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12ee03d11684 -- 252d [root] 
|    Should Austrian economics care about macroeconomics?
|    
|    I think yes!
|    
|    But Stephan's Livera's guest, Peter At Once, says no. "Sit back and watch what everyone gets up to"
|    
|    When two people trade, they do it because both believe they will be better off. However, let's not forget that
|    third parties might benefit too. If I pay a builder to build a restaurant for me in an area that has a shortage
|    of restaurants, then many customers can benefit.
|    
|    There will be cases where two people are close to trading, but they - just about - decide not too. However, if
|    the interest rate was just slightly lower, they might decide to trade and that would benefit society overall.
|    
|    Similarly, a lot of harm can be done even if we assume everyone is rationally making the right trades. Anybody
|    into game theory knows how bad things can get even with everyone making the "optimal" decision for themselves.
|    
|    I'm not saying that we should keep the exact institutions that we currently have, such as the Fed and Europe's
|    ECB. We're smart people and maybe we can come up with a better way to make interest rate decisions; perhaps a
|    jury of randomly-selected citizens could decide.
|    
|    Finally, on Bitcoin. I stack and hodl because it's good for me. And Bitcoin could be good for the world. But
|    Bitcoin will be harmful on average if we don't think about the macroeconomics
|    
|    30m45s into this: https://youtu.be/lwL5Lbt2_ZI?t=30m45s
|    reply [1 reply]
epsql -- 252d
Since you're talking about Austrian economics, this is what Rothbard has to say about interest rates:

"Perhaps more fallacies have been committed in discussions concerning the interest rate than in the treatment of
any other aspect of economics. It took a long while for the crucial importance of time preference in the
determination of the pure rate of interest to be realized in economics; it took even longer for economists to
realize that time preference is the only determining factor. Reluctance to accept a monistic causal
interpretation has plagued economics to this day."

This is an excerpt from page 389 of "Man, Economy, and State" -
https://cdn.mises.org/man_economy_and_state_with_power_and_market_3.pdf

Your suggestion that perhaps a jury of random citizens should select the interest rates is a fallacy, as was
already argued by Hayek in his "The Use of Knowledge In Society" -
https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html

The interest rate is the price of money, so select group of people, however skilled or randomly chosen, should
"decide" it.
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