Saturday, April 16, 2016

The Internal Contradiction of a MarketWatch Tweet

MarketWatch has been blasting this tweet out for days, which means that it is probably getting a lot of click-throughs.




But there is a problem with the basic premise of the tweet. By definition, the stock market is not the socialist part of an economy.

 Indeed, as Paul F. Cwik, writes:
Murray Rothbard once asked Ludwig von Mises at what point on the spectrum of statism is the point that designates a country as "socialist." To his surprise, Mises said that there was, indeed, a clear-cut delineation: The Stock Market.
Mises said, "A stock market is crucial to the existence of capitalism and private property. For it means that there is a functioning market in the exchange of private titles to the means of production. There can be no genuine private ownership of capital without a stock market: there can be no true socialism if such a market is allowed to exist."
  -RW

1 comment:

  1. It is not the only problem with this tweet. Stock market performance is by no means an indicator of economic health. The world's best performing stock market is Venezuela's! So this proves that socialism works, right, as long as you don't mind queuing for hours for a roll of toilet paper.
    Also, the Nordic countries are actually far less socialistic than is widely assumed. Although they continue to have large welfare programs, they have long ago begun to get rid of the worst socialistic excesses - to such an extent that the Heritage Foundation currently considers the economy of Denmark to be more free than that of the United States.

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