I like it.

We should be thanking those whom BHO criticizes, since those are the guys working hard to get us a workable price, and they are doing so on their own dime.

For those who don't think this is a great value for our nation, we can see what happens when we leave price determinations to government geniuses–it was called the Soviet Union. It is gone now.

If you truly are for competition and market forces winning the day you can't be for speculators who game the market, corner the market and turn it into a casino.

"And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed."

The Great American Bubble Machine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

Rolling Stone magazine

When you start defending oil speculation and price manipulation as some part of natural markets you've really jumped the shark.

Have you apologized for your lies, Mr. Strawman? Define price manipulation as opposed to …..?

$13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent.

Obviously, this money came from somewhere, where did it come from? Did it come from the fact that money was withdrawn from something else, and there by depressing the price of those commodities, goods, or assets? or did this money come from the state's ( Fed's ) printing press?

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

Where is the proof? How many ex-banker's work in the St. Obama's administration?

These guys basically bilked each and everyone of you of $300 to $1000 last summer. There going for more now and you guys are shaking PomPoms in praise for them. Can you say Stockholm Syndrome?

Could somebody explain this?

Says the man who wants more and bigger government, which has bilked billions of people out of trillions of dollars, using actual violence. Can you say projection?

The intellectual error committed here is that most arguments put forth are based upon servicing an ideal, or what is an abstract conception of what conditions are required for the generation of maximum societal wealth, rather than individual self interest–which is what spontaneous order is all about. For example, why shouldn't the Obama administration manipulate markets to further consolidate their power? According to spontaneous order, they should. Why would an argument that Obama shouldn't maximize his power make sense?

So in reading these threads, we get arguments that the administration is wrong about this and that, rather than the truth, which is that the administartion in power is trying to steal this and that. After all, exactly what is spontaneous order? It is about groups competing for power and how the settlement, unintended, results in some form of equity, or compromise.

So, if anyone is still with this line of reasoning, the administration and the Left, in general, is only doing what it is supposed to do–which is to steal from the productive sectors of the economy for the benefit of the unproductive sectors. It is foolish to editorialize how this hurts "society as a whole". Who the hell is he? It hurts productive people only, and if it eventually hurts the unproductive, it's to distant a prospect as well as an unexplainable one to them–since most unproductive people are also stupid.

In spontaneous order, envy also plays a positive roll contrary to popular wisdom. An ideal libertarian society, which this site tends to advocate, does not take into consideration the contribution of envy to spontaneous social order, and how it strenthens society. In theoretically free markets, wealth would accrue heavily to the most able people, and they would use that wealth to tilt the laws in their favor–thus destroying the free market. Envy plays the crucial roll in preventing the maximum consolidation of power from taking place. So, rather than this site considering envy as some sort of human defect, it should remain faithful to its premise of spontaneous order by trying to understand its actual roll in nature, and not castigating ther masses for allowing envy to influence their voting, etc.

To make this more clear, imagine a band of robbers succeeding in stealing a years worth of wealth from a village and getting away with it. The villagers have to work triple time to regain what they lost and the robbers can enjoy leisure activities for a full year. Now, imagine Ludwig Von Mises going to the robbers and explaining to them that had they not stolen their booty, the total wealth produced would have been greater and their share would have increased accordingly too. Unfortunately, it would not be a compelling enough argument to influence the robbers, and equally so, many of the arguments posted here are similarly weak. It'd would be better to clearly write about who is stealing from who and how they are doing it.

I loved it.

On a side note, I recently wrote a little program that takes any arbitrary graph, and displays it in a visually appealing way.

The program 'cooks' the graph in a completely non-deterministic way.

The cooking involves two simple competing, and complimentary tasks:

1) for every node in the graph, find all the other nodes that are connected to it with an edge, and move them half the distance closer (straight line, like gravity).

2) For every node in the graph, repel every other node, connected or not, by an amount that is inversely proportional to their distance (close nodes repel further). If the nodes are connected, repel only half as much.

When those 2 simple rules (attract and repel), are repeatedly applied to the graph, an aesthetically pleasing arrangement 'emerges'.

On complex graphs, it can take a while to converge, but watching it run is a trip.

For graphs that are trees, the program always converges on an arrangement that is fairly stable. If a graph has cycles in it (closed loop of edges), the program will sometimes create strange oscillations in the nodes, or it may even twist a ring into a figure 8, and endlessly march the nodes around the '8' like ants.

On really complex graphs, it sometimes has to make very intricate, and complex-looking moves – seemingly improbably moves to straighten out a mixed up graph.

In the end, it's an extremely inefficient, but fun way to lay out a graph.

Hmm? The demand for firearms and the mood to revolt against the (theft) government is also part of the spontaneous order, is it not? What amazes me on this site is how many people with views contrary to those of the many on this site not only accept the theft but actually advocate for more of it.