At 3:35 AM 8/13/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

Bart Croughs writes:

...

I would be proud if I had discovered this axiom, but alas, I haven't. It's an axiom that is generally accepted among austrian economists (Rothbard, Hazlitt, etc). I don't know who actually discovered it.

The truly hysterical part is that Tim and I are both (from what I can tell) Austrians.

Indeed. While Perry and I disagree on some things, the relevance of the Austrian School of Economics, and its University of Chicago satellite campus, is not one of them. If Croughs stays on this list long enough, he will surely see this. (And find plenty of references to Hayek, Menger, Friedman, etc., in the archives.) The problem with the "Croughs Axiom" is not that there is not a _general_ correlation between average national wages and average national capital investment--there is. A scatter plot of wages vs. capital investment for the 200 or so nations would almost certainly show that the Ivory Coast has low per capita wages and low per capita wages, Sweden has both higher wages and higher capital investment per capita, and so on. Correlation, of course, is not causation. No, the problem was that Croughs invoked this general _correlation_ (which can arise for various reasons) to support his mercantilist protectionist ideas. (He also didn't say he was talking of nations, which is why some of us found the examples we did, e.g., MacDonald's vs. law firms, which have the opposite correlation he described.) And the cloud of ideas connected with somehow forcing capital investment to remain in the U.S....well, the best way to do this is to alter the tax laws so that America (for example) becomes a magnet for investment. (If one is looking to help America, that is.) In any case, the original notion, of somehow using cryptography policy to support U.S. interests....well, I rather doubt that Menger, Von Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, or any of the others connected with the Austrian School would buy Crough's protectionist arguments. And I certainly know that jingoistic appeals to "America First!" are inconsistent with the sentiments of many or even most on this list. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."