some very nasty things. Personally, I ignore him because he’s clueless and nasty to boot.

… Mises mentions subjective value a lot… a lot he actually accredits Carl Menger in Human Action. I am fairly sure Jaitly has never read Mises’s Treatise. In honesty I have not studied Menger, but if Jaitly’s arguement that I can’t say that I have studied Austrian Economics, I will proudly concede that I have studied Misesian economics.

I hope that’s all it is. If not then his IQ is below 15. This is just completely insane!

Tom,
If I had just gotten housed like that, I would have to invite you onto my show. It would be the only way for me to save any credibility I had left. I told Max he should do this (posted as “veritas”). It would be good TV. It could be a chance to clear the air and spread the Austrian message. So, if he invites you, are you going to accept?

I can’t take Keiser seriously, and I don’t really follow Jaitly’s point either. He made an off hand remark about Mises in a tweet, and he was struggling to justify it later. He seemed almost embarrassed by the predicament.

Jaitly goes on about money being the ultimate, universal extinguisher of debt, but “money” is a word, and words mean what people commonly mean by them, and conventional economists don’t use this word as Jaitly does.

Money is a medium of exchange. Anything that people accept only to exchange it soon thereafter for something else is money. People have used gold and silver as money, but I don’t need money to extinguish a debt at all. I can extinguish particular debts with anything valuable, but I can’t use anything valuable as money.

People have also used gold and silver as a standard of value for extending credit, while using notes promising the standard as money, but confusing a standard of value with money itself is an incredible error. People routinely accept the promise of a standard of value in exchange for other goods without any desire ever to receive the standard.

Under a gold standard, many people never possess and never want to possess any gold, because they have no personal use for gold. The standard of value is only a yardstick beside which we measure the current value of other things. Any number of other commodities could be a standard of value, like Grade A whole milk.

But gold does have intrinsic value, i.e. it has value other than as money. It has modern uses in electronics for example, quite apart from any monetary use. The value of these other uses is subjective, but “intrinsic value” in this context is not equivalent to “objective value”. It means to “valued as something other than money”.

Because gold has intrinsic value, it can also be the collateral for an extension of credit, but the standard of value for an extension of credit need not be the collateral, and it rarely is. “Full reserve banking” basically supposes that the standard of value and collateral in an extension of credit are the same thing.

You mean gold has use value. That is not the same thing as intrinsic value. What if people no longer want the uses to which it can be put?

“The idea that private interests preserve the capital value of resources (‘unless they are interfered with by the state’) produces a superior economic outcome over the public interests preservation of capital value of resources is the type of pseudoscience, faux-Austrian claptrap that gives rise to economic dictatorialism…”
Max, I’m a fan of yours, but to insinuate that the allocation of my resources by the state as opposed to the allocation of my resources by myself would produce a superior economic outcome and not give rise to economic dictatorialism is disappointing. That is the intellectual foundation of despotism.
“What Woods is advocating here is in effect central planning, but the ‘right kind’ of central planning by the ‘right people’”
Also, me allocating my resources as I see fit relative to the state allocating my resources as they see fit would not classify me as a central planner as you also insinuate above. I would be an individual acting according to my wishes. In America, I would be 1 of 300 million individuals acting according to their wishes. Those 300 million individuals acting according to their own wishes would not constitute a centrally planned state.
Intellectual honesty will lead me to agree with Mr. Woods.

In terms of coinage, “intrinsic value” means the market value of a coin’s constituent metals, distinguished from the coin’s face value or its value as a collectible or its market value apart from its face value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(numismatics)

I don’t speak for the Mises Institute, but “extinguish all debt” cannot be correct in my way of thinking. You and I decide what distinguishes your debt to me. If we agree that you may mow my lawn each week for a summer to extinguish a debt, then the debt is extinguished this way, and your lawn mowing service is not money for this reason. If you agree to accept the title to my car to settle a debt between us, then our debt is settled this way without any money.

Something is money when people commonly accept it only to exchange it later for something else. This process of indirect exchange need not involve any debt per se. When I accept a valuable good from you in exchange for some good of mine, not because I want your good for its own sake but only because I expect later to exchange your good for another good that I do want, neither of us is indebted to the other thereafter. This transaction involves money but not debt.

A transaction may extinguish debt without money, and a transaction may involve money without creating or extinguishing any debt, so defining “money” in terms of extinguishing debts makes no sense to me.

On the other hand, I do accept the real bills doctrine, properly understood. I don’t believe that money must necessarily be a negotiable record of debt, but people can choose to use these records as money, and people can choose to use money to settle debts more generally.

If I exchange a gold coin for a silver coin, who is paying whom for what?

Keiser literally is the Norse version of Kaiser. Same word.

Capitan, I suspect that Max Keiser is a lot like the late Irving Kristol. Both are attracted more to novelty than logic.

Words mean what people mean by them, and people mean something, rather than nothing, by “intrinsic value”. The market value of an ounce of silver bullion and the market value of a one ounce silver round celebrating 30 years of the Mises Institute are both subjective values, but only the former is the “intrinsic value” of the latter in the sense of the term common among coin collectors.