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BrandorKP posted:
I get the impression that the only part of my post that you read was the quoted portion. Again, libertarianism only has an actual political influence insofar as its ideas can be used to promote the overall conservative platform, which overlaps with it on taxes, property rights, and regulation. I mean, you have this example: BrandorKP posted:Edit: Is it really viable to suggest D. Koch, actual libertarian candidate for president at one point, is not within Libertarianism? It's like fundamentalists arguing that Catholics are not Christians. There's two things to note about this example. First, "David [Koch] earned the vice-presidential spot on the [1980] Libertarian ticket, then split with the group in 1984, when it promoted the idea of eliminating all taxes, and has been a Republican since." Second, the Libertarian ticket got 1% of the vote in 1980, and that was the by far the best they've ever done. This is what I mean when I call them marginal. David Koch may himself be a libertarian by conviction but he only achieved political relevance by working within the machinery of mainstream conservatism, which limits what he can achieve. In fact the key factor in movement conservatism today is the anger of the far-right fringe (including not only libertarians but also Christian theocrats and others) at being unable to enact its varied agenda, because it has been blocked not only by Democrats but more importantly by the Republican establishment. There's a tendency in the American left to believe that the Koch brothers are these puppet masters who run the Republican Party, but the reality is that their influence is mediated by the other factions within the party. The end result is, as I said before, the Republican Party enacts those parts of the libertarian agenda that coincide with conservative positions--many of which are original paleoconservative stances that have been in the GOP platform since long before American libertarianism really existed as a movement. Was Andrew W. Mellon a libertarian? Basically they are spending millions of dollars to subvert the electoral process and help Republicans get elected, and the Republican policy will then pursue the same policies they wanted in the first place. It's roughly the same con the Democratic Party works on genuine leftists.
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Oct 25, 2014 22:11
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I want to talk about economics for a minute, specifically the nature of economics as a discipline and its relationship to libertarianism. I hear all the time from leftists that libertarianism is a dogmatic religion because we are supposedly "anti-scientific" and we "reject empiricism". The truth is that we don't reject empirical data or the scientific method in the least. However it is appropriate to understand what role empiricism has and where it is appropriate. Some disciplines of human inquiry are decidedly different than the natural sciences and thus require a different approach to arriving at knowledge that is true and valuable for humanity. Economics is a social science, meaning it involves human action and interaction. The truth is that libertarians embrace empiricism and data gathered through observation of reality to bolster our economic arguments and to support our interpretations of historical events (see Rothbard's "America's Great Depression, which contains mountains of empirical research and hard data to support it's conclusions). The difference that libertarians and Austrians have is that we believe that the starting point for the discipline of economics must rest on a priori truths about human action and it's necessary implications. Certain a priori truths can be ascertained prior to any laboratory experiments or observations. To somehow imply that the rigorous application of logic and reason is inherently inferior to empirical testing for all disciplines and in all cases is absurd. If you dismiss libertarianism or Austrianism on the grounds that it arrives at certain laws a priori, i.e. prior to or instead of relying on empirical testing, then you must also reject many other fields of study for these very reasons. In the first place you would of course have to reject Euclidian Geometry as an invalid system of mathematics. Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid. Similarly, when speaking about the social sciences, there are some established truths about human nature that can be proven through logic and reason, a prioi. These starting points establish the scope of study for the discipline. For Austrians, the first a priori truth that we determine is that humans act. Can you deny the validity of this proposition? The act of denying this proposition is in itself an action. Doing so would be called a performative contradiction, which means that you invalidate your argument through your actions. If you accept this established truth about the validity of human action, you must necessarily concede that certain a priori truths CAN in fact be established prior to observation and empirical research. Then your disagreement with the Austrians is nothing more than one of degree, since you are forced to accept the validity of a priorism. If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. Here is a youtube video of economist Robert Murphy going over this in a concise manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6oYFxtpN8s What Austrians are seeking are economics laws through which we can make sense of modern economic phenomenon. Not hypotheses that are only best guesses based on forever incomplete information. As was previously established, certain a priori truths can indeed be established without using the Natural sciences method of empiricism. If economic laws exist they provide an invaluable tool through which we can guide our shared human experience. Through rigorous argumentation and the law of non contradiction, relying on logic and reason, we can establish a great many valuable implications of human action and apply those lessons to modern economics. Central planners of all stripes have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the social sciences. They suffer from physics envy. Economists want to consider their discipline a part of the "hard" sciences where empirical research and perpetually falsifiable hypotheses are put forward as the correct method for that line of inquiry. Central planners never tire of reminding you how "scientific" their central plan is. Keynesians LOVE empirical studies. Boy do they love empirical studies. In the first place, the unsophisticated masses are impressed when someone throws around charts and graphs and various "studies" that they have commissioned which provide scientific cover for the State to regulate, control or otherwise use violence or the threat of violence to control human behavior. Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. For example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, on one occasion, that raising the price of a good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate that law? Of course not. It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period. Keynesians love to refer us to empirical studies that purport to prove that increases in the minimum wage don't lead to higher unemployment rates. They presume to "prove" through empiricism that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the supply and demand of labor services on the market. The problem with these studies is that they are usually taken for too short a time period, or are paid for by established interests that are seeking a rationale for central planning. Science can be purchased and unless a public has an understanding of economic laws, then the unsophisticated can be deceived through appeals to authority. The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. This is as true of the purchase of labor services on the market as it is of computers at Best Buy. The necessary effects of increases in the minimum wage are not always easily and quickly perceptible and can escape the limited scope of even well meaning empirical study. A very small increase in the minimum wage is hardly going to cause massive unemployment the next day. But the effects are real and insidious. I'll end with a question about where Keynesianism and the empirical approach to economic analysis has lead us. I don't think I have to remind everyone that the "empirical" mainstream economics profession failed spectacularly to warn us about the impending crash of the housing market in 2008. The established "facts" about the cause of the Great Depression and various economic phenomenon change every few years based on new empirical studies or reinterpretations of old studies. No concrete facts and methods of analyzing the data are presented other than providing post facto justification for the expansion of State power. If you can establish economics laws that necessarily must be valid due to the necessary implications of the fact of human action, then you have a far more powerful tool through which to analyze modern economic phenomenon. I really would like you to view that video of economist Robert Murphy speaking about economic law to provide more details than I am able to provide here. Would you now concede the validity of a priori truths that can be established through argumentation, logic and reason? Or would you like to reject the validity of Euclidean Geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem as well?
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Oct 27, 2014 08:58
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First off forgive me because I jumped ahead 1500 or so posts. What would the libertarian government (or lack there of) response to an ebola epidemic be? Besides the assumed people dying in the streets and mass panic. Could a libertarian government mandate a quarantine of a patient with ebola?
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Oct 27, 2014 09:18
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Instead of ending with a "question" amid a paragraph that didn't have a single question mark and on a topic that made no sense (people are perfectly aware of what caused the 2008 crash: fraud on a massive scale, and the reason prevailing authorities couldn't see it coming had nothing to do with ideology per se and everything to do with power relations), maybe you should have ended with some sort of example or case study to buttress your worthless "Keynesians love to..." non-arguments.
Heavy neutrino fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 09:18
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jrodefeld posted:Economics is a social science, meaning it involves human action and interaction. The truth is that libertarians embrace empiricism and If they did measure real triangles to see if they conformed to Pythagorean Theorem, what do you think they'd find? jrodefeld posted:I'll end with a question about where Keynesianism and the empirical approach to economic analysis has lead us. I don't think I have to remind everyone that the "empirical" mainstream economics profession failed spectacularly to warn us about the impending crash of the housing market in 2008. Can you give an example of an economist who agrees with your views and successfully predicted a 2008 housing market crash caused by deregulation allowing fraud on a massive scale to occur? Strawman fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 09:22
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Is it just me or did jrodefeld just come out and admit that austrian economics isn't falsifiable?
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Oct 27, 2014 10:01
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jrodefeld posted:The difference that libertarians and Austrians have is that we believe that the starting point for the discipline of economics must rest on a priori truths about human action and it's necessary implications. jrodefeld posted:Certain a priori truths can be ascertained prior to any laboratory experiments or observations. jrodefeld posted:To somehow imply that the rigorous application of logic and reason is inherently inferior to empirical testing for all disciplines and in all cases is absurd. jrodefeld posted:If you dismiss libertarianism or Austrianism on the grounds that it arrives at certain laws a priori, i.e. prior to or instead of relying on empirical testing, then you must also reject many other fields of study for these very reasons. jrodefeld posted:They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid.  Don't start pretending that you understand mathematics. Please, dear gods. jrodefeld posted:there are some established truths about human nature that can be proven through logic and reason, a prioi. jrodefeld posted:For Austrians, the first a priori truth that we determine is that humans act. jrodefeld posted:If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. "Humans act." "Okay, bears poo poo in the woods." "Humans act, therefore Austrian economics." "gently caress off, you lunatic." jrodefeld posted:As was previously established, certain a priori truths can indeed be established without using the Natural sciences method of empiricism.  jrodefeld posted:Through rigorous argumentation and the law of non contradiction, relying on logic and reason, we can establish a great many valuable implications of human action and apply those lessons to modern economics. jrodefeld posted:Central planners never tire of reminding you how "scientific" their central plan is. Keynesians LOVE empirical studies. Boy do they love empirical studies. In the first place, the unsophisticated masses are impressed when someone throws around charts and graphs and various "studies" that they have commissioned which provide scientific cover for the State to regulate, control or otherwise use violence or the threat of violence to control human behavior. jrodefeld posted:Scientific law established by the Austrian method jrodefeld posted:for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. jrodefeld posted:It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. jrodefeld posted:Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. jrodefeld posted:It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period. jrodefeld posted:Keynesians love to refer us to empirical studies that purport to prove that increases in the minimum wage don't lead to higher unemployment rates. They presume to "prove" through empiricism that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the supply and demand of labor services on the market. jrodefeld posted:The problem with these studies is that they are usually taken for too short a time period, or are paid for by established interests that are seeking a rationale for central planning. Science can be purchased and unless a public has an understanding of economic laws, then the unsophisticated can be deceived through appeals to authority. jrodefeld posted:The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. jrodefeld posted:This is as true of the purchase of labor services on the market as it is of computers at Best Buy. jrodefeld posted:If you can establish economics laws that necessarily must be valid due to the necessary implications of the fact of human action, then you have a far more powerful tool through which to analyze modern economic phenomenon. jrodefeld posted:Would you now concede the validity of a priori truths that can be established through argumentation, logic and reason?
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Oct 27, 2014 10:58
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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jrodefeld posted:The difference that libertarians and Austrians have is that we believe that the starting point for the discipline of economics must rest on a priori truths about human action and it's necessary implications. Certain a priori truths can be ascertained prior to any laboratory experiments or observations. To somehow imply that the rigorous application of logic and reason is inherently inferior to empirical testing for all disciplines and in all cases is absurd. All disciplines have a priori assumptions. However, a a priori arguments exist to explicate tautological truths which arise from how we define concepts. If an argument is subject to falsification by empirical testing or other forms of empirical observation, it is not a priori. This is itself a priori. quote:In the first place you would of course have to reject Euclidian Geometry as an invalid system of mathematics. Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid. This is ridiculous; the Pythagorean Hypothesis is incredibly easy to test, and also easy to demonstrate through examples of everyday usage, or by testing it mathematically (which students do in practice by using it in equations which would not work were the theorem incorrect). It is not a priori; a relevant example of which would be "a triangle has three sides." quote:If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. This isn't true a priori. One party could be engaging in the transaction out of altruism or for deontological reasons, despite expecting to suffer as a result. That altruistic actions are taken independent of any possible benefit to oneself (including intangible rewards) is an a priori truth. quote:Central planners of all stripes have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the social sciences. They suffer from physics envy. Economists want to consider their discipline a part of the "hard" sciences where empirical research and perpetually falsifiable hypotheses... Economics deals with empirically observable behavior, which a priori falls into the category of a posteriori knowledge. quote:Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. First, scientific knowledge is by definition a posteriori. Second, this proposition may be empirically tested and does not follow from pure reason. If this statement were true a priori then it would follow that raising prices would decrease sales regardless of other factors such as supply and demand. Indeed, a priori, price is a function of those two empirical variables combined with observable human behavior. Contrast that with the observation that a triangle has three sides: there is no variable which can alter this fact, it arises from the definition of triangle. quote:Keynesians love to refer us to empirical studies that purport to prove that increases in the minimum wage don't lead to higher unemployment rates. They presume to "prove" through empiricism that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the supply and demand of labor services on the market. Yes, empirical evidence can establish facts. quote:The problem with these studies is that they are usually taken for too short a time period, or are paid for by established interests that are seeking a rationale for central planning. Science can be purchased and unless a public has an understanding of economic laws, then the unsophisticated can be deceived through appeals to authority. Or perhaps empirical data actually simply disproves your assumptions. quote:The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. What? That is not true on any epistemological basis. Your definition of a priori is incorrect: the term refers to a type of knowledge, not totally baseless assumptions.
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Oct 27, 2014 11:02
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jrodefeld posted:In the first place you would of course have to reject Euclidian Geometry as an invalid system of mathematics. Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid. jrodefeld posted:Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. For example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, on one occasion, that raising the price of a good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate that law? Of course not. It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period. jrodefeld posted:The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. This is as true of the purchase of labor services on the market as it is of computers at Best Buy. When means that if you accept labor as a good, Austrian economics has been falsified.
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Oct 27, 2014 11:22
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jrodefeld posted:Economics is a social science, meaning it involves human action and interaction. The truth is that libertarians embrace empiricism and data gathered through observation of reality to bolster our economic arguments and to support our interpretations of historical events (see Rothbard's "America's Great Depression, which contains mountains of empirical research and hard data to support it's conclusions). "Empiricism when it supports my argument" is not empiricism. The entire point is a continual process of trying to prove yourself wrong. Science is full of examples of us discarding old assumptions and theories based on the results of experiments, including important fundamental concepts we thought were ironclad. Since I was just teaching this to my students the other day (and because it has a great name), I'm going to go with the Ultraviolet Catastrophe as an example: our best theories combined to make a simple, elegant, and completely goddamned wrong prediction on how black-body radiation should work. Specifically, they predicted that every object in the universe should be crapping out infinite amounts of high energy light. The physics community's response was not to reject the measured evidence showing it wasn't true and to accuse our spectrometers of being statists, it was to kickstart the development of quantum mechanical theories. This is a question out of genuine curiosity, but has Austrian Economics ever done this? Has it ever been confronted with evidence that forced its practitioners to admit one of their most cherished theories was flawed? This is not a trick question to get you to admit that the entire field is corrupted, because being wrong and admitting it is not a sign of a field's weakness; the exact opposite is true. If they've never scrapped a bunch of work because it doesn't reflect reality, they're straight-up not doing science. jrodefeld posted:For Austrians, the first a priori truth that we determine is that humans act. Can you deny the validity of this proposition? The act of denying this proposition is in itself an action. Doing so would be called a performative contradiction, which means that you invalidate your argument through your actions. If you accept this established truth about the validity of human action, you must necessarily concede that certain a priori truths CAN in fact be established prior to observation and empirical research. Then your disagreement with the Austrians is nothing more than one of degree, since you are forced to accept the validity of a priorism. Wait, so because a person did a thing once, Austrian Economics is correct? Everything from stars to slime mold does things, all the time. Do stars follow the laws of Austrian Economics? Are neutron stars capable of becoming black holes if they just put their mind to it? You'd need to be far more specific here. It looks like the Austrians have a funny definition of "act" that assumes intentional action toward a goal. But people do things that don't fit that definition all the time. They don't stand there deciding that it would be in their best interests to beat their heart at the right rate, or digest their food, or produce insulin. Do those count as Action? Is diabetes just the result of poor time preference? I'm going to go ahead and assume the answer is no there, and it turns out Von Mises does too. He specifically separates things humans do into voluntary Actions and involuntary actions, so people doing people stuff vs meat doing meat stuff. But where do you draw that line? Diabetes obviously falls under the meat category, but what about clinical depression? What about the effects of a drug, or drug addiction? If someone gets drugged, are their actions still considered actions in the Austrian sense? What about Wall Street traders, those Titans of Time Preference, taking testosterone to make them more aggressive on the trading floor? Surely if action was separate from mere meat stuff, changing how much of a normal human hormone you have wouldn't be able to influence your judgment, right? The fact is, the
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Oct 27, 2014 11:53
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"jrodefeld" posted:What Austrians are seeking are economics laws through which we can make sense of modern economic phenomenon. Not hypotheses that are only best guesses based on forever incomplete information. As was previously established, certain a priori truths can indeed be established without using the Natural sciences method of empiricism. I missed this earlier. While it is true that all fields have a priori assumptions, those tend to be very simple and foundational. As soon as a discipline encounters experiential evidence, it enters the realm of a posteriori arguments. As you seem to understand, scientific laws are, in principle, falsifiable- ultimately, they are "best guesses." To be able to make a priori arguments with a stronger truth claim than empirical evidence which explain and predict complex observable behaviour is an extraordinary claim of the first order. It requires absolutely extraordinary evidence. That evidence would need to be empirical in nature. Any substantial observation which contradicts the a priori claim must be accounted for. This presents one with three options: abandon the entire theory, modify the theory to account for empirical evidence, or find empirical evidence that invalidates the contradictory data. If you choose either of the latter options, you are no longer making an a priori truth claim. This is why actual a priori arguments are simple and tautological- they need to be incredibly simple and obvious in order to avoid falsifiability while not contradicting experiential knowledge. To claim to explain human behaviour in such a shaky foundation is laughable.
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Oct 27, 2014 12:53
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jrodefeld posted:Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. Actually insisting that students go out in nature and start measuring triangles (or at least measure triangles in the classroom) is exactly what high school math teachers insist they do. Other people have already ripped into the other portions of your post so I won't bother but Jesus Christ, this is a really loving poor way to start your whole spiel. Although it is rather prophetic.
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Oct 27, 2014 13:06
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tonberrytoby posted:The exception to a monotone supply vs. demand curves are somewhat questionable in the field of normal goods. But when you include labor as a good the empiric evidence for refusing the basic law of supply and demand is almost incontrovertible. What? No. That's dumb. Workers form the labor supply and employers form the labor demand. That framework is fine. jrodefeld posted:If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. This is pretty uncontroversial and in line with standard econ but it's also trivial. How do you get from this to something interesting?
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Oct 27, 2014 13:14
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wateroverfire posted:This is pretty uncontroversial and in line with standard econ but it's also trivial. How do you get from this to something interesting? Except it ignores instances of coercion.
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Oct 27, 2014 13:32
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wateroverfire posted:What? No. That's dumb. Workers form the labor supply and employers form the labor demand. That framework is fine. Which means that if your laws of supply and demand forbid the backwards bend in labor supply they have been proven wrong.
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Oct 27, 2014 13:38
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Jrodefeld, Yes logic exists independently of empircal evidence but there is always a leap of uncertainty when applying reasoning to real life. Pi is pi no matter what but it takes a second leap to decide that a wheel is the right tool for any particular job. So given certain presumptions the reasoning behind supply and demand can stand no matter what, but that says nothing about how well suited it is as a system for real life human actors. The thing your glossing over is that you don't understand humans. No one has a logical model for how humans are going to behave in every instance so we can't take a purly logical system and insert human agents we don't understand and consider it proven that it's going to work. Because of the uncertainty the only thing we can fall back on is real life observations and evidence, not logic. tonberrytoby posted:That is what I was saying. If you say workers supply and employes demand labor like any other good then it also has to act like any other good. Just to put it out there immediately, most of the reasons people come up with here for why the labor market is different than the goods market are wrong. They're not that different and not different in the ways people like to say (they're economically similar, ethically different).
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Oct 27, 2014 14:14
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tonberrytoby posted:That is what I was saying. If you say workers supply and employes demand labor like any other good then it also has to act like any other good. We tend to talk about supply and demand in very 101 terms because it's easy and it's what most people know about econ (including us, mostly) but all sorts of shapes are permissible. The framework is more complex than we usually have to get into. Who What Now posted:Except it ignores instances of coercion. That's a separate issue, though. The following two statements are trivially true: 1) Humans do stuff. 2) If two humans agree to do a thing they both think it's worth doing for whatever reason. Whether that reason is something like "I don't want to be thrown out of a helicopter" doesn't affect the logic. Whether one or both of the humans is mistaken doesn't matter either. In a sense it's air tight - it just isn't telling you anything on its own.
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Oct 27, 2014 14:15
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During the recession everyone at my company got a 5% pay cut yet we didn't start skipping 5% of work. Are we abominations from another dimension that violate the unquestioned truths of Human Action? I'm frightened 
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Oct 27, 2014 14:22
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wateroverfire posted:We tend to talk about supply and demand in very 101 terms because it's easy and it's what most people know about econ (including us, mostly) but all sorts of shapes are permissible. The framework is more complex than we usually have to get into. I totally agree that better methods can permit other shapes.
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Oct 27, 2014 14:25
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Hodgepodge posted:
There once was a trader who had the best of all good ideas. "I'll double the price of food!" he exclaimed. "Then I'll be twice as rich, twice as fast!" And so he doubled the price of food. And would you believe it! The bloody little poor persons, those greedy takers, all lay down in the streets and died. They'd rather starve to death with their families and friends and loved ones, than pay the proper new costs, all just to spite the trader, to rub it in his face what useless mooching scum they were. So the trader moved to the next village and set up the same deal there, and eventually he retired and lived happily ever after, thus proving his a priori economic knowledge correct. -- "The Austrian Tale", Decamerone (expurgated folio)
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Oct 27, 2014 14:31
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wateroverfire posted:That's a separate issue, though. The following two statements are trivially true: Reread Jrod's post because that is not what he said. Specifically he said: quote:If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. This has an enormously different set of implications than saying that the two parties believe that something is worth doing. Many people agree to do things that they think will actively make them worse off. Let's take your example, someone is threatened that if they don't give up their bank account number they'll be thrown out of a helicopter (these are very high profile muggers). No matter what the victim is going to be worse off than when he started. Simply because being poor is arguably better than being dead doesn't change that fact. Jrod is speaking in absolutes, and his absolute is wrong, plain and simple. -EDIT- You can quibble about the usage of the term "voluntary" in that example, but it's not hard to think of examples of people knowingly and willingly taking deals that harm them. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 14:32
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Who What Now posted:Reread Jrod's post because that is not what he said. Specifically he said: The fact that the victim ends up poor instead of dead in that scenario does make them better off, is the thing, since there's no option that allows them to avoid both outcomes. You could also infer from the victim's choice that they prefer being poor to being dead given a choice between those two outcomes only. "end up better off" is just a way of saying they're getting utility out of the deal for whatever reason. The logic is fine. There's no reason to argue against it since it's trivially true. Anything interesting based on that premise will necessarily other premises that can be attacked, though.
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Oct 27, 2014 14:51
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wateroverfire posted:The fact that the victim ends up poor instead of dead in that scenario does make them better off, is the thing, since there's no option that allows them to avoid both outcomes. You could also infer from the victim's choice that they prefer being poor to being dead given a choice between those two outcomes only. They're better off only in one sense, overall they are in a worse position than when they started. And you really can't infer that they would prefer to be poor to being dead because they weren't actually making an informed decision, nor were they in a rational state of mind. I have no problem with saying that people who enter in agreements believe that there is some sort of utility to that agreement, but I don't accept that that's what Jrod is saying. Going by his previous posts, and by the views of libertarians he cites, he's taking it one step further and saying that it's not only utilitarian but always because both parties have rationally come to a conclusion that it will actively be beneficial. If Jrod wants to revise what he said, great, I'll accept that no problem.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:05
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Who What Now posted:They're better off only in one sense, overall they are in a worse position than when they started. And you really can't infer that they would prefer to be poor to being dead because they weren't actually making an informed decision, nor were they in a rational state of mind. State of mind doesn't matter. Having full information doesn't matter. Being literally choosing between poverty and death doesn't matter. They're better off in the only sense that matters for the purpose of this concept - ie of the options they thought were available they chose the one they preferred. Those things are important later, when someone starts implying that because of the above any agreement between two people should be legal, etc. Who What Now posted:I have no problem with saying that people who enter in agreements believe that there is some sort of utility to that agreement, but I don't accept that that's what Jrod is saying. Going by his previous posts, and by the views of libertarians he cites, he's taking it one step further and saying that it's not only utilitarian but always because both parties have rationally come to a conclusion that it will actively be beneficial. He might indeed believe that, or he might argue into that based on the concept above, but what he wrote was pretty reasonable as far as it went. Why not give it its strongest possible reading rather than its weakest? There will surely be enough to disagree with later.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:18
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tonberrytoby posted:That is what I was saying. If you say workers supply and employees demand labor like any other good then it also has to act like any other good. That isn't caused by labor being unique, it's caused by the supplier also having a demand for leisure time. I'm sure you'd see the same thing for crap being sold on Etsy.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:19
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Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:That isn't caused by labor being unique, it's caused by the supplier also having a demand for leisure time. I'm sure you'd see the same thing for crap being sold on Etsy. But the state of empirical verification is a lot stronger for labor then for other goods.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:22
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wateroverfire posted:He might indeed believe that, or he might argue into that based on the concept above, but what he wrote was pretty reasonable as far as it went. Why not give it its strongest possible reading rather than its weakest? There will surely be enough to disagree with later. Because my reading is consistent with what he and other libertarians have said in the past.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:37
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Well geeze, this was the shortest JRodefeld drive by of all time.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:44
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jrodefeld posted:In the first place you would of course have to reject Euclidian Geometry as an invalid system of mathematics. Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid. No, it won't. In fact, it's not. If you go construct a perfect triangle in the real world and measure it any number of significant digits you care to, it will deviate from the Pythagorean theorem. Why? Because the Pythagorean theorem is derived from the axioms of Euclidean geometry including, among others, that through any two points there is exactly one line (the shortest distance between those two points) and that parellel lines never intersect. In the real world, neither of these are true. Space is curved by gravity, the shortest distance is a geodesic curve and parallel lines can meet. You can go out and observe this happening by looking at an eclipse and finding you can see the light from stars that are behind the sun because light follows a the path of curved space around the sun. Now, real scientists take this data and say "the Euclidean system, while perfectly self-consistent, is not adequate to describe the real world because space violates the assumptions of Euclidean geometry". If we'd pulled a von Mises and just went "the Pythagorean theorem is a law and will never be violated so something-something Arthur Eddington must have measured the angles wrong because Euclidean geometry cannot fail, it can only be failed" we'd be living in the world of VH1's hit series I Love The 1890s. jrodefeld posted:If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. People engage in voluntary transactions that make them objectively economically worse off all the time. Only one counterexample is necessary to demonstrate your axiom does not operate in the real world and therefore invalidate the entire chain of reasoning you use to draw conclusions from it (some of those conclusions may still be accidentally correct of course, but just not because of your argument), but just for fun, I'll list a few.
Tons of things people do every day are voluntary transactions without any rational expectation of a direct benefit. Your premise is wrong from the start. Like any religion, it describes beings that don't exist and then closes its eyes whenever the real world doesn't conform to its predictions about the way things are.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:13
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wateroverfire posted:This is pretty uncontroversial and in line with standard econ but it's also trivial. How do you get from this to something interesting? In standard economics, this is an a posteriori claim based on the observation that when free to do so, humans tend to choose which actions to perform based on how they evaluate the consequences for things they value. This can be phrased "rational self-interest," although it is only so in a broad sense- it is only rational in that one has reasons for choosing one action over another, and only self-interested in the sense that one is interested in acting in a manner which one deems correct (or at least permissible). For his purposes, however, this rule has to arise from the definition of the concepts involved in a manner which is so obvious as to be tautological once properly understood, and so to be impossible to contradict. This means that any action performed voluntarily must be the action which one preferred to take given how one evaluates the available actions and their consequences. To do otherwise is impossible, because "voluntary action" is defined as "an action which one consciously choses to perform based on one's preference among those actions which one understands to be available." The former is a descriptive observation, the latter a inviolable law on the basis of logic.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:25
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Oh and if you look at that list and go "You're just nitpicking, VitalSigns. Obviously sometimes people act irrationally and do things they know will make them worse off, but in general the axiom is valid" then that's not an axiom and you don't understand mathematics and you don't understand logic. Euclid's postulates don't say "Parallel lines never intersect, you know most of the time except for when they don't". You couldn't derive any rigorous conclusions from that poo poo, because you have to go behind it and show somehow that it's one of the cases where the postulate is true. Yet Libertarians make up axioms like that and try to put on the mantle of mathematics and say "Well you don't mind axioms in geometry class, so you have to accept mine." The other way of course to reconcile the difference is to go the route wateroverfire is in his posting and water down the axiom into some neutered irrelevant unfalsifiable bullshit that's essentially "people choose to act because they choose to act" which while true in its circular way is about as useful in economics as "triangles are those shapes that are triangles" would be as a geometric axiom.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:25
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VitalSigns posted:People engage in voluntary transactions that make them objectively economically worse off all the time. Only one counterexample is necessary to demonstrate your axiom does not operate in the real world and therefore invalidate the entire chain of reasoning you use to draw conclusions from it (some of those conclusions may still be accidentally correct of course, but just not because of your argument), but just for fun, I'll list a few. It's not necessary that transactions make any party objectively economically better off for his axiom to work. Only that in a voluntary transaction both parties think it's worthwhile for some reason. "I get warm fuzzies from doing this" is a reason. So is "I hate that guy and I want to see him suffer" or "I don't want to fall off this cliff" or whatever.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:30
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tonberrytoby posted:Mathemathics is not a science, and never has been. The only people who say differently are people who are trying to bolster support in an unrelated field by confusing the definition of science. Hey, go copulate with your mother, our field is the queen of sciences. Jrod, you don't understand mathematics, like, at all. Euclidean geometry follows from a set of axioms, and axioms are voluntary. Within a certain context, I can choose to use the axioms of Euclidean geometry, or hyperbolic geometry, or fractal geometry, or... Austrians love to refer to a priori truths and then say "well math guys do it, therefore we can!" Except we don't. We make certain assumptions (assertions, really, when we're talking about axioms) and see what can be proven from them. We don't make epistemological claims about the truth of those assumptions/assertions.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:39
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wateroverfire posted:It's not necessary that transactions make any party objectively economically better off for his axiom to work. Right right, like I said you can water this down to an irrelevant question-beg but then you can't prove anything economically by it. Racists have a "reason" that they "think it's worthwhile" to refuse to hire, serve, or educate black people even though apartheid is objectively economically harmful to a society. If you're going to include that as a rational reason under the Human Action axiom then it no longer follows that (since coercion is required to force people to make choices that they wouldn't freely make) the society which coerces least is going to have the best outcomes. If you allow in the axiom that people sometimes make decisions that make them and society objectively worse off for emotional reasons like hatred and spite then it's no longer a slam-dunk that maximal freedom from coercion means maximal good. For example, Austrians use this axiom to "prove" that the Civil Rights Act is harmful economically (or at best useless) because if a lot of people refuse to hire black labor, then the demand for it will be lower and their non-racist competitors will out-compete them by taking advantage of the lower labor costs. They also claim that equal pay for women is unnecessary legislation because if women really make less money for equal work then businesses would be staffed entirely by women to save money so since they're not, then obviously a woman's work must be inferior to a man's QED  We can see how well these logical predictions work out in practice. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 16:48
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jrodefeld posted:The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. If we increase the price of Lamborghinis by one dollar each, should we expect sales to decrease?
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Oct 27, 2014 16:51
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Jack of Hearts posted:Jrod, you don't understand mathematics, like, at all. Euclidean geometry follows from a set of axioms, and axioms are voluntary. Within a certain context, I can choose to use the axioms of Euclidean geometry, or hyperbolic geometry, or fractal geometry, or... Yeah pretty much this. Euclidean geometry doesn't make any claims about the real world. It just derives conclusions logically from a set of arbitrary axioms and if you wish you can select different axioms and create systems of non-Euclidean geometry that are just as self-consistent even though they don't represent facts about the world either. Now it just so happens that we've made an a posteriori empirical observation that at human scales the real world very closely approximates Euclidean geometry and as a result Euclidean geometry is incredibly useful for making predictions and building structures at our scale because it agrees with our results to more significant figures than we care about to be reasonably sure my bridge won't fall down. But if you use Euclidean geometry to try to make predictions at cosmic scales (or at subatomic scales for that matter), you'll end up with massive discrepancies that are likely totally wrong and useless for whatever you're trying to do, which is when you take the very non-Austrian tactic of dispensing with Euclidean axioms and selecting a system which has a better record of predicting experimental results.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:57
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I Am The Scum posted:If we increase the price of Lamborghinis by one dollar each, should we expect sales to decrease? Going by how Lamborghinis are traditionally bought, increasing the price may actually increase demand, as it increases personal status even further.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:02
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Talmonis posted:Going by how Lamborghinis are traditionally bought, increasing the price may actually increase demand, as it increases personal status even further. This can't be true because it violates the conclusions of the Human Action axiom, and by rejecting the Human Action Axiom you're claiming you don't act but making a claim is an action. jrodefeld posted:For Austrians, the first a priori truth that we determine is that humans act. Can you deny the validity of this proposition? The act of denying this proposition is in itself an action. Doing so would be called a performative contradiction, which means that you invalidate your argument through your actions. Your argument is invalid 
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Oct 27, 2014 17:05
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EvanSchenck posted:I get the impression that the only part of my post that you read was the quoted portion. Yes that would be the part I was taking objection to. And that's the part I think is explained by the Hayek / Rothbard divide. The Hayek side seemed to occasionally compromise itself and act practically (in conflict with their ideology) and from what I see are now basically fully part of the mainstream GOP. The Rothbard crowd seems to be more rigid and doesn't bend. EvanSchenck posted:David Koch may himself be a libertarian by conviction but he only achieved political relevance by working within the machinery of mainstream conservatism, which limits what he can achieve. In fact the key factor in movement conservatism today is the anger of the far-right fringe (including not only libertarians but also Christian theocrats and others) at being unable to enact its varied agenda, because it has been blocked not only by Democrats but more importantly by the Republican establishment. Look I agree with this part: "the key factor in movement conservatism today is the anger of the far-right fringe". But let's look at think tanks for a moment. Look at how something like Heritage has changed over the years (what does DeMint heading it imply). Look at the last Republican Vice Presidential candidate. I don't know that they are blocked by the Republican establishment anymore! JBS was allowed back to CPAC after all, Buckley must be spinning in his grave over that. I mean the conversation has shifted from "those nutjobs aren't invited" to "well we won't let the nutjobs be the sponsor of the event because it looks bad" Here's the hypothetical I would ask: what policies would we get if they take the senate this election and then manage to take the presidency in 2016? Would we get something like the Bush years (more Republican establishment)? Or would we get something like Kansas? EvanSchenck posted:There's a tendency in the American left to believe that the Koch brothers are these puppet masters who run the Republican Party, but the reality is that their influence is mediated by the other factions within the party. The end result is, as I said before, the Republican Party enacts those parts of the libertarian agenda that coincide with conservative positions--many of which are original paleoconservative stances that have been in the GOP platform since long before American libertarianism really existed as a movement. I think they've moved the the conservative positions. I think they have, through intentional action, taken over many of the think tanks and university programs and fundraising organizations, etc. And I don't think the Koch are puppet masters, I think they are evangelists. I think the idea itself is the problem and I don't limit that idea to Libertarianism: it's one expression of willful greed, desire for individual power, and selfishness. Rockopolis posted:But then, what would you say about Vital Signs' objection, that they don't actually value "freedom", that it's more of a shibboleth than a conviction? I like that you used "a shibboleth " to describe it. How did Ephraimites feel about saying shibboleth? That it is a shibboleth, a tool by which to differentiate ingroup from outgroup, scares me. Especially that it's being used as a political tool. Some of them value it, some of them don't, but they're all participating in it and using it. And we're on the outside of it. And this goes back to my response to EvanSchenck. They've used it as shibboleth within the GOP already, you don't speak the words you get primaried. And they use it as one in general election to turn the base out. Look at what they are doing in this thread. When they come here and post they are announcing this is how you speak "Freedom" or "human action", their shibboleth, to us. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 17:10
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jrodefeld posted:I want to talk about economics for a minute, specifically the nature of economics as a discipline and its relationship to libertarianism. I hear all the time from leftists that libertarianism is a dogmatic religion because we are supposedly "anti-scientific" and we "reject empiricism". The truth is that we don't reject empirical data or the scientific method in the least. However it is appropriate to understand what role empiricism has and where it is appropriate. Some disciplines of human inquiry are decidedly different than the natural sciences and thus require a different approach to arriving at knowledge that is true and valuable for humanity. Well right off the bat here you are at odds with both Ludwig von Mises and Hans Hermann Hoppe. Mises had this to say on the issue: "Our statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts." "The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.” That is a rejection of the scientific method and of empirical data. That is a statement wherein the effective founder of your ideology indicates that if data proves that his logically derived arguments are wrong, that it is in fact the data that is wrong. If you used Praxeology to argue that a sky was red, and a study later proved it was in fact blue, it is the empirical study that is wrong. Hoppe meanwhile, said this: However appropriate the empiricist ideas may be in dealing with the natural sciences (and I think they are inappropriate even there, but I cannot go into this here), [25] it is impossible to think that the methods of empiricism can be applicable in the social sciences. That is two separate austrians who you support who directly reject any possible role for empirically based economics. This is why we call you anti-science, because you think that pure logic is a better fit than science, which is a thought process that was abandoned sometime after the loving dark ages. quote:Economics is a social science, meaning it involves human action and interaction. The truth is that libertarians embrace empiricism and data gathered through observation of reality to bolster our economic arguments and to support our interpretations of historical events (see Rothbard's "America's Great Depression, which contains mountains of empirical research and hard data to support it's conclusions). As I've shown above, clearly they do not. In fact Hoppe goes so far as to say this: "But if one can learn from experience in as yet unknown ways, then one admittedly cannot know at any given time what one will know at a later time and, accordingly, how one will act on the basis of this knowledge. One can only reconstruct the causes of one's actions after the event, as one can explain one's knowledge only after one already possesses it. Indeed, no scientific advance could ever alter the fact that one must regard one's knowledge and actions as unpredictable on the basis of constantly operating causes. One might hold this conception of freedom to be an illusion. And one might well be correct from the point of view of a scientist with cognitive powers substantially superior to any human intelligence, or from the point of view of God. But we are not God, and even if our freedom is illusory from His standpoint and our actions follow a predictable path, for us this is a necessary and unavoidable illusion. We cannot predict in advance, on the basis of our previous states, the future states of our knowledge or the actions manifesting that knowledge. We can only reconstruct them after the event." From Hoppe's point of view Murray rothbard is wasting his time, because you can't go back and look at history with any empirical evidence and try and make sense of it. Considering you're closer to Hoppe than to Rothbard's viewpoint I suspect that you'd probably agree more with him than with rothbard. quote:The difference that libertarians and Austrians have is that we believe that the starting point for the discipline of economics must rest on a priori truths about human action and it's necessary implications. Certain a priori truths can be ascertained prior to any laboratory experiments or observations. To somehow imply that the rigorous application of logic and reason is inherently inferior to empirical testing for all disciplines and in all cases is absurd. Most Austrians believe that the start and end point of economics has to rest on those A Priori truths. Praexology is based entirely around logic, with no statistical or empirical basis to support it. That some people like rothbard wisely understand that you can't make all your prediction based on rolling bones in a cup and cackling does not mean that the ideology as a whole is different from what it actually is. And I for one will absolutely say that the rigorous application of logic and reason is inherently inferior to empirical testing in all cases. Go take a look at the Social Networking thread and you'll find a kindred spirit who has logically proven that networks are the source of everything. He is just as wrong as you are, because A Priori works as a starting point for a hypothesis, but it is no substitute for testing to see if your insanity matches reality. Which it does not. quote:If you dismiss libertarianism or Austrianism on the grounds that it arrives at certain laws a priori, i.e. prior to or instead of relying on empirical testing, then you must also reject many other fields of study for these very reasons. When the Pythagorean Theorem was being deveoped, it might have indeed been A priori knowledge. In current day it is, as other posters have pointed out, A posteriori knowledge. We know from both experience and empirical study that the Pythagorean Theorem doesn't actually hold absolutely true in nature for one thing the same as we know from empirical study that gravity for earth is 9.78 m/s². There is a ton of philosophical discussion to be had on the nature of what we know vs what we can prove, I'll give you that much. quote:Similarly, when speaking about the social sciences, there are some established truths about human nature that can be proven through logic and reason, a prioi. These starting points establish the scope of study for the discipline. What about humans in a vegetative state? They are still humans, but because of their condition they do not act. Or babies. Does a baby 'act'? Is feebly attempting to lift your head 'acting'? This is a good example of your philosophy's shallow nature. You make a grand sweeping statement like this, but it is so vague as to be meaningless. Humans Act. Is that some humans or all Humans? What do you define as Acting, because there are plenty of humans who probably don't act. quote:If you accept that human's act, there are certain truths that are necessary implications of that fact. There are other things that can be established. If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off, for example. Whoh whoh whoh. You've just made a loving Evel Knievel style logical jump here. Human's Act. Therefore if two people exchange in a voluntary transaction blah blah... yeah, no. You've made no attempt at proving anything of the sort, you've just made a bald assertion and asked us to accept it on fact when there are plenty of examples of people engaging in voluntary transactions made in this thread alone. quote:Here is a youtube video of economist Robert Murphy going over this in a concise manner: No one wants to watch your stupid loving youtube videos and you know this. Use your own loving words or don't speak. quote:What Austrians are seeking are economics laws through which we can make sense of modern economic phenomenon. Not hypotheses that are only best guesses based on forever incomplete information. As was previously established, certain a priori truths can indeed be established without using the Natural sciences method of empiricism. Yeah, you didn't establish poo poo. You've thrown down a proof by assertion fallacy wherein you assert that you've proved these things and thus blah blah blah. This is actually the exact flaw with Austrian economics, Praexology is built by layer upon layer of unproven, and unprovable assertions. You are simply saying 'this is right, thusly this must be right, and accordingly this must be right!' and calling it a system of economics. quote:If economic laws exist they provide an invaluable tool through which we can guide our shared human experience. Through rigorous argumentation and the law of non contradiction, relying on logic and reason, we can establish a great many valuable implications of human action and apply those lessons to modern economics. If unicorns exist they provide an invaluable tool through which we can guide our shared human experience. This is what you are saying here. quote:Central planners of all stripes have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the social sciences. They suffer from physics envy. Economists want to consider their discipline a part of the "hard" sciences where empirical research and perpetually falsifiable hypotheses are put forward as the correct method for that line of inquiry. Central Planners!  You aren't making any proof here, you're just saying things and assuming we'll just nod our heads and agree with you. Which we don't. This may be a sign of mental illness on your part if you expect us to accept this garbage unblinkingly. quote:Central planners never tire of reminding you how "scientific" their central plan is. Keynesians LOVE empirical studies. Boy do they love empirical studies. In the first place, the unsophisticated masses are impressed when someone throws around charts and graphs and various "studies" that they have commissioned which provide scientific cover for the State to regulate, control or otherwise use violence or the threat of violence to control human behavior. Argumentum Ad Nauseum coupled with some good old Ad Hominem attacks here. You insult central planners, Keynesians, and the 'unsophisticated masses' (I assume you mean black people) all in one paragraph. Good job, I'm sure we'll be convinced now to abandon science in favor of loving witch doctor voodoo! quote:Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. For example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, on one occasion, that raising the price of a good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate that law? Of course not. It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period. There is literally no such thing as Scientific Law established by the Austrian Method. Maybe you meant economic law? Because Austrian economics rejects science. You reject it in this paragraph by literally arguing that empirical evidence Can not falsify your work. That is an utter rejection of the scientific method. To take your example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, in every instance, raising the price of the good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate the law? According to you, of course not! You could literally be 100% wrong in every case and according to your ideology, it would be the loving evidence that was wrong, not you. Do you not see how that is problematic? quote:Keynesians love to refer us to empirical studies that purport to prove that increases in the minimum wage don't lead to higher unemployment rates. They presume to "prove" through empiricism that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the supply and demand of labor services on the market. drat those Keynesians and their math and facts!  It is hilarious that it doesn't even occur to you that they could be correct. Because it would shatter your entire worldview if science turned out to be right. quote:The problem with these studies is that they are usually taken for too short a time period, or are paid for by established interests that are seeking a rationale for central planning. Science can be purchased and unless a public has an understanding of economic laws, then the unsophisticated can be deceived through appeals to authority. Science can indeed be purchased, which is why you see Austrians trying to buy science that proves that the minimum wage causes job loss when reputable independent studies do not find that. I mean, just think of it this way. One group is being paid for by businesses who want to pay less to their workers. The other group is being funded by government grants to study the position so that they can figure out if it is good public policy or not. You are arguing that the ones being paid by business are the unbiased ones. quote:The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. This is as true of the purchase of labor services on the market as it is of computers at Best Buy. The necessary effects of increases in the minimum wage are not always easily and quickly perceptible and can escape the limited scope of even well meaning empirical study. A very small increase in the minimum wage is hardly going to cause massive unemployment the next day. But the effects are real and insidious. The Austrian would be incorrect because of medical services and other inelastic services. If I have to take insulin shots every day to live, and they cost... $5 (I have no idea), I'm going to take those shots everyday. If they increase the price to $6 a day, I am still going to pay $6, because I need the shots to loving live. Literally the only instance in which I would stop paying that money is when I reach the limit of what I am capable of paying, because I want to live. Demand for that good will only decrease when people physically cannot pay for the good in question, until then demand will remain stable. Likewise, computers at best buy don't need to eat, or clothe themselves. People are different, shockingly, than tradable goods. quote:I'll end with a question about where Keynesianism and the empirical approach to economic analysis has lead us. I don't think I have to remind everyone that the "empirical" mainstream economics profession failed spectacularly to warn us about the impending crash of the housing market in 2008. The established "facts" about the cause of the Great Depression and various economic phenomenon change every few years based on new empirical studies or reinterpretations of old studies. No concrete facts and methods of analyzing the data are presented other than providing post facto justification for the expansion of State power. Broken Clock fallacy. I have pointed this out to you in probably 5-10 threads, but almost every libertarian who was 'right' about the economic collapse was wrong about it for years before and after. Peter Schiff has said there would be another collapse every single year since 2008, and as far as I can tell he said there would be one every year from 1998-2008. Gerald Celente is in the same boat, as is every major example you can come up with. If I scream every day that I'm going to fall down the stairs, eventually I will be right. That does not make me psychic, or a good prognosticator. It makes me cognizent of a basic fact, re: I am clumsy. Austrians are capable of understanding the concept of a boom-bust cycle. Bully for them. Show me an Austrian Economist who made a lot of money during the crash (meaning he accurately predicted it enough to make money on the market). Show me an Austrian Economist who accurately predicted the credit freeze, or the problems inside the banks and we will talk. As to your garbage about the depression, you bring this up every thread too. The general ideas about the great depression haven't changed in my lifetime. That economists make new models to try and more accurately describe what happened is what we call science. It is a progressive thing where we make models that describe events, and then use those models to make more precise models and try again. quote:If you can establish economics laws that necessarily must be valid due to the necessary implications of the fact of human action, then you have a far more powerful tool through which to analyze modern economic phenomenon. But you haven't established it, and the people who tried have been laughed out of mainstream economics for over a century. quote:I really would like you to view that video of economist Robert Murphy speaking about economic law to provide more details than I am able to provide here. Would you now concede the validity of a priori truths that can be established through argumentation, logic and reason? Or would you like to reject the validity of Euclidean Geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem as well? False Dilemma fallacy. We can point out why you are wrong without having to reject anything because the basis for your argument is flawed. Caros fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 17:21
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