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jrodefeld posted:The question is very apropos, just how independent and scientific is the field of economics anyway? Most of us would agree with this assessment. Economics as a discipline has a lot of perverse incentive to prescribe policy that favors political outcomes. But for whatever reason, you seem to be suggesting that we abandon all semblance of science and empiricism, which is essentially the opposite of the logical solution to the problem you suggest. To me, this suggests that you also would prefer to prescribe policy that favors your political outcomes.
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Nov 2, 2014 18:42
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Many aspects of regulation actually have nothing to do with economics, so the whole argument that he's making is incredibly (intentionally) misleading
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Nov 2, 2014 19:20
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At the risk of being entirely too snarky, if pollution is an act of aggression, why are libertarians allowed to ever speak? The one thing that still is mystifying me after all these threads is that everytime I tell them that I am a statist and I fully intend to act in complete bad faith and contempt for their world order they have no answers. Apparently libertopia begins with the rapture, which explains some of their strange bedfellows or the complete end of the liberty they so fervently wish to suckle on, so no one can resist.
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Nov 2, 2014 19:38
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QuarkJets posted:Many aspects of regulation actually have nothing to do with economics, so the whole argument that he's making is incredibly (intentionally) misleading Since Human Action == Economic Transaction, then I can only assume that he is confident that regulation (human action) == economics.
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Nov 2, 2014 19:39
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RuanGacho posted:At the risk of being entirely too snarky, if pollution is an act of aggression, why are libertarians allowed to ever speak? That's only a difficult problem if you don't interpret "thinking in a way I don't approve of" as aggression. Hans-Herman Hoppe posted:In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order. It's worth noting that Triple H advocates for this sort of preventative action specifically for people he disagrees with, rather than, say, polluters. In fact, "people who don't like polluters" are on his list of enemies of the people.
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Nov 2, 2014 19:51
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RuanGacho posted:The one thing that still is mystifying me after all these threads is that everytime I tell them that I am a statist and I fully intend to act in complete bad faith and contempt for their world order they have no answers. Well, when your entire argument consists of using very broad terms very broadly, when someone says "Well, what if I do this action that is incompatible with your worldview," they tend to have a hard time.
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Nov 2, 2014 19:52
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RuanGacho posted:At the risk of being entirely too snarky, if pollution is an act of aggression, why are libertarians allowed to ever speak? jrod has responded to bad faith actors before, back when we were asking him how a DRO would work. His response was that we would obviously just construct an Orwellian nightmare where everyone is monitored 24/7 and where non-compliance with *Noncompliance includes missing a DRO payment or getting dropped from your DRO due to a clerical error QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 20:14
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QuarkJets posted:jrod has responded to bad faith actors before, back when we were asking him how a DRO would work. His response was that we would obviously just construct an Orwellian nightmare where everyone is monitored 24/7 and where non-compliance with Yeah but all those things are voluntary so it's okay. Just like how if I own an island and shipwreck survivors show up. No moral problems with me making them my slaves or throwing them back into the ocean. Now if they thought I should be compelled to let them take refuge on my island though well that would of course be an awful crime.
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Nov 2, 2014 20:19
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Oh good, Jrode is back. Sorry, not to pile on to the massive amounts of posts from people responding to you, but if you get a chance I'd like to hear your explanation. You mentioned an example of right-wing conventional wisdom about how Keynesian policies caused the Depression to be longer than it would have been if we had gone down the path of FREEDOM. But the thing is, government spending ramped up steadily all the way up until the end of WWII. If this belief for right-wing economists was true, then you would expect unemployment to get worse as government spending increases. Or at the very least, UE and economic growth should simply flatline. But in both cases, we would agree that it should not improve whatsoever, right? But the problem is, the UE rate went down, GDP went up, and the economy was improving at a good clip. In fact, government spending didn't just go up, it loving skyrocketed, and despite that there was no negative effects on the economy (well, unless you count the deficit, I guess). Why didn't we spiral back into a Depression?
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Nov 3, 2014 00:50
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In libertopia, if a penniless child crawling through the desert dying from thirst comes upon a water fountain owned by John Galt, and John Galt charges 5 cents per drink, would he be justified in denying the penniless child a drink?
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Nov 3, 2014 01:00
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Arri posted:In libertopia, if a penniless child crawling through the desert dying from thirst comes upon a water fountain owned by John Galt, and John Galt charges 5 cents per drink, would he be justified in denying the penniless child a drink? I prefer this one: "You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"
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Nov 3, 2014 01:35
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ThirdPartyView posted:"You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?" Whatya means, I'm not helping? Mr Interweb posted:Why didn't we spiral back into a Depression? Humans Act. Therefore the economy recovered in spite of Keynesian interference but if we had only learned to translate the mysterious Austrian language earlier, a policy of  FREEDOM would have made the recovery faster and betterer.
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Nov 3, 2014 01:44
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ThirdPartyView posted:I prefer this one: *shoots interviewer*
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Nov 3, 2014 02:07
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JRode did you ever read Steinbeck? He's pretty much the triple-H of his time.
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Nov 3, 2014 03:45
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Cercadelmar posted:JRode did you ever read Steinbeck? He's pretty much the triple-H of his time. Hunter Hearst Helmsley, King of the Ring and Libertarian wunderkind. edit: Wow, I just googled Hans Herman Hoppe and for some reason I always assumed he was way older and a product of a different era (like, the 1890s). Nope, he's just a massive shitlord writing abhorrent things about slavery and rounding up undesirables. Rhjamiz fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 04:17
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Rhjamiz posted:Hunter Hearst Helmsley, King of the Ring and Libertarian wunderkind. He'd be a massive shitlord in 1890 too. In any time period, really.
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Nov 3, 2014 04:33
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paragon1 posted:*shoots interviewer* If only the replicants had adhered to the non-aggression principle. 
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Nov 3, 2014 04:37
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StandardVC10 posted:If only the replicants had adhered to the non-aggression principle. Yeah it's always a real bitch of a time when your slave labor revolts.
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Nov 3, 2014 05:41
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Arri posted:In libertopia, if a penniless child crawling through the desert dying from thirst comes upon a water fountain owned by John Galt, and John Galt charges 5 cents per drink, would he be justified in denying the penniless child a drink? Ethically? Who the gently caress would do that?
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Nov 3, 2014 09:27
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ilkhan posted:Ethically? Who the gently caress would do that? The owners of the water company who order the installation of a water vending machine so that no one can get the water without paying. For example.
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Nov 3, 2014 09:34
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ilkhan posted:Legally? Yes. Why do you think killing a child should be legal in this situation?
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Nov 3, 2014 10:25
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Strawman posted:Why do you think killing a child should be legal in this situation? Well it would be unethical to force someone AT GUNPOINT not to callously let a child die.
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Nov 3, 2014 11:57
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Caros posted:Oh good, you're back! I was worried that you weren't going to contribute to the thread anymore and I felt a tear fall from my eye. Lets dig in shall we. I'm not opposed to the idea of a verbal debate at some point in the future. At the moment I don't even have a webcam nor do I have the sort of privacy to dedicate an hour or two to recording a live debate. Perhaps in the future we could work something out. It could be fun. In any event, I am not trying to change the subject because I can't or don't want to defend my positions. I have a number of things I want to discuss and, like I said, it is unrealistic for me to respond to every post. I will further elaborate on the merits of the rational deductive approach to economics I assure you. I'm not trying to sound condescending but the truth is that this subject is very complex and, for those who are conditioned by the mainstream of economic thought, or who read Krugman, it would take a great deal of reading and thinking on your part to even begin to understand the Austrian approach. I can say a few words on the subject to clarify my thinking and my position a bit, but I'm not sure it's productive to spend pages and pages devoted to the topic. Most people won't even read a short link I post, so what hope is there for people to learn enough about Praxeology and Epistemology to understand the value of an A Priori, logical deductive method to gaining economic knowledge? It just seems unlikely to say the least. Caros posted:Yes. For the most part. I'm not super keen on capitalism in general, but given the choice I'd rather use the sort of economics that has a solid footing and was ascendant during the great economic booms of the last century. Modern states do not fight recession with inflation, they fight it with direct stimulus. This distinction is important because Quantitative Easing for example, did not directly add to inflation due to how lovely the economy was doing. I cannot understand how you can possibly think that Keynesian economic intervention has had a good record over the last century. By "great economic booms" are you referring to the 1950s and 60s? Surely you understand that correlation is not causation. Just because we experienced prosperity in the middle of the 20th century, that does NOT mean it had anything to do with Keynesian economic theory. The real history of central banking and Keynesian economic theory goes something more like this: The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 ostensibly in reaction to the Panic of 1907. We were told that the central bank would smooth out the business cycle and provide liquidity to banks. Of course, you would have to be a fool to not understand that some of the most powerful banking figures at the time had sought the creation of a central bank for many decades and their motivations were more selfish. They wanted a cartel to protect their economic interests, to bail them out when times got tough. In any event the first half of the 20th century can hardly be considered a rousing success economically with two world wars and a fifteen year depression. While Keynesian theory was not embraced until the 1930s, surely you can understand the vital role the Fed played in permitting the funding of foolish military interventions like the US intervention into the first world war, facilitating an economic bubble in the late 1920s and permitting the economic interventions of both Hoover and Roosevelt, culminating in another multiple year war effort in the early 1940s. I don't want to again rehash the point that the New Deal programs were entirely ineffective in getting the economy out of the Depression and in fact prolonged the crisis, but there are a great many economists and historians who are not Austrians who attest to this fact. Even World War 2 didn't get us out, it only lowered unemployment because everyone was conscripted and the rest were at home building bombs and tanks. You can't eat bombs and tanks. It would be infinitely preferable for these resources to be used producing things that raised peoples standard of living. It is a matter of historical record that when the war ended in 1945 most of the Keynesian economists were warning that the US economy was set to relapse back into Depression unless massive new public works programs and economic stimulus was not immediately enacted. That didn't happen, as I have said before. In fact, both taxes and spending were cut back drastically and the economy improved. In fact, it was the single largest economic expansion in US history. quote:Blodget’s pal, writer Zeke Miller, warns that “cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget would be an instantaneous 7 percent cut to GDP.” So because of the way GDP is figured, we are to believe that all government activity is a plus, even though it takes place outside the profit-and-loss nexus (i.e., the money government spends is simply seized from the population, so government cannot determine whether what it produces is actually desired and/or whether it comes at the expense of things people value more). Since economic calculation cannot occur under these conditions, it is worse than arbitrary to claim government spending as an unambiguous contribution to human welfare. (See Robert Batemarco, “GNP, PPR, and the Standard of Living.”) http://tomwoods.com/blog/henry-blodget-ron-pauls-plan-will-destroy-the-economy/ If you doubt the credibility of Tom Woods as a source (as you no doubt will), look over this article by Richard K.Vedder and Lowell Gallaway. It is humorously titled "The Depression of 1946" since that is what the Keynesians, in all their wisdom and foresight, predicted to occur when the war spending was stopped. Every metric of economic analysis proves the precise opposite and this should have constituted a death blow to Keynes' reputation. http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae5_2_1.pdf So, massive spending cuts and reallocated capital released from the clutches of State control provides the basis for the economic prosperity of the 1950s. A couple of decades of national fatigue allow the State to loosen it's grip upon the economy and the United States enjoys the post-WW2 prosperity. Even the Fed chairmen of the time were, like Paul Volcker a couple generations later, better and less inflationary than the worst of the Fed chairmen. In the late 1960s through much of the 1970s the United States deceived us into the Vietnam War through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident. Such a foolish and protracted military conflict, which was a horrible consequence of the rise of (as Eisenhower warned us about) the military industrial complex, is enabled by easy credit expansion by a central bank. You would have to be a fool to not understand that a printing press makes it easier to take a nation to war. We all know what happened in the 1970s. The Bretton Woods agreement broke down in 71, Nixon closed the gold window and embraced a worldwide fiat money standard with the Dollar as the reserve currency of the world. The rest of the decade was full of Stagflation, a stagnant economy and very high inflation. This was the second time Keynesian economic theory should have been thoroughly discredited. Volcker halted inflation when he raised interest rates to 21% in the early 1980s but we unfortunately blew the opportunity to really reform the banking system and return to sound money and market interest rates. People like the great David Stockman thought that perhaps such reforms were possible and he took a position as Reagan's Budget Director to move in that direction. Ron Paul participated in the Gold Commission which was to study the viability of a return to a commodity backed currency. Unfortunately Reagan's puppet masters, the neocons like George H.W. Bush and Rumsfeld had different ideas. "Deficits don't matter" they shouted. We'll just grow our way out of our budgetary problems. Alan Greenspan was placed into office in 1987 and he single-handedly engineered the Tech Bubble and Housing Bubble and is most responsible for the economic troubles we now face. How exactly is this a good record for Keynesian interventionist economics? I'll go even further. Keynesian theory recommends counter cyclical spending so that national debts don't get out of control. But as we know, credit expansion is a drug that is hard to quit. Politicians need to get reelected after all. New programs need to be implemented and funded. Crony capitalists need subsidies. We are supposed to run surpluses during the "good times" to balance the budget and pay down the debt. But you and I both know that hardly ever happens. The debt keeps piling up in both recessions and booms. And finally, I want to reiterate that inflation is not defined as "rising prices". Inflation is an expansion of the money supply. That is why the Fed can inject "stimulus" (new money) into the economy without prices rising, at least not right away. This new credit expansion causes dislocations and malinvestment through distortion of interest rates and is very harmful weather or not rising prices result immediately. You cannot "inflate" prices. Inflation means to expand. Prices don't expand. They rise or fall. The money supply expands or contracts. Keynesians love for you to think about inflation ONLY in terms of rising prices. What this does is deflect attention from what they are doing to the money supply. Caros posted:While the beginning of this statement, that the last half century of our economic history has been full of economic bubbles and subsequent recessions is factually true, it completely lacks historical context. I've linked you to this list of US recessions a number of times before, but I'd encourage you to read it even as I explain while you are wrong. Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama, found that the numbers and dating used by the National Bureau of Economic Research exaggerate both the number and the length of economic downturns prior to the creation of the Fed. She is hardly an Austrian ideologue. In so doing, the NBER likewise overestimates the Fed’s contribution to economic stability. Recessions were in fact not more frequent in the pre-Fed than the post-Fed period. Comparing the economic crises of the modern era to the pre-Fed era, economist George Selgin explains, "They were also three months shorter on average, and no more severe." The average time peak to bottom took only 7.7 months as opposed to the 10.6 months of the post-World War II period. From a recent article on the subject: quote:The 19th-century boom-bust cycles that are supposed to discredit the idea of a free market in money and banking are in fact consistently attributable to artificial credit expansion, a practice given artificial stimulus by means of the various government privileges granted to the banking industry. According to Richard Timberlake, a well-known economist and historian of American monetary and banking history, "As monetary histories confirm...most of the monetary turbulence – bank panics and suspensions in the nineteenth century – resulted from excessive issues of legal-tender paper money, and they were abated by the working gold standards of the times." It is the old story of the faults of interventionism being blamed on the free market. You still don't seem to understand the Austrian position on the business cycle. We are NOT saying that an economic bubble can ONLY be formed by a central bank. Rather, that the cause of the business cycle is excessive credit expansion and the unsustainable projects that are undertaken as a result. Whether such a bubble is caused by a central bank or other State interventions, the cure for such economic maladies is the same. As soon as possible halt the unnecessary expansion, permit prices to work and allow the necessary market correction to occur. If there are not sufficient savings to finance economic expansions, then they should not be undertaken. If there is malinvestment in a certain sector of the economy, those resources should be reallocated away from those unsustainable projects towards more urgently needed ends. Caros posted:
As I have demonstrated, Keynesian economics has had a terrible record both in predicting future economic trends and in supposedly smoothing out the business cycle. The Fed has given us a century of war, the Great Depression, constant price inflation, Stagflation in the 1970s, and the tech bubble and housing bubble. It is a real shame that the only alternative was a form of "economic intervention for the rich", otherwise known as conservative supply side economics. Not much of an improvement. Let me ask you a very simple question. Why is inflation ethical? Think about this for a second seriously. Why is it moral for the State to continually steal value from my savings? Why can't money be seen as a store of value? At one time it was possible for people to merely put away US dollars (which were really certificates indicating a certain amount of gold) for their retirement content in the knowledge that the money would be worth as much or more than when they put it in their savings account or hid it under the mattress. Why create uncertainty and anxiety for so many when they have to live with the fact that their money will be worth less, likely FAR less, when they retire? You push people into investing in the Stock Market just to have a hope of making ends meet in the long run. Most people have no business being in the stock market but they are left with little choice. Who is going to put away pieces of paper to save for retirement? Say whatever you want about the era of the Gold Standard in the United States, but the indisputable truth is that the dollar actually gained in value by about 7% over the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Not only was there no inflation over the long run, but money appreciated in value. And during that time we saw an unprecedented expansion of the US economy. While we debate the economic panics before versus after the creation of the Federal Reserve, it should not be forgotten that we are living in an age of perpetual inflation and depreciation of the value of the dollar while prior to the Fed, money actually appreciated. You wonder why so few of us save money anymore and why we are all saddled with personal debt? That is one very good reason. It is impossible to plan for the future calculating the cost of living in a decade or so. Caros posted:You think that Koch industries does not contribute tens of millions to think tanks and public advocacy organization filled with "climate scientists" who promote the view that it is sound environmental policy to drill baby drill? How is this aspect of economics unique to any form of controversial science? I'd argue that it is not, which is why I support economic positions that I myself understand, and which best fit observable reality. If you cannot refute a claim I make without self contradiction, otherwise known as a performative contradiction, I DID in fact prove the validity of the claim. I don't know why you are so intent on denying the power of logic and deductive reasoning and the law of non contradiction. Anyone at any time is free to refute any of the axioms that Austrians support. It is just that they have to do it through discourse. If I say "these are the necessary implications of the action axiom and thus form the basis for the study of economics" then anyone is free to attempt to prove how the implications we deduce are wrong. If they can do so without contradiction, without making an error in their reasoning, then we will be glad to discard the refuted axiom. It is ludicrous to look at a human being and assume that nothing can be known with certainty about his interaction with others, that every question regarding human action is up for grabs and requires constant empirical testing to know anything about the real world. Every discipline has certain a priori assumptions in how it views reality whether its proponents admit to it or not. Yes, the statement that economics is a discipline that explains human action is indeed an a priori statement. Humans act. Humans act purposefully to attain goals. I'd like you to peruse this article that touches upon a few of the necessary implications of the action axiom: quote:The starting point of praxeology is not a choice of axioms and a decision about methods of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action. Caros posted:Except that we have plenty of examples, from vaccinations, to climate change, safety testing and so on than this is not at all unique to the field of economics. Yes, people can be bought, that does not discredit the field anymore than Andrew Wakefield discredits the entire field of medicine. Yes, this is true. Just because there are economic incentives for economists to support Keynesian interventions and not criticize the Fed, that does not discredit the ideas themselves. But it remains true that it is far more lucrative personally to provide the role of "court historian" and State apologist than it is to support a heterodox school of thought like the Austrian School of economics. This is not a major point that I am making, but I would say that you have far more reason to be skeptical about the conviction of a mainstream Economist who enjoys prestige and a privileged position owing to the fashionable opinions they take than you would of an Austrian economist. You would have much more reason to believe that a mainstream Economist is bought off. If you see an Austrian economist, it is overwhelmingly likely that they are completely sincere in what they believe and are not bought off by some special interest. Even the Koch Brothers are much more comfortable with the Milton Friedman Chicago School of economics, perhaps because of bitterness over the feud they had with Murray Rothbard in the early 1980s. Caros posted:It is worth remembering that your typical libertarian is 68% male and 90% non-hispanic white. Your ideology only appeals to people in power. You are not the plucky underdog hero. Of all the crazy things you have said this must be near the top. If Austrian economics only appeals to people in power, why is it not embraced by the media, by the big banks, by politicians? It is certainly not because it is "not scientific". That never stopped the powers that be from embracing any other number of policies or ideas. If the "powerful" in society truly benefited from propagating the ideas of the Austrian School, it would be far more well known. The fact that it is not, the fact that The Mises Institute relies on small donors and is run on a shoe string budget proves exactly the opposite. I don't know if your figures are correct about libertarianism, but I find it absurd for you to think that because someone happens to be male and/or white, that automatically gives them "power". For someone who professes to love science and empiricism such statements should be irrelevant. The only important consideration should be whether the ideas offered are correct, whether the policies proposed have merit. Judging a movement based on its demographics should be irrelevant. jrodefeld fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 12:47
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Caros posted:
Everyone owns property. I don't think that Austrian economists are immune to outside influence or corruption. I just think that it is less likely because there is less to be gained by taking contrarian positions in an outside-of-the-mainstream school of thought. It is more likely that the sort of person who adheres to the Austrian School teachings is someone who is concerned with ideas first and prestige last. Libertarians are not concerned with property "above all else". We are concerned with the initiation of force. It would seem quite odd for you to criticize an anti-rape advocacy group for caring about property "above all else". In that case the anti-rape advocate would be protecting the property rights of women to their own bodies. The libertarians are doing precisely the same thing yet we are criticized for it? Everyone owns property and aggression against that property is an act of violence. What you are trying to do is make libertarians and Austrian economists out to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths, owners of massive wealth who just want to protect their own wealth. Ludwig von Mises, the most influential of all Austrian economists, was very poor for most of his life. He was teaching at a time when Communism and Socialism were sweeping over the academic fields in much of the developed world. He had nothing to gain personally by holding on to these "old" classical liberal ideas. He spent much of his life denied of teaching positions and awards for which he was eminently qualified for simply because he upset the establishment with his condemnation of socialism and central planning. When he came to the United States in the 1940s, a Jewish man fleeing Hitler and the Nazis, he could only get a non-paid part time teaching position. He was continually disrespected by faculty and never given the respect he deserved. All because he was unfortunate enough to live in an era when his ideas were out of fashion. He had NOTHING to gain personally from adopting these positions. If only he would have renounced them and embraced Socialism, he could have had all the prestige and accolades he could have wanted. He stuck to his principles because he believed in them. As he told his wife before they got married "I will write about money a great deal, but I will never have much of it" (paraphrasing). Caros posted:
You are making a big deal out of something that has no real relevance to the point I was making. Yes, I said Mises' work was released in English in the "late 30s". I was going off of memory and the very fact that I gave a rough estimate rather than a specific date should have clued you to that fact. I was in error but the point stands regardless. The Theory of Money and Credit came out too late to have the impact it might have had before the Keynesian revolution took full effect. If it had been released a decade earlier and people were made aware of Mises' warnings about the impending market failure and crash that was to come? Then perhaps Mises or his students could have been consulted on what to do to counter an economic crises that they, almost unique at the time, were able to anticipate and predict. By 1934 both Hoover and Roosevelt and been intervening in the economy for years with public works programs and various interventions. Caros posted:Ugh. Every. loving. Thread. You bring this up, and every loving thread you are wrong about it. Even if you could just directly compare two separate recessions that happened over a decade apart for different reasons, you would still be wrong because you are making assumptions about them that are flat out wrong. I had to explain this to you about three or four threads ago, but I hope you are still aware that FDR did not actually enter office until 1933, and that Hoover lost his loving job for doing the exact thing that you suggested doing, which was largely sitting on his hands and doing nothing for years while the economy cratered. You don't know what you are talking about. The very fact that you think Hoover was some advocate of laissez-faire and sat on his hands doing nothing shows you don't know a thing about his presidency. He was an incredibly interventionist President. quote:The Hoover New Deal of 1932 Read the rest of this article for elaboration on the many economic interventions of Herbert Hoover: The Hoover New Deal of 1932 http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/chapter11.asp Caros posted:Yeah, the market failed due to the stock market crash of 1929. Do you have any evidence that it didn't? Because I can point to loving mountains of evidence that it did. Likewise I can point to study after study after study from all manner of economists who go into detail about why leaving the gold standard was the correct decision, not the least of which was the fact that when the US left the gold standard, the economy improved. Funny that! Yes the economy crashed due to the stock market crash of 1929. But WHY did the stock market crash in 1929? How can you just dismiss the question of "why" and just assume that these instabilities are just some inherent feature of capitalism? The economy improved after we went off the gold standard? That's funny, I thought our economy continued in Depression for another decade culminating in the second World War. THAT is success? FDR stole the gold from private citizens so they could suffer through another decade of double digit unemployment and hard times? Like I said earlier, Austrian Business Cycle theory does NOT require a central bank. What it requires is an excessive expansion of credit and misallocation of scarce resources, unsustainable projects undertaken without sufficient means to complete them. I'll refer you what I wrote earlier in this reply since I don't need to repeat myself here.
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Nov 3, 2014 12:47
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Strawman posted:Why do you think killing a child should be legal in this situation? Because it has troubling implications with regards to rich people's ability to concentrate money and power on a galactic scale while others starve. This is our civilization's greatest policy consideration, and it permeates all public discourse.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:05
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Jrod, I'm not going to touch your long posts, but I'd like you to answer a question for me: should people be allowed to sell themselves into slavery? After all, I own my person, and I have the right to sell anything that I own. As long my master-to-be isn't using force or fraud to get me to transfer all my personal rights to him, I don't see how someone who believes in the primacy of property rights can object to such a transaction.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:11
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Caros posted:Yeah, I covered it above, but just to reiterate: What are you talking about? Keynesian style policies were what proved effective at curbing the great depression? Even non-Austrian economists and historians are conceding that the economic interventions of the 1930s proved ineffective or harmful to economic recovery. The record is quite clear on this subject. I've written enough on my previous post on this subject. Read that first.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:12
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jrodefeld posted:In any event, I am not trying to change the subject because I can't or don't want to defend my positions. I have a number of things I want to discuss and, like I said, it is unrealistic for me to respond to every post. It's mysterious how many posts with valid points that you completely ignore in favor of going after nitpicking. jrodefeld posted:I will further elaborate on the merits of the rational deductive approach to economics I assure you. I'm not trying to sound condescending but the truth is that this subject is very complex and, for those who are conditioned by the mainstream of economic thought, or who read Krugman, it would take a great deal of reading and thinking on your part to even begin to understand the Austrian approach. I can say a few words on the subject to clarify my thinking and my position a bit, but I'm not sure it's productive to spend pages and pages devoted to the topic. Most people won't even read a short link I post, so what hope is there for people to learn enough about Praxeology and Epistemology to understand the value of an A Priori, logical deductive method to gaining economic knowledge? It just seems unlikely to say the least. "For those of you who like your economic thought to be based in reality, it would take a lot of reading to convince yourself that the Austrian school, which rejects empirical data, should be taken seriously." You're right, jrodefeld; it would. It would take me a lot of reading to do that, but you're just handwaving away as "oh it'd be too complicated for you". You have done literally nothing to convince me (or likely anyone else) of the value of praxeology. If I assume that the entire methodology you use to make your assumptions is bunk, and when you get criticisms of it, you dodge and evade and duck the criticisms with a handwave of "oh, it's too complicated for you to understand, you'd have to do a lot of reading..." Guess what? It gives us zero reason to take your political theory seriously, because to someone who's not a praxeologist it looks like you're just pulling poo poo out of your rear end and then saying it's a a priori truth. Weirdly enough, this is not at all how anyone else thinks of a priori truths, as has been stated to you numerous times over the past several pages!
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Nov 3, 2014 13:12
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Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:And there is the fundamental issue. It's not like self-ownership is much of a controversial thing, but we don't accept that you try to bootstrap it into including property as well. Economic schools are just dancing around that difference of opinion. How do you make the decision about how property rights are allocated? If it is not the first user of something that has a greater claim to property ownership over something external to their bodies, who else does? Where do you draw the line? I can own my clothes, my car, and my home but if I turn my home into a business all of a sudden I don't own my home anymore? What coherent concept of property acquisition is there other than original appropriation and homesteading?
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Nov 3, 2014 13:16
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jrodefeld posted:What coherent concept of property acquisition is there other than original appropriation and homesteading? It's simple: "property rights yield to the right to not live miserably." It's a matter of priorities. Some people want the ultimate right to be the ability to control inanimate stuff. Others want to ultimate right to be things like not starving in the streets or dying of easily treatable conditions.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:20
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jrodefeld posted:Let me ask you a very simple question. Why is inflation ethical? Think about this for a second seriously. Why is it moral for the State to continually steal value from my savings? So is prospecting for gold unethical then, since if wildly successful like the 1849 Gold Rush it inflates away people's savings? Is building new houses unethical? Is accepting payment in silver and causing a fall in demand for gold unethical? And anyway, it's not illegal to own gold or foreign currency. If someone is worried about their central bank, they're free to trade their dollars for gold as an inflation hedge...a decision they'd still have to make in private libertopian banking except that's even more dangerous because if the bank you're storing your savings in fails, all your bank notes become near-worthless.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:25
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Caros posted:Pollution is an act of aggression. But in the words of the great Lucille Bluth: "Prove it." I think these "lifeboat scenarios" don't prove nearly as much as you think they do. You think that by getting me to admit that if I was starving I would violate the non-aggression principle to survive, that somehow discredits libertarianism. I think this is ridiculous. You could apply this standard to anyone. Anyone who professes to believe in certain principles could theoretically be subjected to some extreme circumstance where they will violate those principles in desperation in order to survive. That doesn't discredit the principles being espoused. If anything it merely proves that they are human, and humans have a breaking point where they will abandon any abstract ideas to survive. You could as easily criticize those who oppose cannibalism since they might have to resort to it if subjected to some hypothetical extreme situation. "Hypocrites!", you exclaim. They claim to be against eating people but if they are starving on a lifeboat somewhere they are pushed to eating another person, therefore their principle is fatally flawed. It shouldn't be too hard to see the absurdity of this line of argument. People WILL violate the non aggression principle, whether in a libertarian society or a statist one. People will act unethically. That is simply a fact that must be accepted. The purpose of principle and ethics is to provide a standard from which to judge good behavior and distinguish it from bad behavior. The law should be universal and prohibit bad behavior for all members of the society. But complex situations exist and juries and Judges have to deal with such complexities all the time. There is a reason we don't consider theft of food by a starving child the same offense as theft of a television by an adult. It would be the same in a libertarian society. Nearly everyone has some breaking point where they abandon civilized behavior and resort to aggression in order to survive. If someone owned property and had his property violated by a desperate person, say a starving person on an Island, then he could sue the thief later. He could press charges. Society would no doubt criticize him heavily and society, in my opinion, should ostracize and heavily criticize such abhorrent behavior. However, he still had ownership over that property. I find it strange that you would even think this is some sort of trump card where you just disproved the validity of the non-aggression principle. Name any other principle held by anyone and I could construct an unlikely extreme hypothetical where the proponents would break their professed principles if pushed far enough. That proves nothing.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:36
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jrodefeld posted:What coherent concept of property acquisition is there other than original appropriation and homesteading? I dunno, "Your property is only the stuff you're actually using?" Like, when you're wearing your shirt, it's yours, but if you take it off I can walk up and put it on myself. It could only become your shirt again if I took it off and you took it and put it on once more. Sure, that property system would be far from perfect (and I want to note that I don't actually advocate it), but in many ways it's arguably better than the system we have now! For instance, adopting the system I present would instantly solve the homelessness problem in the U.S. because every one of the 3.5 million homeless people could immediately move into one of the 18.6 million vacant homes. Maybe you don't like it, but it seems perfectly "coherent" to me. Pththya-lyi fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 13:39
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But Caros' hypothetical isn't extreme or unlikely at all. The world where a small oligarchy controls the majority of the land and resources and starved the moat vulnerable is called The Real World, and in America we dealt with the worst of this problem with medicare and food stamps, and it's only political intransigence from feudalism-minded luddites who hold us back from finishing the job.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:44
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jrodefeld posted:How do you make the decision about how property rights are allocated? If it is not the first user of something that has a greater claim to property ownership over something external to their bodies, who else does? It's fuzzy, which is why the political and legal systems exist. There's no inherent need for a concept of property to be "coherent" unless you've already decided that it's the bedrock of your moral system. Property is just means to an end for me. jrodefeld posted:Nearly everyone has some breaking point where they abandon civilized behavior and resort to aggression in order to survive. If someone owned property and had his property violated by a desperate person, say a starving person on an Island, then he could sue the thief later. He could press charges. Society would no doubt criticize him heavily and society, in my opinion, should ostracize and heavily criticize such abhorrent behavior. But you didn't break your principles. You said that society should criticize the property owner suing the starving person, but you didn't say that he shouldn't have been allowed to do that. Even in this scenario you claim that the starving person was in the wrong.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:52
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Helsing posted:Can you please clarify this? Maybe I am mistaken, but it seems as though either you are lying or you are making an error because one of your heroes has repeatedly stated that people will be free to form "convents". Within these convents you are free to "physically remove" anyone who promotes ideas that disagree with the ideas held by the people who founded the convent. First of all, let me state that I don't answer for Hans Hoppe. Different libertarian thinkers have differing views and opinions on many different things. I have my disagreements with Hans and with Rothbard. That said, what Hoppe has advocated for is hardly more controversial than saying that you have the right to "physically remove" someone from your home who you don't want to be there. Do you not have the right to determine who can stay at your home and who has to leave? A "covenant", as Hoppe describes it, would simply be a group of private property owners who build a community together and voluntarily agree to contracts and legal agreements which specify which sorts of behaviors are permitted and which aren't. These sorts of voluntary communities should be expected to develop naturally as humans tend to associate with those who share their interests and values. If a certain covenant accepts another member in, then it is specified that certain standards are expected and that failure to comply will have certain repercussions. This is not an act of aggression, since it is a voluntary contract that each person accepts of their own volition. And it is established by private property owners who have the right to determine the use of their own property. The right of exclusion or discrimination is implied by the very nature of private property. Now, not to go off on a Hans Hoppe tangent, but what he meant when he said "physically remove" someone from a covenant, is was referring to someone who agreed to a contract and then proceeded to advocate for and promote values that are are contrary to the values of the other members of that covenant. He was NOT referring to what people do in the privacy of their own homes. Let us suppose you agreed to live in a strongly religious covenant with people who share those values. You agreed to respect those values. Yet, once a member of the community you proceeded to proselytize about Satanism. The other members of the covenant have the right to expel you for breaking your contract and for acting in a way that threatens the very purpose of the covenant. Of course the Satanist has every right to join a community that share those antireligious values. And if he would have just kept those values to himself, no one would have cared anyway. It's all about the right to free association. But you cannot force others to associate with you against their will. So Hoppe's argument is not more controversial than saying that you have the right to determine who enters your home and who doesn't. It is a private property rights issue. If anyone violates someone else's property rights, then that would constitute a rights violation and the victim should let their DRO know immediately and charge the aggressor with a crime.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:56
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QuarkJets posted:That is tautological. The state does not prevent businessmen from acting morally under libertarian law and ethics. Businessmen today do not abide by libertarian law and ethics, and there's no reason to believe that they would begin to do that in the absence of a state. You don't understand. Today, the State permits businesses to violate private property rights through pollution, they permit them to gain monopoly privilege through subsidies and to do a myriad of things that would be illegal under libertarian law. Libertarianism will impose MORE restrictions on acts of aggression than the State does currently. Businessmen today don't abide by libertarian law and ethics because libertarian law and ethics are not enforced. That is the whole point of what I am advocating for. Private property rights, contract law, and the non-aggression principle SHOULD be enforced while these other interventions into the economy should be discarded. There is every reason to believe that bad business behavior will be more regulated under libertarian law than under State monopoly regulatory control of the economy, where Corporate interests need only to gain access to the rule makers to tilt the tables in their favor.
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Nov 3, 2014 14:04
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jrodefeld posted:I will further elaborate on the merits of the rational deductive approach to economics I assure you. I'm not trying to sound condescending but the truth is that this subject is very complex and, for those who are conditioned by the mainstream of economic thought, or who read Krugman, it would take a great deal of reading and thinking on your part to even begin to understand the Austrian approach. I can say a few words on the subject to clarify my thinking and my position a bit, but I'm not sure it's productive to spend pages and pages devoted to the topic. Most people won't even read a short link I post, so what hope is there for people to learn enough about Praxeology and Epistemology to understand the value of an A Priori, logical deductive method to gaining economic knowledge? It just seems unlikely to say the least. You are refusing to defend your own beliefs in your own words, and accusing those who have criticised your poor understanding of epistemology of not understanding the subject while declining to engage with their ideas. This is the basis of your entire position, and it rests on a knowledge claim which radically defies all of Western epistemological thought since the dark ages, and a good deal of what came before that. You need a rock solid argument here. You are up against Kant, Hume, and Descartes, just to name a few, and they were not stupid people. All had good reason to limit the scope of deductive reasoning even those who were its champions, or even deny its epistemological value entirely. You do not even understand the subject well enough to realize that you are making what seems an absurd, ignorant claim, and all by you have in the face of criticism is excuses and insults. You look like a fool. Are you one? E: Did you intent that essay on Action as a counterpoint to arguments such as mine? Because it's quite irrelevant, although somewhat interesting in its own way. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 14:24
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DarklyDreaming posted:I want to focus on this a little because it's part of an important environmental concern You obviously can't sue anyone. Bad, short sighted business decisions were made over one hundred years ago and they continue to have repercussions even today. There are a lot of hazards that we face but what is left unchallenged is the assumption that the State can or will improve upon what can be accomplished through the competitive market. Critics of the market or of libertarianism like to bring up difficult situations like the one you describe but the real question that should be posed is this: what would the State do about this? Could they really solve such a problem were the market could not? Let's broaden the question to include what QuarkJets asked: QuarkJets posted:Seriously, jrodefeld, how do you deal with people who act in bad faith? The short answer is that I don't know what would happen or how free people organize to best protect against such environmental harm. The question that should be asked is "what would YOU do?" Suppose you had to live in an anarchist society and you couldn't look to the State to solve these problems for you. What would you do? Now most people don't want to be poisoned. Most people want to know that the homes they buy are safe, that the food the buy is safe to eat, the water is clean and the businesses they employ are honest and reputable. Since there is that demand, entrepreneurs and just plain concerned citizens will organize to provide this service. Maybe you would start a website that rates different businesses. Maybe someone would start a private food inspection agency who inspects restaurants and lets customers know that they meet a certain standard. Perhaps professional detectives and forensics people will create an agency whose sole goal is determining the source of environmental damage when the case is not clear cut and getting compensation for the victims. There are so many different methods available and the demand is so great for knowledge about business behavior and product safety, that people will organize to provide such a service. And the competition between food inspectors will no doubt provide greater quality of service than a State monopoly. The issue of determining the cause of environmental pollution is an interesting one. It is easy to say that pollution is a property rights violation and the polluter should have to pay restitution to the victims. But it is harder to determine with accuracy who caused health problems due to air pollution or who polluted a river in your backyard, especially if there are several factories upriver. But technology is advanced enough that insurance agencies and private forensics specialists can test the air, or the water and determine the origin of the pollution. It may not be perfect but the State has proven so inept in protecting the environment that it would no doubt be a massive improvement. But remember that you should think about what YOU should do to help solve a social problem. By saying "the State should handle it" what you are really doing is abdicating your responsibility and your capacity to contribute to society.
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Nov 3, 2014 14:26
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paragon1 posted:Jrodefeld please tell us what you mean by "libertarian law" (especially confusing coming from an avowed anarchist). It's rather hard to engage with a moving object that only you can see. Why I mean by that is simply the non-aggression principle. Acts of aggression should be illegal. All other acts should be legal. What is aggression or not aggression is determined by the concept of private property rights, which come into existence through homesteading or original appropriation.
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Nov 3, 2014 14:32
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