Monday, April 22, 2013

Free market funnies

Speaking of skepticism about the spooky goodness of unrestrained markets (see previous  post, "2 ideas at once, head must explode," over at my commercial blog, I have been having a little fun with the free marketeers.

Besides Restating the Obvious, which I do for fun, I get paid to blog at Kamaaina Loan (http://kamaainalona.com/wordpress). This is a totally market-oriented blog, to the extent that content is almost beside the point; the point is SEO (search engine optimization) in order to make Google rank Kamaaina Loan high. It could probably do the job if it was just a melange of random words, as long as the SEO keywords were included.

Nevertheless, I try to make it interesting as well. The most recent posts were  inspired by the curious case of the gold bullion that fell in the night. If you believe the classical liberal economists, it was not supposed to do that.

But that's the price you pay if you adopt an inductive belief system, trying to tell economies what they must do, rather than inquiring of the data to see what they do do.

Anyhow, lots of people had lots of thoughts about gold, most of them contradictory. I mined two posts out of it: "The rout of the gold bugs" (April 15) and "Thoughts from a gold refiner" (April 19). Both, I think, hold up well although they are already a week old, a coon's age in Internet years.

In between there was ". . . and what about diamond investing?" (April 17), which has some good advice for anyone thinking about investing in diamonds. (Shorter advice: don't.)

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