Critiques Of Libertarianism

What's new at the new site.

2012-01-16T08:36:00.001-05:00

I'm adding some indexes as I think of them. I have started adding some quotations as well.

Most of the indexes simply have a brief explication of their purpose. Later on I intend to flesh them out with better descriptions.

I welcome comments, criticisms, suggestions, etc.

NEW 1/16/2012: Seven principles for arguing with economists [More...]: Some of the more common fallacious economics arguments, and how to counter them. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Anarchy, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick has written the most academically important attempt at libertarian philosophy. It is rife with fallacies, misdirection and unstated assumptions. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: The Road to Serfdom: Friedrich von Hayek's comically failed prediction of the coming totalitarian socialist state in western nations. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Discussion Questions For "Free To Choose" [More...]: Brad DeLong's guide to understanding Free To Choose through questions, the second assignment in his Spring 2012 Econ 1 course at UC Berkeley. The overview points out the skewed idea of freedom being used. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand's horribly written young-adult fiction. A grotesque self-parody. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Free To Choose: Milton Friedman and Rose Director Friedman's major propaganda success for market-based everything. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Fundamental Libertarian Books: A few popular books do the heavy lifting for libertarian ideology: bringing the most recruits, popularizing the ideas and providing critiques of mainstream ideas. They are all severely flawed. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: Cato Institute - SourceWatch [More...]: A detailed report on the policy positions, funders, and funding of other "like-minded" think tanks. A great place to start. [more...]

NEW 1/14/2012: SourceWatch [More...]: SourceWatch profiles the activities of front groups, PR spinners, industry-friendly experts, industry-funded organizations, and think tanks trying to manipulate public opinion on behalf of corporations or government. One of the Center for Media and Democracy projects. [more...]

NEW 1/12/2012: Brief insights into the libertarian mind [More...]: Freddie deBoer writes: "... the central analytical failure of libertarianism as a worldview: a total and disqualifying inability to measure or account for power as it exists in the real world." [more...]

NEW 1/12/2012: Real World Power: Libertarians like to attribute all power to demon government, but refuse to face any other sort of oppressive power. [more...]

NEW 1/08/2012: The Con Job of Libertarian "Economics" [More...]

A brief and clear presentation of the major failings of Austrian Economics. [more...]

Most Recent Quotations

[edit]Quotations

There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs. *
Raj Patel, "The Value Of Nothing" p. 172.

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on. *
Will Wikinson, "Why I’m Not a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian"

Liberalism is not so foolish as to aim at the abolition of the state. Liberals fully recognize that no social coöperation and no civilization could exist without some amount of compulsion and coercion. It is the task of government to protect the social system against the attacks of those who plan actions detrimental to its maintenance and operation. *
Ludwig von Mises, "Omnipotent Government"

Government may even be called the most beneficial of all earthly institutions as without it no peaceful human cooperation, no civilization, and no moral life would be possible. *
Ludwig von Mises, "Economic Freedom and Interventionism"

Extreme laissez faire capitalism of the kind extolled off and on over the past two centuries, and increasingly preached by economists, financiers and conservative thinkers over the past four decades, is a perverse distortion of human nature, foisted upon us by cold and demented thinkers captivated by inhuman notions of efficiency and domination. In the end, it is a system that reduces each human being to an object whose value is nothing beyond what it is worth in the market. We need to restore a social balance, in which private property, entrepreneurialism and commercial activity do not dominate our lives and set all the rules for our existence, but function within a democratic social order framed by a politically coherent and effective commitment to the public good. In a democratic social order there exists an activist public sector controlling a substantial store of social goods, and channeling democratic energies and intelligence into the ambitious perfection of such goods. *
Dan Kervick, "Public Money for Public Purpose: Toward the End of Plutocracy and the Triumph of Democracy – Part VI"

[...] the failure of the market to insure against uncertainties has created many social institutions in which the usual assumptions of the market are to some extent contradicted. The medical profession is only one example, though in many respects an extreme one. All professions share some of the same properties. The economic importance of personal and especially family relationships, though declining, is by no means trivial in the most advanced economies; it is based on non-market relations that create guarantees of behavior which would otherwise be afflicted with excessive uncertainty. Many other examples can be given. The logic and limitations of ideal competitive behavior under uncertainty force us to recognize the incomplete description of reality supplied by the impersonal price system. *
Kenneth Arrow, "Uncertainty And The Welfare Economics Of Medical Care"

On Hayek… in my view, there are four Hayeks, one good, and three of varying degrees of badness:
The good Hayek of the price system as a discovery and information transmission mechanism, of the importance of entrepreneurship, and of private property and the rechstaat as guarantees of individual liberty.
The bad Hayek who prefers Augusto Pinochet to Helmut Schmidt.
The worse Hayek who had his head completely up his posterior on economic policy during the Great Depression.
The worst-of-all Hayek. The one who when Keynes praises the Road to Serfdom and pronounces himself in "not just agreement, but deeply moved agreement with it" responds "no you are not!" *
Brad DeLong, "Daniel Kuehn: Maynard, Fred, Gus and Ralph on the History of Macroeconomics".

... I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and the United States, they did harm. *
Milton Friedman, interviewed in Barron's (August 24, 1998)

Medicare has its problems -- but all the evidence says that it is substantially more cost-effective than private insurance. Partly this is because it has lower administrative costs; partly it’s because Medicare is able to use its market power to negotiate lower prices. And the international evidence is overwhelming: single-payer systems are much cheaper than systems centered on private insurance. *
Paul Krugman, Joe Lieberman’s Plan to Make Health Care Worse and More Expensive

Consider four marvels of our age -- science, democracy, the justice system and fair markets. In each case the participants (scientists, litigants, politicians and capitalists) are driven by selfish goals. That won't change; not till we redefine human nature. But for years, rules have been fine-tuned in each of these fields of endeavor, to reduce cheating and let quality or truth win much of the time. By harnessing human competitiveness, instead of suppressing it, these "accountability arenas" nourished much of our unprecedented wealth and freedom. The four arenas aren't always fair or efficient! A good theory, law or commercial product may flounder, or else face many trials before prevailing. But remember that organic systems needn't be efficient, only robust. Likewise, our core institutions have to keep functioning despite individual incompetence, or the most everlasting human temptation-- to cheat. In achieving this, the four old accountability arenas have done pretty well by us, so far. *
David Brin, Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit

So what is it that differentiates the writing of Rand from those of classic academics and professional philosophers? It is simply that her work has every appearance of an extended and multi-faceted straw man argument that fails to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship. It has all the marks of what in science would be pseudo-science. If there is such a thing as pseudo-philosophy, this is it. *
Gary Merrill, Rand’s work: style and quality

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the negroes? *
Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny

On the natural interpretation, shared by everyone in mainstream economics from Samuelson to Stigler, this book [ The Road to Serfdom ], which argued that the policies advocated by the British Labour Party in 1944 would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, was a piece of misprediction comparable to Glassman and Hassett's Dow 36000. So what is going on in the minds of the buyers? Are they crazy? Do they actually think that Hayek was proven right after all? Is there a defensible interpretation of Hayek that makes sense? The answers are "Yes", "Yes" and "No". *
John Quiggan, Hayek's Zombie Idea

[...] in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. *
John Scalzi, What I Think About Atlas Shrugged

Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. *
John Scalzi, What I Think About Atlas Shrugged

Colbert Report should get an Emmy this year.

2012-01-15T10:28:00.000-05:00

His shenanigans with his pac, superpac, transferring the superpac and now candidacy are some of the most brilliant satire on our political system I've ever seen. His persona grates, but it is just amazing what he's doing with it.

What's new at the new site.

2012-01-02T19:58:00.000-05:00

I'm really growing to love the ease and speed with which I can add new materials to my web site. As people recommend new links, or as I stumble upon them in my blog browsing, I can add them in just a couple of minutes. The slowest thing is deciding which indexes they should be in, and whether and where to create new indexes.

So here's another week's casual additions. I have a huge backlog of other pages to review and add.

NEW 1/03/2012: Tyler Cowen on Subprime Lending [More...]: Tyler Cowan's ignorant misreading of the subprime lending crisis. [more...]

NEW 1/03/2012: Mercatus Center "Experts" on the Subprime Crisis [More...]: What Mercatus Center "scholars" wrote about subprime lending before the collapse, and how it was completely wrong. [more...]

NEW 1/02/2012: Yet More Corruption At The University Of Chicago... [More...]: Brad DeLong posts ad-hominem accusations of corruption from Robert Lucas, [Eugene Fama]] and Richard Posner. Sad, really. [more...]

NEW 1/01/2012: The Koch-Whore Archipelago: How The Billionaire Kochs Screwed My Scoop While Screwing America [More...]: Mark Ames describes how Koch supporters in the media attempted to discredit his reporting on Koch creation of the Tea Party. [more...]

Public Money for Public Purpose: Toward the End of Plutocracy and the Triumph of Democracy – Part VI [More...]: Dan Kervick proposes six challenging progressive tasks whose successful pursuit would help us achieve a more just, equal and democratic society. [more...]

Laissez Faire Capitalism Has Huge Faults: History shows pretty clearly that unregulated, unfettered capitalism is a brutal environment where wealth accumulates in the

hands of an elite leaving most people in poverty, deeply vulnerable to the inevitable economic shocks that follow. [more...]

Why Corporations Are Psychotic [More...]: David Niose points out that libertarians ought to reject corporate personhood and concentration of power. They are not a product of minimal government. [more...]

Corporations Are Government Creations: Libertarians love to whine about government handing our special privileges, but somehow seldom notice that corporations use special privileges to achieve social dominance. [more...]

What Does Ron Paul Stand For? [More...]: Bob Cesca lists "a wide variety of utterly horrific positions spanning nearly the entire spectrum of public policy -- positions that would cause significant harm, damage and destruction to the economy, to women, to minorities and to nearly everything progressives value." [more...]

What's new at the new site.

2011-12-27T09:08:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm working on producing a new, wiki-based site that is easier to maintain and develop than my old site. In the next year, I plan to update it with the resources from the old site, fixing the linkrot as I go. Only 500+ links and a few hundred quotations and a hundred or so references.

The new site has a large number of improvements: not least, you will be able to search all the externally linked articles as well as those in the wiki itself. It is re-indexed, with a nice top-level index that should make it easy to locate whatever you are looking for. I plan to write a number of additional FAQs. Lots of work to do!

Another nice feature is that I can cut and paste from the What's new page to here for discussions. Take a look, and have at it!

NEW 12/27/2011: The Many Non-Governmental Limitations Of Liberty: Libertarians like to claim only government limits liberty. But that's not what people experience. [more...]

NEW 12/27/2011: The liberty of local bullies [More...]: Noah Smith points out how libertarians are oblivious to commonplace coercion that isn't from government. Which makes it a favorite of local bullies who wish blessings upon their bullying. [more...]

NEW 12/17/2011: Keynes v. Hayek: Enough Already [More...]: David Glasner points out that Keynes and Hayek are "two charismatic personalities who have become figureheads or totems for ideological movements that they might not have endorsed at all". Glasner identifies Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel as accurate predictors of the great depression. [more...]

NEW 12/17/2011: Uncertainty And The Welfare Economics Of Medical Care [More...]: Kenneth Arrow's classic 1963 article that details the differences between the medical care industry and competitive market models. This is why privatizing health care does not work well. [more...]

NEW 12/16/2011: Murray Rothbards many errors about Keynes and probability [More...]: An examination of Murray Rothbard's comments on Keynes's logical approach to probability reveals that Rothbard was either a master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool.Either case is good grounds for eliminating M Rothbard from serious consideration as an economist or philospher. [more...]

NEW 12/16/2011: Daniel Kuehn: Maynard, Fred, Gus and Ralph on the History of Macroeconomics [More...]: Brad DeLong endorses Daniel Kuehn's criticism of the Keynes versus Hayek videos. [more...]

NEW 12/16/2011: G.O.P. Monetary Madness [More...]: Paul Krugman points out how incredibly wrong the predictions of Ron Paul and Austrian Economics have been about the tripling of the monetary base. [more...]

NEW 12/16/2011: Ron Paul: A libertarian congressman (and perennial long-shot presidential candidate) renowned for kooky racist, isolationist, goldbug and Austrian beliefs. Not to mention conservative civil and reproductive rights ideas 50 years out of date. Father of senator Rand Paul. [more...]

NEW 12/15/2011: Inequality: Libertarians have three dismissals for inequality: it is market-based just dessert, it is the fault of government, and it is unimportant. All three are wrong. [more...]

NEW 12/15/2011: Lord Keynes (pseudonym): Blogs "Social Democracy For The 21st Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective". Very well versed in Austrian Economics. [more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: Austrians Predicted the Housing Bubble? – But so did Post Keynesians and Marxists [More...]: Austrians claims to "predict" the housing bubble are given a thorough examination and a sound drubbing. Their claims just aren't credible.[more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: Libertarianism and the Leap of Faith – The Origins of a Political Cult: Philip Pilkington traces the evolution of the libertarian cult belief in the entrepreneur-hero from obscure 19th century debates over the source of value: very similar to the contemporaneous Communist cult beliefs. [more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: The Austrian Disease – Poor Scholarship, a Priori Bias: Philip Pilkington says "Praxeology is to the libertarians as diamat was to the Marxist-Leninists; an a priori pseudo-philosophy that allows them to ignore unwelcome evidence and insulate themselves from criticism" [more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: Americans For Nonsmokers Rights -- The Cato Institute [More...]: The intertwining of the Cato Institute and Big Tobacco for the promotion of smoking and the discrediting of science about smoking. [more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition -- Partner Organizations [More...]: LEAP lists 40 partner organizations, most of them mainstream and not libertarian, that ally with it in the goal of legalization and regulation of drugs. [more...]

NEW 12/14/2011: Journey into a Libertarian Future: Response to Reader Comments [More...]: Wrapup and responses to commenters on Andrew Dittmer's 6 part interview series. [more...]

Education as signalling

2011-12-11T15:45:00.001-05:00

I've been reading a lot of conservative criticisms of the expense of college, including our libertarian friends at ~~Koch~~ George Mason University. Often they complain that students don't actually learn anything useful in college and that degrees from universities are mostly about signaling who is preselected.

It is strange that conservatives and libertarians, fans of markets, would make such accusations. Because they immediately fail the test of markets. If it was true that no value was added by colleges and that employers think that selection process is valuable, then wouldn't employers be recruiting freshmen at colleges? Why would employers wait and pay a premium for a degree from a university when they can snag those same students earlier? And wouldn't students bite at the opportunity to avoid spending about $100,000 and earn perhaps $150,000 instead? Coming out ahead by $250,000 is a good way to start a life.

It's in the interests of plutocracy to place as much of the burden of educational costs in the private sector: that will maximally burden the middle class. Other wise the upper classes might have to pay taxes. The middle class is there to be exploited, in their viewpoint. They may attempt to hide their interests behind banners of "liberty, and hire GMU propagandists to wave them, but we don't have to sit still for it.

The demands of continuous existence.

2011-11-11T07:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a question for economists out there.

Would economics examples be significantly different if we start off understanding that people have a continuous demand for consumables such as food with no elasticity as we approach starvation? Do assumptions such as maximization and rationality still work the same way? What else changes? Does this cause discontinuities in models? This is a very important question for the 99% in many countries, and for close to 40% in the USA.

I don't know: I'm not an economist. If you don't have some sort of formal economics credentials, but insist on answering, please explain why you are qualified to answer.

Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman school Tyler Cowan

2011-10-10T12:13:00.000-04:00

Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman school Tyler Cowan

Bully for the Baltics?

2011-09-25T06:29:00.000-04:00

Bully for the Baltics?

Paul Krugman slaps down Tyler Cowen hard for repeatedly claiming that Ireland's recent performance is evidence against Keynesianism. This is a followup to Brad Delong's similar complaints. I don't notice any response from Cowan yet; normally, he is very quick to respond.

Very gratifying. Tyler is brilliant, smug, and a leading Koch tool. His job as an economist seems to be more to maintain a drumbeat of propaganda than to do any research of significance. If anybody has any evidence of the significance of his work (such as status by numbers of citations) I'd be interested to hear it.

Take for example his latest book, "The Great Stagnation". It is a classic example of lying with statistics. Cowen claims that our innovation is stagnating because median GDP/capita is not increasing the way it used to. But mean GDP/capita has been increasing steadily. The difference is because increases in GDP over the past 30 years have gone almost exclusively to the rich. This is clearly spelled out in There Is No Great Stagnation, Only Great Redistribution by Kindred Winecoff. It is disgusting that Tyler relies on a trick that we teach students about in grade school (the difference between mean, median, and mode), and even more disgusting that so many people have considered his claims seriously instead of denouncing the trick. Why would he do this? Simple class warfare tactics: if you convince people that wealth is not there, instead of being redistributed to the rich, they will not be able to fight back.

Cowen generally adopts denialist tactics for economic positions his masters oppose; if you cannot refute it legitimately then spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. (FUD)

I follow Cowen's (and Tabarrok's) high-volume blog "Marginal Revolution" daily. It's full of disgusting shout-outs to the libertarian faithful (such as "Markets in Everything") and links to the latest libertarian propaganda. But some leads from there are very useful or interesting: Cowen is well characterized as an infovore and popularizer. That's his good side.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Upton Sinclair

Addendum: Tyler responds in The luck of the Irish. In typical fashion, he moves the goalposts, and tries to make it a discussion of what Krugman predicted. Instead of defending his own position about whether Ireland's recent performance is evidence against Keynesianism. This may be good rhetorical strategy, but it is dishonest. To distract from the dishonesty, Tyler makes a show of "honestly" admitting his own predictions were wrong too (after a whole post claiming Krugman's were wrong.)

That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.

2011-09-17T08:43:00.000-04:00

That's how Ron Paul described his campaign manager's early, uninsured death.

However, "When he died on June 26, 2008, two weeks after Paul withdrew his first bid for the presidency, his hospital costs amounted to $400,000. The bill was handed to Snyder's surviving mother (pictured, left), who was incapable of paying. "

This is a classic case of libertarians claiming that they are taking their own risks, but somebody else ends up having to pay. There is a simple reason why libertarians routinely lie this way: their ideology claims they are independent, but the reality of human socialization is that we are interdependent in many ways. Through families, churches, friendships, professional associations, employment, etc. We routinely and informally assume responsibility for each other.

Recently, Brad DeLong wrote Economic Anthropology: David Graeber Meets the Noise Machine... where his comment was: "Indeed. It really looks from the anthropologists that Adam Smith was wrong--that we are not animals that like to "truck, barter, and exchange" with strangers but rather gift-exchange pack animals--that we manufacture social solidarity by gift networks, and those who give the most valuable gifts acquire status hereby."

I think DeLong is in error because the barter and gift paradigms are often both used. They are not exclusive. The error is to claim only one applies or that they are exclusive, and I doubt Adam Smith makes either of those particular errors.

When we are involved in gift networks (such as families) we are not independent: others are relying on us for future gifts and we "owe" for past gifts. This is one of the great blindnesses of libertarian ideology, and it explains why libertarians will not see as problems what normal people see as problems. One of my favorite examples is drug usage. That's why this Brain on Drugs public service announcement about heroin seems comical to libertarians, but makes sensible people cry. Gift networks are very emotion-laden. I haven't worked it out yet, but I think this ties in with the idea of libertarianism as applied autism.

Libertarianism In One Lesson: the Belorussian translation!

2011-06-12T10:35:00.000-04:00

Galina Miklosic has now translated Libertarianism In One Lesson into Belorussian. Do alert all your Belorussian-speaking friends.

Update 9/26: it's a scam, using Google Translate to fake human translation. I've removed the links that were the apparent objective of the scam.

Simple critique of Bitcoin

2011-05-18T09:41:00.003-04:00

For all its technotarian groovyness, Bitcoin suffers from classic private currency flaws that make it a scam.

Bitcoin MIGHT work if only it was able to be unique. But there is nothing to stop a proliferation of identical networked coinage systems. Even if it were patented, the patent would expire. With no intellectual property protection, we would see an unlimited set of identical citcoin, ditcoin, etceteracoin.

With no limit on the amount of identically created coinages, what could stop the precipitous decline in value? Trust in the original? What reason would anyone have to trust one more than another? The basic problem is that bitcoins are ENTIRELY speculative in value: there is no intrinsic value (such as a real-world use) to them at all except perhaps the value as a medium for exchange: but there is no scarcity of mediums for exchange, so no intrinsic value.

We've seen this in the past when private currencies were attempted. Without trust in the currency because of a backing in something with intrinsic value, it rapidly can become worthless. Bitcoin has no backing. Even if it had backing, insiders may remove the backing and leave the currency worthless.

Bitcoin relies on some computational artificial scarcity to claim that it won't explode in volume and thus inflate away to valueless. I'd have to see a clear explanation before I believed it, but even so the prospect of innumerable competing identical currencies would create the same problem.

Bitcoin looks like fool's gold to me. A classic scam of selling something that will eventually leave somebody holding a worthless currency.

[Added 6/3] Here is Adam Cohen's criticism of Bitcoin. The punchline:

"But Bitcoin is not designed to be a functioning currency, it's designed to enrich early adopters. Again, that is why it is a scam. Period."

[Added 6/19] There’s a Virus that Will Steal all Your Bitcoins The first of many, no doubt. The features of bitcoins that make them private will also make them difficult to recover when stolen. Who will be the first to cash in by offering bitcoin insurance against theft? One reason why public assets are valued is because their theft is obvious.

[Added 6/20] Bitcoin Prices Plummet on Hacked Exchange At the very least, there's a whole new world of flaws to shake out of the system. Note also that they have "rewound" the transactions to solve the problem: do you want your transactions subject to somebody else's "rewinding"? Note also that the user database was stolen and circulated publicly. So much for privacy.

Robots Evolve Altruism, Just as Biology Predicts

2011-05-08T07:52:00.000-04:00

Robots Evolve Altruism, Just as Biology Predicts

Ayn Rand denied altruism, and used examples of robots in her "philosophy". How fitting this is as another stake in the heart of that bizarre pseudophilosophy objectivism.

Open Thread.

2011-04-23T07:24:00.002-04:00

The last open thread has worked out pretty well, with some interesting questions still popping up.

So here's a new one! It would be good to keep them fairly fresh.

Question about the Libertarian Party

2011-04-18T07:05:00.000-04:00

The LP has always been a creation of the Koch's, and has periodically been purged when attempts have been made to stray from Koch-approved dogmas.

Since the success of the Kochs of swaying the Republican Party with their Tea Party insurrection, have they ignored the LP? Is it possible that the reform caucus has a chance of freeing the LP from the tyrannical hand of the Kochs?

See the Libertarian Reform Caucus for a colorful display of pseudoscientific diagrams illustrating their general approach.

I Pencil: A product of the mixed economy

2011-04-17T11:49:00.000-04:00

I Pencil: A product of the mixed economy

The excellent John Quiggan puts up a response to Leonard Read’s I, Pencil.

I, Pencil is an extensive piece of invisible hand propaganda that by directing you only to the vastly complex network of market resources mobilized in creating pencils, misdirects you away from the equally complex network of government resources that enable those market resources.

Rand Justice For All

2011-04-17T11:35:00.000-04:00

Rand Justice For All

A Slowpoke cartoon lampooning the limited definition of freedom preferred by Rand Paul and other libertarians.

Beingism response to economic conservatisms such as libertarianism.

2011-04-17T08:22:00.000-04:00

Myths about Economic Conservatism

Beingism is a new, liberalish philosophy that describes itself as wanting changes that would be "consistent with some form of Libertarian Socialism".

The title strikes me as misleading: it would be more accurate to describe it as "44 Myths Spread By Economic Conservatives". It's long, and many of the points are compatible with my own criticisms in Critiques Of Libertarianism and those of the late Steve Kangas in Liberalism Resurgent.

Most of the myths are also discussed as inline YouTube videos.

Rand Paul humor

2011-04-17T08:05:00.000-04:00

Rand Paul to Demonstrate Commitment to Ayn Rand Philosophy By Removing Under-Performing Parts of His Own Body

The title says it all. Hat tip to an email contributor. (I have to be careful about naming some contributors because they are concerned about conservative bosses. If you would like to be creditied, please let me know: I want to err on the side of caution.)

Non-Libertarian FAQ: the Belorussian translation!

2011-04-04T17:55:00.000-04:00

Every now and then I get a request if somebody may translate my FAQ into another language. There should be a Chinese version out there somewhere, though nobody has told me where.

Bohdan Zograf has now translated The Non-Libertarian FAQ into Belorussian. Do alert all your Belorussian-speaking friends.

According to wikipedia, the Belorussian language is spoken by 4 to 9 million people.

Update 9/26: it's a scam, using Google Translate to fake human translation. I've removed the links that were the apparent objective of the scam.

Open thread.

2011-03-25T05:58:00.000-04:00

A large number of other blogs use open threads, so perhaps I should try one.

Bring up your own points, ask questions, propose discussion threads, lurkers make yourselves known, etc.

Good economics from India

2011-03-05T12:47:00.000-05:00

Good economics from India

From Angus Sibley at www.equilibrium-economicum.net.

Sibley provides a brief summation of why Amartya Sen rejects market fundamentalism in favor of his Capabilities Approach. Market fundamentalism might be good if all we wanted to do is maximize total wealth. Instead, he proposes maximizing human wellbeing, a radically different goal that takes into account positive freedoms.

The Capabilities Approach can in some ways be viewed a an extended reformulation of modern liberalism, and it is perhaps the most important political/philosophical development of the 20th century. Martha Nussbaum has a new book out describing it, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Capabilities is a good way to make sure that everybody benefits from society. The book is not the best read you'll encounter, but the ideas are great.

Encyclopedia Dramatica on libertarianism

2011-03-05T12:15:00.002-05:00

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Libertarian

A lengthy, humorous take on libertarianism from many angles, and well worth chortling over.

FDR and unions.

2011-02-27T11:43:00.001-05:00

Assorted right wingers and libertarians are claiming justification for Wisconsin union bashing in a quotation from FDR:

"... the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."

Our course, this is a quotation out of context. Look in the original letter.

FDR affirms the place of unions in government as well as private industry. He is cautioning against strikes by government employee unions as a tool of collective bargaining the way they are used in bargaining with private industry. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. He argues that the special purposes of government make them inappropriate. He points out: It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."

This is not in any way like stripping bargaining rights from unions in government. Indeed, many states have laws that forbid government employee unions from striking, yet still have strong unions that are able to negotiate. It would be more just for those laws to balance the loss of rights to strike with limitations of government abuses of that advantage, but that's not the case that I'm aware of.

Sweatshops

2011-02-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

Libertarians are notorious defenders of sweatshops. Kevin Wayne, in a comment, brought up this excellent resource:

A Consensus Statement on Sweatshop Abuse and MIT’s Prospective Actions in Pursuit of International Labor Justice

Wisconsin

2011-02-24T12:41:00.000-05:00

Hungarian socialist political economist Karl Polanyi made the antitheical argument to Hayek in the book The Great Transformation. Polanyi wrote that an uncontrolled free market would lead to repressive economic concentration and then to a co-opting of democratic governance that degrades civil rights.

Three generations of human rights

People Who Piss Me Off: Libertarians

2011-02-22T16:43:00.000-05:00

People Who Piss Me Off: Libertarians

Not deep, but heartfelt and enjoyable.

Why does college cost so much?

2011-02-19T19:01:00.000-05:00

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen puts up a post titled Why does college cost so much?

This is a common right-wing meme, aimed at generating discontent with the intellectual class and used as an excuse to review all the normal libertarian ways of blaming any problem on government. And you can tell, because Tyler and his claque ignore the obvious facts about the market.

First, we know there is a huge market failure because statistics have always shown that the increases in lifetime earning AFTER a college education more than pays for the costs of the education. In an efficient market, the marginal cost of an extra degree should equal the marginal increase in lifetime earnings. That's why it is efficient for society to pay even for the education of the mentally challenged, if you view the expense of caring for them to be reduced by education. We probably should be spending significantly more on education because ignorance is the costly alternative.

Second, the assaults on the middle class and increased demand for highly educated workers have, if anything, made this market failure even larger by continuing to reward education with increased lifetime earnings.

Third, we expect the price to increase until it reaches what the market can bear. That's why private colleges charge such enormous and increasing tuitions.

Fourth, the education market suffers from other fundamental market failures which keep it dominated by non-profit institutions at almost all levels except nursery schools and trade schools worldwide. We've seen innumerable for-profit educational enterprises attempted and fail. It's not "barriers to entry" worldwide. And it's not "barriers to entry" in the USA: private non-profits are started successfully at all levels all the time. State universities, state colleges, and community colleges have enlarged tremendously.

While I often get something interesting out of Tyler's posts, I think of him as employed to keep feeding a steady stream of libertarian propaganda through his blog. Much of the time, all he has to do is point and his commenters complete the task for him. And that's what we see here.

Ron Paul Versus the Kochtopus.

2011-02-10T05:46:00.000-05:00

Monetary Policy Hearing Today, or: Ron Paul Versus the Kochtopus.

From Rortybomb, a brief glimpse into the Rothbardian faction's (paleolibertarians such as Rothbard, Mises, Rockwell, Paul) view of the Kock brothers' faction.

Academic tendencies.

2011-02-09T06:06:00.000-05:00

"Academic bias" is another right-wing "When did you stop beating your wife" term. Using the term, even in defense, just repeats and ingrains the accusation.

Is there an academic tendency towards liberalism? Very likely, and for the same reason there is a tendency towards liberalism amongst mothers. Both are charged with a non-profit-making task, the development of children into responsible, educated, more independent adults. Both understand that they need to get the resources for this task from others without shackling the children into servitude in exchange. That means redistribution, bane of conservatives.

Some people have noticed that economics has the most conservative academics of all. Small wonder: economics departments have been the special recipients of conservative-funded welfare for long periods of time. The U. of Chicago and George Mason University famously have capitalist-funded economics departments, and the financial industry is a notorious funder of economics research. There is nothing comparable on the liberal side. There is a huge feeder system for conservative economics, with vast amounts of public propaganda promoting "free markets", chambers of commerce, innumerable think-tanks, and outreach programs to exceptional students that is unparalleled by moderates or liberals.

The biggest pot of money in the world.

2011-02-05T07:45:00.000-05:00

About thirty years ago, it occurred to me that the baby boomer's retirement savings would be the biggest pot of money that the world has ever seen. It would consist primarily of (a) savings and investment (b) home ownership and (c) social security: the "tripod" system (that we used for nuclear deterrence as well, with bombers, submarines, and ICBMs.)

Using this simplistic model, I predicted for myself that there would be bubbles in investments as demand for retirement investments grew bigger and bigger. I was right. I didn't forsee bubbles in housing: I'm not that economically astute. And we've all witnessed decades of conservative and libertarian attempts to plunder Social Security by reducing obligations or abolishing it.

The problem with a pot of money is that everybody else wants to take money out of it. This has been very successfully done with investments as 401K's became 201K's with stock market bubbles. Even with a conservative portfolio of money market funds and index funds, I have lost money over the past decade, and I am not unusual. The boomer's retirements are being systematically pilfered in the investment system; they are averaging below market growth, negative growth when inflation is taken into account. Likewise, the recent housing bubble has taken a huge hunk of boomer retirement assets.

Where is the anger? This is the greatest opportunity for rebuilding a liberal movement in opposition to conservatism that we've had in decades. Unlike tea party themes, this one is valid.

In addition, we're shorting the intergenerational compact by shorting funding for the needs and development of children. We are horribly and predictably underfunding investment in education by reducing public funding of higher education and public education. No other developed nations are so shortsighted. The beneficiaries of these awful policies are not other generations: this is class warfare by the super rich who have been promoting these policies for decades.

Egyptian Internet

2011-01-29T07:01:00.000-05:00

A favorite civil liberties quote by John Gilmore:

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Libertarians have often paraded that hopeful message as gospel, but Egypt shows that it isn't true.

I've heard civil defense proposals that cell phones should act as text relay stations so that even if towers and satellites are down (say during a hurricane, other natural disaster, or human-made disaster) you can still communicate. I think it is a great idea for a standard, but there are two major reasons why it would be opposed strongly:

(1) First, the idea that people could communicate electronically at some base level without having to pay phone companies will be opposed by the entire communications industry.

(2) Governments will oppose uncensorable and unspyable communications. Including the US government, which has required all mass communications media to be legally spyable with a court order and routinely intercepts and processes all mass communications anyway.

The US internet and (cell) phone services could just as easily be shut down.

In actuality, civil defense phones could be shut down just as easily with denial of service attacks. It's hard to think of a two-way mass communications system that couldn't be shut down with denial of service attacks.

The solution is a citizenry that is attentive to good government, and seeks to change bad features. Libertarianism doesn't solve that problem, because it has no method for deciding what constitutes good government, good life, or anything else.

Austrian Economics: an example of greedy reductionism.

2011-01-22T08:40:00.000-05:00

Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett for pretense of explanation in simpler terms while ignoring or underestimating enormous complexities or layers of understanding.

Cosma Shalizi, in Must Macroeconomic Theories Have Microfoundations?, explains seven ways people insisting on microfoundations (which I think includes Austrians insisting on "action" or "rational man" explanations) are foolish or go wrong.

Brad DeLong (who does permit comments) notices and calls attention to a physics aspect of the article in The Microfoundations of Condensed Matter Physics Was a Doomed Research Program Until the 1920s. The comments are well worth reading.

The pseudoscience of libertarian morality.

2010-12-19T10:23:00.000-05:00

Ronald Bailey, in The Science of Libertarian Morality (an article in Reason) directs us to:

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology by Ravi Iyer et al. Which, by the way, bases one of its "predictions" on the title of Reason. And thus the echo chamber is closed.

The fundamental fallacy of this paper purporting to discuss "psychological roots" that surveys DEVELOPED attitudes is that they do not consider the indoctrination process. Libertarians differ strongly from liberals and conservatives in that they are heavily indoctrinated at early ages. Ask a 25 year old how many liberal, conservative, or libertarian books they've read. Most liberal and conservative 25 year olds will say very few if any, but we know that the libertarians will reel off a list starting with Ayn Rand, the Friedman's, etc. You might just as well ask where Catholic ideas about God come from compared to atheists: it's the indoctrination, stupid.

If they truly wanted to study "psychological roots", they should start with 16 year olds (most of whom have no idea of libertarianism) and observe how they change with time.

They make the ridiculous "prediction" that "Libertarians will value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns." That's about as serious as predicting that "Zombies will value eating brains more strongly and consistently than humans, at the expense of other moral concerns." They cite the writings of Ayn Rand as a source for this prediction: I must then cite Dawn Of the Dead, I suppose.

Another huge problem is that they have really drunk the Kool-Aid of adopting libertarian terminology and propaganda claims throughout their paper.

Take, for example, "It is clear, then, that libertarians cannot be readily classified on the standard left-right dimension." No, that is not at all clear as anybody familiar with Lakoff 2002 would know. Lakoff clearly places libertarians in the conservative (right) end of the scale. They cite Lakoff 2002 just a few paragraphs earlier, but haven't the wits or honesty to admit that some real academics disagree. Nor is it clear that there is a single definition of "the standard left-right dimension."

The methodology is also highly susceptible to spoofing: they've used an internet survey site open to anybody. As anyone from Pharyngula would know, it is easy to send droves of readers with similar points of view over to any poll. And it took me about two minutes to find the first example of libertarians being steered over to it: "If you’re interested in answering that question, and consider yourself libertarian, register at yourmorals.org and take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire."

What we have here is an attitude survey of libertarians which is larded by repetition of standard libertarian talking points with no academic credibility. These talking points are the product of decades-long public relations campaigns, which (among other things) rely on incessant repetition of propaganda. Funding of this "study" by an investment banker strongly suggests to me that this is just another excuse to repeat propaganda yet again.

I will be very interested to see where this "study" gets published.

Does School Choice "Work"?

2010-12-13T18:23:00.000-05:00

Does School Choice "Work"

Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute gives a surprisingly lukewarm answer of "barely, and much less than had been promised." After more than 20 years of efforts, you'd think we'd see some clear results, but they are really equivocal.

And it's precisely what opponents predicted based on the fact that very few schools are in any way significantly different than public schools. They tend to draw from the same pool of teachers, texts, administrators, and students. They tend to teach to the same requirements.

My personal opinion (as a public school teacher) is that almost all of the low-hanging fruit for school improvement has long since been picked. Class sizes have been reduced. Early learning opportunities for preschoolers have been greatly increased by educational television, good day care and more preschool. Disabilities are tested for and recognized much earlier, before much harm is done. Many of the social issues such as equal access, integration, language barriers, cultural insensitivity, and access for the handicapped have been dealt with. These are huge improvements since the 70s.

And all these have been done by public schools, without bashing teachers or public schools, and with the enthusiastic support of teachers.

They have been unsuccessfully blocked by conservatives who (a) want to maintain patterns of class and racial discrimination (b) don't want to spend the money or (c) want public institutions to fail so that their religious alternatives look good. These are many of the same people who are agitating for school choice and a host of other attacks on traditional public schooling.

Enormous pressure is put on administrators and school boards to keep improving public schools, but you can only get so much blood from a stone no matter how hard you squeeze.

The remaining big, relatively easy improvement in education will come from parents creating better family environments that encourage learning. Train parents to inspire their children to be well educated, and to perform the needed supervision to keep students on track in their studies. There is huge room for parental improvement, and we should vigorously explore public and private options for providing training and inspiration for parents.

It would also help if there is a promising economy that can provide jobs for all the educated: our 10% unemployment rate does not inspire scholarship. Imagine if we promised employment opportunities to anybody with a HS diploma as a form of social insurance, with government counter-cyclicly providing useful low-wage jobs when the private sector does not (such as in a recession.) That would be a HUGE incentive to graduate.

World's Biggest Writing

2010-11-25T20:11:00.000-05:00

World's Biggest Writing

Time for a contest for the world's biggest ridicule.

This bozo claims he drove a route that mapped out the message "Read Ayn Rand" across the USA.

Just what is he compensating for? Snigger.

All that driving because he wouldn't ask for directions, and relied on "Wrong Way" Rand.

Judging from the picture, he lost his crayon and so decided to write it bigger.

The hi-tech equivalent of writing in the snow.

You try too: think of some creative ridicule for the comments.

(Hat tip to Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature)

What Is Libertarianism?

2010-10-09T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a new page for my site. Here's a preliminary version, for comment, criticism and suggestions.

What Is Libertarianism?
It's obvious that definitions of libertarianism by opponents are prone to bias. By the same standard, self-serving definitions by proponents are also prone to bias. The simple solution is to present multiple viewpoints, each true to some degree, to construct a picture of the whole. The story of The Blind Men and the Elephant illustrates how ridiculous clinging to a single viewpoint can be, and how building a more realistic picture would require critical acceptance of multiple viewpoints. Viewpoints of proponents of libertarianism are well known; here are some viewpoints of opponents.

* A Rhetoric Of Liberty

Libertarianism is united only by a rhetoric of liberty. "Liberty" is the central glittering generality of libertarian propaganda.

Who can reject "liberty"? That makes it a powerful rhetorical tool; as long as you don't start getting specific. Different people have different ideas of liberty, and can divide over those issues. The defense against attempts to get specific is "equal liberty", but that rhetoric also begs important questions. We all might have equal liberty to kill each other, but do we want such liberty?

"Liberty" unspecified is vague enough to justify any atrocity. We routinely see libertarians promoting Barry Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." In the name of liberty, John Galt plans genocides dwarfing those of Communist states in "Atlas Shrugged". In actual history, liberty to own slaves was a frequent claim. Liberty to head your own family and religious liberty excused beating wives and disobedient children, sometimes fatally.

"Liberty" is the rhetorical tool of choice that unites libertarians: it can back any claim they make, no matter how bizarre. Libertarians have no single claim in common except this rhetoric, and they can gloss over their conflicting beliefs through the persuasion of their own rhetoric of liberty.

* A Rightwing Populist Movement In Miniature

While libertarians may profess socially left ideas such as freedom of choice, their right-conservatism becomes obvious if you ask them what parts of the right-wing economic agenda they'd be willing to sacrifice to realize their left social goals. They just won't give up their opposition to government and taxation, nor will they give up their allegiance to absolute property. No matter what social goals you propose in exchange.

* A Childish Selfishness

Libertarianism is a tiny movement of people who primarily want (a) to freeload on society by not contributing their share (b) to avoid social prohibitions and (c) want to lock in their good fortune. It's really that simple: all the supposed philosophy is really just after-the-fact (post hoc) rationalization. Everything springs from the childish "I don't wanna pay", "I wanna do that anyhow" and "no, it's mine!"

* A Catspaw For Corporations

A great deal of libertarian literature is written by corporate hirelings. Sure they can throw in the occasional socially liberal complaint about warmongering to genuflect towards the purported ideology, but they do NOT bite the corporate hand that feeds them. Otherwise they'd be pointing out that corporations are government creations of special privilege, and asking that they be abolished the way they ask that public schools be abolished. And those authors would be looking for new jobs, as we've seen so often from think-tanks. Professional libertarians tend to be reliant on the corporate right-wing welfare employment of think-tanks, lobbying and astroturf organizations.

The liberty these corporate hirelings write of is generally the liberty desired by corporations, not the liberty desired by ordinary people. Hence we see propaganda such as the "Index of Economic Freedoms".

* A Long-Running Public Relations Campaign

The extent of libertarianism today is largely the result of decades-long public relations campaigns that have been working on insinuating libertarian ideas throughout our society. The time, the ambition and the resources applied over the past 60 years are extraordinary. Generations of propagandists, scholars, lobbyists, think-tanks, astroturf organizations and political parties have been financed by large corporations and billionaires.

They have attempted (quite successfully) to subvert the language, to pack propaganda into textbooks and academic publications, to subvert science (smoking, pollution and global warming), to create intellectual shock troops to disperse their propaganda, to stack the legal system with specially trained judges, to direct politicians with think-tank plans and offers of revolving-door employment, and a host of other activities.

Because "he who pays the piper calls the tunes", the result is that libertarianism has benefitted major corporations and billionaires far more than it has benefitted the middle-class pot smoker (now approaching lower class.)

* Philosophical Fairytales

There are three dominant libertarian fairytales. They are natural rights, the Nozickian night-watchman state, and Objectivism. All three are non-positivist: they are not founded on observable facts and just plain make stuff up that contradicts what's known of reality. Each has produced large, complicated apologetics that attempt to explain away their myriad failings. Like science, they create models, but unlike science their models cannot be validated because they presume the unobservable.

Most libertarian authors rely on natural rights.[1] Natural rights were originally invented to oppose stories such as rights of kings. They are "nonsense on stilts" that is as popular, insubstantial and unprovable as souls.

The supposedly just and non-coercive Nozickian minimal state of Anarchy, State and Utopia is notorious for its failure to justify initial acquisition of property, the basis of the entire scheme. The whole thing appeals to gut feelings as fallaciously as Steven Colbert does, starting with the first sentence: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights.)"

Objectivism starts with the fairytale of a priori knowledge. "A is A", for example. But that doesn't work for the real world, because the real world has time: A at time 1 is not necessarily the same as A at time 2. It's never the same water in the river, and even protons can spontaneously decay. There is no supposed a priori knowledge that doesn't have this basic sort of problem.

* A Justification of Personal Righteousness

Which emphasizes the notion of virtue in selfishness and has as its historical genesis the exceptional American experience. As such, it appeals mostly to white American males who are moderately above-average in intelligence, economically secure, independently-minded, and prefer simplistic theoretical constructs for making political and moral decisions. It validates their own affluence/privilege not by group affiliation, but by inherent individual merit; and it likewise superficially validates the poverty and lack of privilege of others not on the basis of group affiliation, but inherent fault. In this it mimics a meritocratic view, which allows the libertarian to congratulate himself on his lack of bigotry; but, in fact, it is a facade behind which his true bigotry hides. Keith M Ellis

* A Simplistic Ideology

Kevin Carson calls this "vulgar libertarianism": "Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get." Simple rules for identifying friends and enemies, righteous and unrighteous. Private or public? Statist or freedom loving? Individualist or collectivist? Market or coercive? Ignorant or enlightened? Libertarians portray themselves as elite because of their ideological righteousness: but they are really just the bosses favorites, the house slaves. Read some Atlas Shrugged to learn that mentality.

* A Blinkered Ideology

Libertarianism is often easy to recognize by the things it will not consider. For example: market failures, public goods, benefits from government, benefits from spending tax money, deadweight costs from private sources, threats to liberty from private sources, rights other than property rights, values other than economic values, social harms from private actions (such as drug usage), anything but methodological individualism, Keynesianism, etc.

Shunning these ideas is essential for "consistency" in the beliefs of many libertarians. If you don't admit contrary data, your theory is unfalsifiable.

* A Cargo Cult

Many libertarians expect gifts from the sky if they perform the right philosophical rituals: surrender of political rights, surrender of all government property claims, etc.

They wish us to hand over political sovereignty of the richest, most powerful nation in the world. They wish us to hand over the lands, roads, and other property held in common by the government. They wish us to hand over the biggest pot of money in the world: social security funds for the retirement of essentially the entire US population.

What do they offer the rest of us for these enormous gifts? Nothing. They do not expect us to do it as an exchange, but as a magical summoning. They summon these gifts magically by re-interpreting liberal philosophy and Constitutions.

* A Millennialist Cult

Many libertarians think they can promise pie-in-the-sky in libertarian heaven. In the libertarian future we would all be amply repaid for having had the faith to bring about the fabulously free and wealthy libertopia where the privately owned streets are paved with gold, a gun in every pot field, etc. They have the unrealistic assumption that if they succeed, they will have an advantage because they learned libertarian principles first. But in reality, a class of oligarchs would quickly form as they did in Russia, leaving the majority in much worse condition. The large middle classes we enjoy are a result of government programs promoting equality. They do not occur otherwise.

* Technological Utopianism

Much libertarian literature relies on technology to create their fantasy world, usually by creating a new frontier. Heinlein and others relied on space travel to open a new frontier. Transhumanists look forward to recreating humans to develop new frontiers. Many libertarian authors write of a forthcoming singularity in technological development. Seasteaders look forwards to marine frontiers in international waters. Rand relied on fictional technology to conceal Galt's community.

What they all miss is that creation of a new frontier doesn't change those left behind into a libertarian society. And as the frontier matures, density and competition will bring about the same problems that led to the governance that libertarians object to, the same as happened in other frontiers in the past. Libertarianism might "work" on the edges of expansion, but creates problems that grow until a government solution is needed.

* Conclusion

No one libertarian exemplifies all of these viewpoints, nor do any of these viewpoints match all libertarians. There might be a libertarian who doesn't match any of these viewpoints.

But it is easy to find libertarians who are well-described by any these characterizations. A large, diverse ideology such as libertarianism requires large, diverse description the same way blind men describing an elephant used a lot of analogies.

Some of these characterizations are repulsive: hurrah for the libertarian who avoids matching the repulsive ones. There aren't too many of them in print because the vast majority of libertarian authors are sponsored by corporate funding (especially the Koch brothers) or rely on philosophical fairytales. A great many libertarians are repulsed by each other for one or more of these problems.

* References

1 David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer pp.82-87

Top 10 Jobs in Libertarian Paradise

2010-10-02T19:00:00.002-04:00

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/9/26/905375/-Top-10-Jobs-in-Libertarian-Paradise

Regulation Vacation Celebration: "Somalia: Libertarian Paradise"

2010-10-02T18:36:00.000-04:00

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

2010-09-18T07:55:00.000-04:00

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

Tony Endres' scathing review of Rothbard's magnum opus. "Rothbard has produced two volumes which are highly jaundiced and purblind." From History of Economics Review.

This is in three indexes: reviews, revisionism, and austrianism.

Endres honestly recognizes some strengths in Rothbard's work, but explains the major failing to be Quentin Skinner's described "mythology of doctrines": finding hints or glimmers of the true doctrine throughout history and damning those without them.

Evolution Is Far Freer Than Classical Liberalism

2010-09-04T15:12:00.000-04:00

Evolution Is Far Freer Than Classical Liberalism

P. Z. Meyers (of Paryngula fame) savages Larry Arnhart's ahistorical claims in CATO Unbound that evolution supports classical liberalism.Further followup here.

Added to the Libertarian Revisionist History index.

Channelling political energy.

2010-09-01T08:57:00.000-04:00

In the gilded era, worker unrest was channeled by management into ethnic and racial competition (until unionism broke that game and allowed workers to unite.) Management divided work into black jobs and Irish jobs, for example, so that the groups could fight over what work they were entitled to instead of uniting to demand better working conditions and higher wages.

Many other passions are channelled in our society: lust for competition is channelled into business competition and sports.

Can we do the same for conservative populism? Can we divide the factions and pit them against each other in a more effective manner?

Have we been doing it all along?

Has Koch money broken the traditional divisions, allowing conservative populists to unite in the Tea Party? Koch money has been indoctrinating shock troops for almost 40 years, readying them to take control of populist movements with a unified antigovernment ideology. Students are targeted with tiny little grants to inflate the importance of the indoctrination. Endless founts of think-tank propaganda are created, all funded for the same goals by the same money, to drive conservatives into the arms of these Koch-spawned leaders.

We've seen inevitable-looking surges of right-wing influence before: one was called the Reagan Era. Sooner or later they founder on the practical experience of their idiocy and harms: they produce their own opposition.

The question is, how do we hasten that opposition along and then keep them divided again?

Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

2010-08-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

Jane Mayer's The New Yorker article on Charles and David Koch. They have financed libertarian propaganda with more than 100 million dollars over more than 30 years. They founded and control the major libertarian think tanks Cato, Reason, Mercatus, and others. See: Koch think tanks at SourceWatch.

Posted in the Criticisms of the Cato Institute and Criticisms of George Mason U. Economics (and Mercatus) indexes.

Space Cadets

2010-08-09T08:26:00.000-04:00

Space Cadets

Charlie Stross, the SF author, points out the fact that space colonization is incompatible with libertarian ideology, contrary to innumerable SF stories by major authors such as Heinlein.

That's to be expected: it's also incompatible with all historical society anyhow. But there are particular circumstances involved in space.

Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets

2010-08-03T10:48:00.000-04:00

Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, looks like a really good read. This link leads to the introductory chapter, via Google Books.

She has the useful idea of noxious markets, which have one or more of the following characteristics:

* vulnerability (must take whatever bargain you're offered because cannot afford not to)

* weak agency (poor information or influence on economic decisions)

* extremely harmful outcomes for individuals (contract killings, for example)

* extremely harmful outcomes for society (vote buying, for example)

In such cases, she discusses alternatives such as blocking the market or alleviating the problems that arise.

Wealthcare: the Cult of Ayn Rand

2010-08-03T07:55:00.000-04:00

Wealthcare: the Cult of Ayn Rand

Jonanthan Chait's big-picture view of Objectivism's influence after reading the two Rand biographies. I would have posted this when it first came out, but it was difficult to find an ungated version.

Posted to the Reviews Of Books Related To Libertarianism and Criticisms of Objectivism (or Ayn Rand) indexes.

Here's the money line:
"But the basic inverted Marxism at the heart of her ideology has become the central focus of both modern conservative thought and Republican policy-making. (That ideology holds that the world is fundamentally divided between virtuous creators of wealth and lazy parasites, the identity of whom is the reverse of what Marx believed.)"

TheLowlyPhilosopher's foolish defense of the Austrians.

2010-07-27T19:27:00.001-04:00

It's always amusing to me what bad assumptions people make when interpreting my arguments, and it is particularly funny when somebody who styles themselves a philosopher is so dreadfully incautious. And sometimes I really enjoy performing a good, vicious fisking.

In a response to my Parable of the ship: why Austrian Economics fails, TheLowlyPhilosopher wrote:

After perusing this blog and in particular reading the entry, The Parable of the Ship: Why Austrian Economics Fails among others, I felt that if there were others who read this blog in general, and in particular the Parable of Ship and (even though this was originally posted over a year ago) it would be beneficial to offer some criticisms of Mike Huben’s general “philosophical belief system” or rather perhaps what he would prefer should be labeled, his “scientific belief system” and in particular his claims concerning science versus philosophy.

What beneficent intentions! I'm sure we will all be incredibly grateful. Not.

Although I have taken some undergraduate economics I do not pretend to be an expert in Economics. My education is in Philosophy (primarily epistemology, logic and the philosophy of language). And it is from this philosophical education that I believe that Mr. Huben asserts views that are quite simply mistaken.

Please don't tell us where you learned your philosophy: they might be quite ashamed.

I will proceed with offering criticism of direct quotations that Mr. Huben espoused in the Parable of the Ship blog entry.

Those quotations being:

1) “But the great fault of Austrianism is that it is not scientific. Science is a better way of knowing than philosophy, because scientific theories have to explain close to all the scientifically collected data. For all the faults of conventional economics, it is far closer to a science than Austrianism because it relies heavily on data.”

2) “Since Austrians are innumerate, instead they must rely on their assumptions, which needless to say tend to have a very right wing bias. Science does not work that way. Nor can Austrians really defend their assumptions: no assumption about the real world is totally true which means that there is fallacy in all their logic about the real world.”

3) “This is not a new position: it is basic to science and ought to be basic to philosophy. Hume said it very clearly 260 years ago: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

4) “When confronted with real-world problems that could have multiple causes, logical verbal models are insufficient. You MUST introduce measurement and mathematics into your models if you want to have any hope of valid answers. Logical verbal models are sufficient to specify possible chains (or networks) of causation, but telling which are significant is a quantitative problem that requires measurement.”

5) “Your faith in philosophy is touching. Science is much better explained anthropologically than by philosophy.”

From 1) “Science is a better way of knowing than philosophy”. That seems a rather strange statement to make. To know something, is to know something that presumably is true. Whether it is known philosophically or scientifically seems irrelevant. If something is known to be true it is true, is it not?

Step number one for the philosopher: start with a howling blunder. I explain to my students that science is about honesty and validity: if they want truth, they must go to mathematics.

IMHO, science is better than philosophy because it is VALID: it works repeatably in the real world.

Mr. Huben additionally states, “scientific theories have to explain close to all the scientifically collected data.” Notice the use of the qualifier “close to all”. Thus by his own admission Mr. Huben admits that science does not explain all of the collected data. What we call Science at best is no doubt, a very useful conjecture or theory that does not completely explain all the observations.

Ah, the illegitimate demand for perfection. As opposed to how much philosophy explains?

It's common knowledge, that I present to all my students, that science MODELS reality, and that the models give approximations of the measurements we take. And often we have pretty good ideas of how close the approximations are and why they are only that close. If only philosophy was that humble, and if only philosophers had the concept of confidence interval.

Indeed this is what philosophers of science particularly Popper argue; that science is open-ended. Science progresses by falsification. Indeed this is how we have changes in our scientific theory. It is by trying to fit new unexplained and incoherent observations into our present theory and when these observations contradict our present theory we must alter our theory. Kuhn also argued along theses lines when he talked of the Paradigms of science.

If you take Popper as gospel, you are either showing your ignorance of other philosophy of science or your bias.

From 2) If we actually take Mr. Huben’s argument to its logical conclusion (Science which by the way was once called “Natural Philosophy”) we must ask how can science be totally true?

After all does not Mr. Huben state that “no assumption about the real world is totally true” Then why are science’s assumptions accepted to be totally true?

Or perhaps Mr. Huben would claim that science is purely empirical, indeed when he quotes David Hume he appears to be arguing this. But perhaps he forgot the Philosopher Immanuel Kant who said

“But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through our impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge supplies from itself…Whether there is any knowledge that is thus independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses. Such knowledge is entitled a priori. And distinguished from the empirical, which has its sources a posteriori that is in experience.”

From The Critique of Pure Reason

Your belief in a priori knowledge is touchingly naive. I consider it a philosophical superstition, just as souls are.

The point is that to believe that the only valid knowledge is empirical or rather scientific is quite simplistic as Kant quite well pointed out.

Are you actually so simplistic as to think all philosophers agree with Kant, and that 200+ years of scientific learning about the nature of cognitive experience supports his superstition?

But perhaps Mr.Huben would claim that science has no a priori assumptions, which is patently false. The question is Mr. Huben, how can science prove itself to be true?

You entirely misunderstand the intentions of science, which CERTAINLY are not to "prove itself to be true". Science is about modeling the world around us as accurately as possible.

Ultimately (induction, science, a posteriori knowledge) and (deduction, logic, a priori knowledge) both are systems that have axioms, principles, postulates, premises that in themselves are not proved to be true but are accepted to be true. Why is science (induction) inherently more conducive to the acquisition of truth than a priori deduction? If you reject a priori deduction (which is admittedly what Austrian economics is built upon) than you must reject the a priori premises that science (induction) is also built upon. But Mr. Huben does not do this. Why the inconsistency?

For the simple reason that truth is not the goal. But you're to dim to understand that: you project the foolish goals of philosophy upon science.

As the philosopher Wittgenstein said, in his work On Certainty

189. “At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description.”

192. “To be sure there is justification: but justification comes to an end.”

253 “At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.”

You don't "believe" in models. You accept or reject them based on whether they are accurate enough to beat out other models. Certainty is hardly an objective of science. Science is heuristic, not certain.

341 “That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

342 That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.”

If some things are not doubted in science, it is because evidence justifying doubt would be quickly communicated.

474 “ This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground.”

The point of these examples is to refute the notion that science is not based on a priori principles (something that Mr.Huben criticizes Austrian Economics for).

Science is not based on a priori principles for the simple reason that a priori principles are a superstition.

All events have causes is the axiom that science is built upon,

My are you ignorant of science! One of the basic ideas in quantum mechanics is that causality doesn't work at those scales.

but the axiom is in itself not proved to be true by science. It is accepted as being true (that is it is a necessary supposition for the pursuit of science). But these axioms are no less valid than the axioms that Austrian economics utilizes. Indeed all axioms ultimately are not provable; they are accepted as being true and the rest of the logical framework as it were follow from the acceptance of these axioms.

The basic ideas of science are not axiomatic: they are empirically observed.

I repeat, the criticism of Austrian economics because it is based philosophically on a system built from deductive a priori axioms is not valid in of itself for if it were, the same criticisms of accepting a priori axioms ought to and must be applied to the empirical scientific methods which are also built on a priori axioms.

Ah, so as a philosopher you use repetition of errors to establish truth. How curious!

From 3) It seems ironic that Mr. Huben quotes David Hume when the main contribution to modern philosophy that Hume is known for is his argument against the certainty of induction and thus science. Hume famously is known for his argument that just because the Sun has risen for billions of years we cannot be certain that it will rise tomorrow. We cannot derive certainty from scientific observations (induction). Thus Hume rejected the idea that science and induction could give us absolute knowledge only probable knowledge.

And thus Hume understood much more about science than you apparently do.

From 4) “You MUST introduce measurement and mathematics into your models if you want to have any hope of valid answers.”

The criticism is that the Austrian school of economics regards measurement (data and observations) as being overall, not important or very relevant for the study of economics.

Indeed, the Austrians argue that what we call the economic system is so complex with multitudes of constantly dynamic variables that science cannot hold the independent variables constant to observe the dependent variables. The misconception is that the Austrians hate science or the scientific method. On the contrary they argue that science has great value in things that science can be relevantly applied to such as; Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry etc.

Ah, so they rule out vast swathes of science such as ecology and evolution, huh? After all, those are at least as complex as economics, and just as insusceptible of experiment. Ooooo, I'd love to see the Austrian ecology and Austrian evolution pseudosciences!

But of course, the Austrian contention that dependent variables are always and everywhere concealed by multitudes of constantly dynamic variables fails as badly for economics as it does for ecology.

It is just not (with very rare exceptions) applicable to the study of economics which is in their view purely deductive. That is, the study economics is similar to the study of logic in that is deductive from first a priori principles.

Lots of people claim similar nonsense, such as Ayn Rand with "A is A". Start with vague, waffle-worded "a priori principles" and you can mislead people in all sorts of directions.

The use of mathematical models and statistical techniques etc. the Austrians basically argue, you can call it what you want, but it is not really science, as it is traditionally known.

Science, the Austrians would argue is repeating the same experiment over and over again with strictly controlled variables and observing the results. (The scientific method)

Observing results is not science: interpreting them is. Statistics plays a major role in interpreting results in almost all fields of science, and Austrians who say otherwise are just wrong.

This cannot be done with a system as complex as the economy to any high degree of proficiency and certainty.

Now there are some waffle words. Doesn't matter how good an economic model is: they it's not to a high degree of proficiency and certainty.

But their armchair philosophy must be perfect, even though they refuse to admit that the real world doesn't follow their predictions much.

How does one know that all the variables are being held constant? As Mr.Huben states from 1) “For all the faults of conventional economics, it is far closer to a science than Austrianism because it relies heavily on data.” If the theory that is proposed to explain the “data” cannot be experimentally verified, tested and confirmed by repeating the experiment then would it really be science?

There are several fields of economics that do look at multiple experiments. I presume you're too ignorant to know of them.

Mr.Huben argues that you must introduce measurement and mathematics to have valid answers because verbal logic is not sufficient. What about symbolic logic? Are not the symbols and methods of mathematics ultimately translatable into algorithmic logical processes?

Evidently you don't read too well: verbal logic is insufficient because it is generally not quantitative. Reread my statement 4.

From 5) and in closing, to state, “your faith in philosophy is touching” displays a childish condescending attitude. Science is a branch of philosophy, indeed what is a PhD in physics anyways? A doctor of philosophy degree in physics.

And humans are a branch of monkeys, as you obviously show with your poo-flinging understanding of the philosophy of science. And if you are unfamiliar with the millennia-old traditions of condescension and disdain in philosophy, then you're an ignoramus as well.

The fact is whether Mr. Huben accepts it or not, Philosophy is the mother of all other intellectual pursuits. Everything intellectual is derived from and of Philosophy!

Evidently you know nothing of cladistics, the science of classification, nor of history, else you wouldn't make such stupid statements.

But even if your contention is correct, that doesn't mean science isn't better than philosophy as a way of knowing. After all, your mother could be a gibbering idiot and you could be a genius. But it seems likely to be the other way around in your case, because you make such incredibly bad arguments.

Regulation and the Theory of Market and Government Failure

2010-07-06T09:32:00.001-04:00

Regulation and the Theory of Market and Government Failure

Nobel Prize winner (economics) Joseph Stiglitz explains that government can improve economic efficiency because real markets don't have the properties of ideal markets. Technical, but not mathematical.

Posted in the Government And Economics and Liberal Criticisms indexes.

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It

2010-07-03T09:59:00.000-04:00

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It

Yumi Kim (at Mises Daily) praises the customary clan law in Somalia, because cheap luxuries are available to the elites. No mention of piracy and kidnapping trades, and warlords are downplayed. At best, shows that warlordism may be better than centralized kleptocracy. Libertarians should move to Somalia!

Linked in the Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism index as an example of self-ridicule.

The 24 Types of Libertarian

2010-06-29T21:19:00.000-04:00

The 24 Types of Libertarian

Ampersand (Barry Deutsch) identifies 24 libertarian points of view. Hat tip to Pharyngula.

Added to the humor index.

The Rational Optimist

2010-06-20T11:51:00.002-04:00

Matt Ridley joins the ranks of cornucopian libertarians with a similarly error-ridden and cherry-picked set of arguments.

I found a harsh review and a followup by George Monbiot:

The Man Who Wants To Northern Rock The Planet

Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist is telling the rich what they want to hear

These are in the book reviews, environmentalism, and freedom through technology indexes.

[Addition: I've found several more harsh reviews, and placed them at: Reviews Of Books Related To Libertarianism.]

The Krugman Blues

2010-06-05T06:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it takes something special to make me appreciate a particular form of art. I'd never been impressed much by the blues, but this brings it home for me.

Capitalism's Wicked Witch

2010-05-16T13:57:00.000-04:00

Capitalism's Wicked Witch

Allen Barra's Daily Beast review of Anne Conover Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" and Jennifer Burns' "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right".

He likes the books, and thinks they paint an accurate picture of just how odious Rand was.

Added to the reviews section of the web site.

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

2010-04-17T10:42:00.000-04:00

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is comical enough without being actually a comic book. It just hasn't happened anywhere, let alone in places like Sweden.

This has been added to the Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism index.

A Dilemma for Libertarianism.

2010-04-17T08:24:00.000-04:00

A Dilemma for Libertarianism

Professor Karl Widerquist argues that libertarian principles of acquisition and transfer without regard for the pattern of inequality do not support a minimal state, but can lead just as well to a monarchy with full the full power of taxation without violation of self-ownership.

He's done for property what G. A. Cohen has done in "Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality". He's used the usual libertarian assumptions to come to opposite conclusions with some deft jiu-jitsu. The key trick is to note that libertarians rely on a statute of limitations for their theory of property, else hardly any real world property would be valid (almost all can be traced to conquest.)

In a number of ways, this corresponds with points I've made in A Non-Libertarian FAQ (such as #16) and elsewhere.

This has been linked into my Philosophical Criticisms Of Libertarianism index.

Widerquist's encyclopedia description of libertarianism.

2010-04-17T08:08:00.000-04:00

Recently, one corespondent suggested that I define libertarianism. I pointed out that it wasn't my job, that there are tons of people who are professional libertarians who could do it, and have done so.

But I've been rather dissatisfied with the definitions I've seen: usually they are written by people who have drunk the cool-ade so long that they're unaware of their own biases. And usually they focus on only a small part of the libertarian spectrum.

I stumbled upon Karl Widerquist's encyclopedia description of libertarianism, and was very pleased with its thorough and evenhanded descriptions of left, right, and socialist libertarianism.

I've added this one to the So You Want To Discuss Libertarianism.... index at my site.

Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged

2010-04-01T21:30:00.000-04:00

Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged

"Today the estate of Ayn Rand announced that they had authorized science fiction writers Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow to write an official sequel to Rand's bestselling novel Atlas Shrugged.[...]"

Ayn Rand: Admirer of Serial Killer

2010-02-27T08:46:00.001-05:00

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer

Mark Ames' AlterNet article details her admiration for a sociopath, based on Jennifer Burns reports of Rand's early notebooks.

The article details William Edward Hickman's most gruesome murder, and how Rand admired his attitude.

Ames attempts to tarbrush prominent Rand fans such as Alan Greenspan, Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Sanford. with this pathology of Rand's. However, the objectivist classification of opponents as "parasites" is merely the beginning of the objectivist disdain for other people and democracy.

His conclusion doesn't need serial killers to stand on its own:

"Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere."

Thanks to THE Rich Rosen for the lead. Rich also has a good (and funny) article on Rand: When Atlas Shrugs, People Listen... But Why?

New Deal Denialism

2010-01-09T07:37:00.000-05:00

New Deal Denialism

It's annoying to see libertarians (and right wingers) citing silly Austrian arguments that deny the success of Keynesianism in dealing with the Great Depression. Generally they attempt to focus attention on US history, ignoring all the contemporaneous world history that falsifies their arguments.

But even focusing on US history defeats their arguments. Eric Rauchway, a UC Davis historian who's written The Great Depression And The New Deal, lists 4 revisionist arguments and why they're wrong, especially focusing on Amity Shlaes' arguments.

As an aside, it's kind of sad to see intelligent libertarians such as David Friedman slide into such denialism, both for teh depression and for global warming.

The new icon.

2010-01-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

For many years now I've been thinking of what sort of an icon I should have for my site and my blog. At first I didn't want ANY graphics, because they slowed the pages down and made the html coding more complex, but that was more than a decade ago, speeds are now excellent, and modern web tools such as blogs and wikis make that optimization unnecessary.

I thought of an upside down Statue Of Liberty, but people might get confused about who is inverting the idea of liberty, me or libertarians.

So instead, I've simply put the 4 most iconic libertarians together under a red circle and slash (meaning "no".) Rand, Hayek, Nozick, and Milton Friedman. I suppose people could argue for others such as Rothbard, Paul, Mises, etc., but let's not make things complicated: each represents a rather different major strand of libertarianism. It's good enough.

If anybody wants to propose a better icon, I welcome submissions.

Schadenfreude

2010-01-02T06:47:00.002-05:00

Peter Boettke and his colleagues at "The Austrian Economists" have announced a change of their blog name to "Coordination Problem" because "austrian economics" represents more than he wants.

The parallels between
The Austrian Economists -> Coordination Problem
and
Scientific Creationism -> Intelligent Design
are just too delicious.

Austrian economics and creationism both suffer from the same big problem. When you dismiss criticism from fellow economists or scientists in favor of authority and bad philosophy, you lose the ability to prevent other fools from larding up your system with numerous contradictory and stupid ideas.

Boettke is aware of this. He writes:

As an experiment, over the past six months we have been tracking the use of the term Austrian economics in the news and in the blogosphere. Less systematically, we have also been listening carefully to the use of the term among fellow professional economists and what they think the label means. The results do not fit our intention. Google alert, for example, inevitably points to financial advice or libertarian politics, rarely to the research paradigm of F. A. Hayek, never to the scholarship of Israel Kirzner. Mises is often mentioned, but Mises the ideological symbol, not Mises the analytical economist. The "Austrian" theory of the business cycle is mentioned, but only in relationship to anti-fed politics and hard money advocacy, and never as an ongoing research program among professional economists.

So the real question now is where is the "Coordination Problem" version of the Wedge strategy?

No discussion is permitted at the new web site. Bob Murphy provides a forum at Boettke Et Al. Engage in Product Differentiation for the sniping, back-stabbing, and other activities typical of authority-based factionalisms. (But to be honest, typical of academia and many other fields as well.) More sniping at Marginal Revolution: Peter Boettke's announcement.

At times like this, I really miss Steve Kangas. We would bust a gut laughing at this.

See also my Austrian Economics index.

[Disclosure: My father was Austrian (Viennese) by birth. He never had anything to do with Austrian economics.]

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive. Bob Murphy provides the Austrian Wedge strategy.

A Convenient Untruth

2009-12-24T08:07:00.002-05:00

A Convenient Untruth

The excellent ARCHNBLOG (Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature) gleefully relates the official Objectivist's reaction to Jennifer Burns’ new Rand biography. Capsule summary: "na na na I can't hear you!"

It's about time the hagiography was punctured.

Libertarians should oppose corporatism.

2009-11-14T06:10:00.002-05:00

Why Corporations Are Not People, And The Unsavory Consequences of Pretending That They Are by Mike Hoy.

Points out that corporations consist of government-created special privilege, and that individualist libertarians ought to oppose such things.

The author uses scare quotes for derision: annoying stylistically, but otherwise harmless.

libertarian censorship

2009-11-14T05:59:00.002-05:00

From:
An Interview with Mike Hoy,
Founder and President of Loompanics Unlimited
Regarding
What is Going On Here Anyway?

[...]
Q. Is there more? [examples of private censorship]

Unfortunately, yeah, lots. One of the most widespread forms of private censorship is the forbidding of advertising. The “Libertarians” are notorious for this kind of censorship. Reason magazine for years forbade Loompanics to place any ad whatsoever – this from a publisher who claims to be devoted to “Free Minds and Free Markets” (as long as they are not too free, I guess). I remember once, shortly after they had refused one of our book ads, receiving a fund-raising letter from Reason soliciting “donations” on the grounds that they were such big-balled, two-fisted freedom fighters that they had difficulty selling ads in their magazine, and you were therefore supposed to give them something for nothing. These hypocrites refused to engage in a straight-forward honest business deal (selling us ads), instead asking for handouts (and lying about why they were doing it) – this from an outfit which opposes food stamps for poor people on the grounds that giving them something they did not earn would destroy their “incentive” to earn a living.

We used to occasionally rent the subscriber list of Liberty magazine to send its readers a sampler of our books. On these occasions, Liberty would rent their list only “on the condition that no nudity appear in the mailing piece.” Thus does the publisher of a “Libertarian” magazine protect the virgin eyes of his readers from the trauma of seeing a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman's left nipple.

Q. Why do you think that the “Libertarians” are so timid?

Well, these examples are actually more silly than they are threatening – I mean, what a bunch of fucking sissies, eh? But the fact of the matter is that no one has ever done more to discredit an ideology by espousing it than the “Libertarians.” They foghorn away about the necessity of the profit motive, but every “Libertarian” propaganda outfit is a non-profit corporation or foundation. Every one. Being themselves so incompetent that they cannot run an enterprise at a profit, they beseech the government to adopt policies forcing everybody but them to live by trade.

And since their products (books, magazines, treatises, etc.) are so worthless that they cannot support themselves by selling them, they ask the government to grant them “tax-free” status, and then ask corporations to give them “donations.” That is why they are so squeamish about accepting ads – they are afraid some corporate suckfish might be offended by actual “free minds and free markets” and shut off their handouts. And when corporations give the “Libertarians” money, the corporations are allowed to deduct these handouts as a “business expense.” Corporate donors are their real “customers” and they are scared to print anything the corporations might not like.

There has been a number of books published recently which call into question the corporate form of enterprise, especially as it is practiced by American/multinational corporations, but you won't find ads for any of them in “Libertarian” magazines. A recent piece in a “Libertarian” magazine (one devoted to “individual liberty”) warns its readers against even thinking critically about corporations and presents them with their thought-stopping mantra: “anti-corporatism.” Thus, any discussion of the true nature of corporations will be labeled by “Libertarians” as “anti-corporatism” and they will respond to the thing as if it were the label. That is, they will refuse to think about it at all.

Q. But don't these magazines have the right to exclude any content they don't approve of?

Of course, any magazine has the right to exclude any content – I am not advocating that the government pass some kind of law that every periodical be forced to carry advertising for products they don't like. What I am saying is that these “Libertarians” are full of shit. While claiming that they want “less government,” they run to the government and ask to be granted exemption from marketplace forces. Just run down the mastheads of Liberty or Reason and look at all the “editors,” “fellows,” “associates,” etc. and you will see that the majority of these “Libertarians” do not earn their livings in the private sector. The “marketplace” is the last “place” “Libertarians” want to be.

Of course, it isn't just “Libertarian” magazines who have forbidden Loompanics (and others) to advertise; the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and Soldier of Fortune are among mags that don't want their readers to know that we exist.

Going back to the anti-free-trade nature of corporations, three excellent books on this subject are: The Divine Right of Capital, by Marjorie Kelly, When Corporations Rule the World, by David C. Korten, and Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann. Check 'em out, Homes.[...]

Why is Atlas Shrugged selling well again?

2009-10-31T06:28:00.004-04:00

I don't know for sure, because I have no real data. But that doesn't stop lots of people from speculating.

Take Reason senior editor Brian Doherty in Why Ayn Rand is Hot Again :

"Readers and pundits alike look at America and see a world scarily reminiscent of Rand's government-choked dystopia in Atlas. It's a world with a struggling economy where political pull matters more than success in the free market, where the government blithely takes over huge transportation industries."

His claim about readers and pundits might be absolutely true. But somehow he doesn't point out that the readers and pundits he's discussing are idiots. Because the real world is NOT like the conspiracy plot of Atlas Shrugged. If government "looters" WANTED to take over transportation industries, it would take over the most profitable ones. Not the losers. Likewise the banking industry. Did government take over the profitable rail freight industry? No. It took over the unprofitable passenger rail industry. Did government take over the profitable foreign-owned auto industry? No, it took over our failing domestic auto industry.

The right-wing echo chamber is full of stupid assertions that the economy is behaving as in Atlas Shrugged. They're patently false, but ought to pump the sales up as a side effect.

Another factor that would push up sales of AS are the Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand. I don't think the publicity of these two biographies is nearly as effective as the right-wing echo chamber, because the media are saturated with the latter.

A third possibility is that sales to Asia have increased. With around 3 billion people in India, China, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, one thousandth of a percent would be 30,000 sales.

Of course, book sales are a bad measure of how many readers a book actually has. Atlas Shrugged is such a miserable read that I suspect most people don't finish more than a small fraction of it.

The libertarian movement crested around 10 years ago, and has been conspicuously declining ever since (judging from the collapse of the US libertarian party.) Its strongest economic claims have been usurped by neoliberal corporatists who want economic liberty for corporations, and the hell with real people. They're already very powerful (plutocrats have always been powerful), and Rand is just more grist for their continuous propaganda efforts. A bump in the sales of AS is nothing I worry about: all it signals is that AS is a talking point for this month.

The Bitch is Back

2009-10-29T18:02:00.002-04:00

GQ magazine has a reasonable article about Rand believers titled: The Bitch is Back.

There is no denying the effect of Rand's writing on teenagers. It's characteristic of propaganda aimed at teenagers. If they only believe in these true principles, they will find their triumphant place in life leaving their worthless competitors in despair! How exhilarating! Thus the emotional hook which fosters belief resistant to criticism, logic, and reality.

This sort of propaganda works on teenagers and other ignorants because they have not yet been vaccinated with enough worldly cynicism, let alone been exposed to more sensible alternatives and counter-arguments.

Even if you are not ignorant, it is difficult to answer Randian "when did you stop beating your wife" assertions that you must believe or you are a looter. The perverse framing is pervasive in Rand's books.

Reason Magazine has a hard on for tobacco

2009-10-25T08:48:00.003-04:00

A reader emailed me this list of 4 recent articles from Reason Magazine. They illustrate a consistent opposition to government efforts to reduce smoking. We'd expect that sort of corruption from organizations that receive (or have received) large amounts of funding from tobacco companies.

He writes:

Apparently reason mag. has a serious hard on for second hand smoke. You know how cigarettes have a filter to take a bunch of gunk out of the smoke you breathe, apparently being on the other end breathing unfiltered smoke is less harmful. In fact, they argue that smoking bans increase heart attacks, no joke.
http://reason.com/blog/2008/08/05/smoking-ban-increases-heart-at

"has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and increases risk for heart disease and lung cancer.", they challenge this, well they really don't, but they really do :)
http://reason.com/archives/2006/07/05/a-pack-of-lies

This article seems to be of a type that helps carefully brand anyone who opposes smoking into emotionally driven idiots like environmentalist or liberals, great ad hominem while accusing the opposition of ad hominems. Apparently questioning smoking and cancer might cause the public to brand you something they don't like.
http://reason.com/blog/2009/02/13/if-you-question-the-deadliness

2) The science is irrelevant to the policy question of whether the government should dictate smoking rules on private property.
Classic your only freedom that is to buy argument. Property worship. If your only freedom is to buy or not, do you really have any freedom?
http://reason.com/blog/2006/06/28/no-safe-level-of-secondhand-sm

Apparently flavored cigarettes don't cause teens to start smoking, "duh!".
http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/28/sweet-lies-about-kids-and-smok

The Ostrom Nobel and organ donation

2009-10-13T18:20:00.005-04:00

I was delighted to see Ostrom win a Nobel. I knew of her work from my previous researches into the nature of rights, when I found her descriptions of the rights bundles associated with common resources (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992).

Reviewing the various summaries of her work, I'm delighted that she's finding good support for non-market solutions. That should stick nicely in the craw of many market-uber-alles libertarians and neoliberals.

Now, some libertarians may claim that the solutions she documents and researches are not government solutions: and indeed they are not. However, they rely upon government supported special privilege to coerce rule-following behavior in ways libertarians would not consider freedom. In the frequent example of the alpine pastures, there is an enforced rule that you may not pasture more animals in the summer than you can maintain over the winter. Such coercion (I'm using the libertarian sense) is unjustifiable for libertarians, since there is either no ownership or communal ownership of the commons. Unless a commune is granted governance powers, it has no legitimate power to direct any behavior than any partner in a partnership does, nor even the power to exclude endless newcomers.

I also wondered if organ donation, which is strongly regulated and prohibited from markets, might benefit from this alternative approach. So I searched in google, and lo and behold:

"The Puzzle of Private Rulemaking: Expertise, Flexibility, and Blame Avoidance in Regulation." By David L. Weimer, 2005.
"My approach to the analysis of private regulation as an institutional form, although much
less ambitious, follows in the spirit of Elinor Ostrom’s study of self-governing common property
regimes."

Libertarians (and others) proposing marketization of transplant organs are opposed to Ostrom's sort of system in this case.

Objectivist Party

2009-09-04T20:49:00.003-04:00

I guess I'm not up to date: I'm a year late in noticing the Objectivist Party.

It was bound to happen: the phenomenal success of the Libertarian Party HAD to spawn even more splinter parties. :-) Yet more evidence that getting libertarians to agree or cooperate is like herding cats.

See also: The Objectivist Party vs "Toxic Randroid Cultists".

Drug abuse.

2009-09-02T12:17:00.002-04:00

Here's an idea that is not statistically valid, but may be a good indicator anyhow.

Think about how many of your relatives, friends and acquaintances have died from illegal drug overdoses or side effects. And how many have had serious addictions to illegal drugs.

Then think about how many rich public figures you can name who have died from illegal drug overdoses or side effects. And how many have had serious addictions to illegal drugs.

In the latter group, I can name at least 20 or thirty without trying hard.

Libertarians want to make it legal and affordable for everybody to enjoy addiction and death from overdoses. Free from oversight by government, doctors and pharmacists. Free from the expenses of black markets and dubious private doctors.

You too can have a pathetic side like Michael Jackson, River Phoenix, Janis Joplin, Rush Limbaugh, etc.

Jane Galt's Got a Gun

2009-08-30T06:58:00.002-04:00

Over at Cogitamus, the recent post Jane Galt's Got a Gun has two excellent observations.

First, on carrying guns to town hall meetings:
The guns that people bring to these events are designed to kill people -- that is their sole purpose. When I strap one on and wear it to an event I am saying to my fellow citizens "if you fuck with me, I am willing to kill you." The gun is not designed to stimulate debate, it is designed to end it. It is not a symbol of civil liberty, it is an instrument of solipsistic incivility saying rather clearly that I intend to have the last word[...]

Second, echoing my dislike of the corporate propaganda of NPR's Marketplace program:
Maybe NPR should consider a show called "Workplace" which would focus on the 90% of Americans who really don't give a fuck about the "numbers."

Progressivism explained.

2009-08-09T18:49:00.002-04:00

Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling attempt comically inept descriptions of progressivism through libertarian blinkers. But worse, neither of them see the big picture.

I'll take a stab at describing progressivism.

Progressivism is a political philosophy that takes the "pursuit of happiness" seriously. Pursuit of happiness in a more Aristotelian sense: human flourishing. Not beer parties. Flourishing means being able to become what you want and do what you want. Progressives want more human flourishing. In this sense, early liberals were progressives and most modern liberals are progressives. And not just flourishing for elites, but for everybody at every age.

Progressives see many obstacles to human flourishing: poverty, disease, tyranny, corruption, monopolists, bigotry, ignorance, traditions, pollution, crime, war, etc.

Progressives believe that humans can flourish better if these obstacles are removed or circumvented, and that society can find solutions. This improvement is the progress in progressive.

Some of the solutions to problems of human flourishing include markets, regulations, unions, corporations, education, laws, publicity, privatization, takings, antitrust, buyouts, public works, infrastructure, balancing powers, social provision, etc. Progressives are pragmatic: they are not committed to one set of solutions (such as traditional solutions or markets): they will look at the history of experimentation with these solutions accross the planet and select what they think will work best in their situation, even if it is untried. In this sense, the founders of the US and authors of its Constitution were progressive.

Progressivism demands improvement, but not perfection. Early liberal enfranchisement of white, male landowners with the vote was progressive, but far from perfect. Later enfranchisement of blacks and women was further progressive improvement. And civil rights voting acts to enable blacks and other minorities to actually register and vote was further progressive improvement still.

This doesn't mean that progressives all perceive the same problems and would choose the same solutions. Progressives are a heterogeneous lot, and can disagree strongly. But their pragmatism and lack of perfectionism allows them to work together and with others easily through compromise.

It may appear that progressives turn away from markets and towards government, but that is because there is little progress to be made by markets that markets aren't already making. In some cases, markets create problems (such as redlining) that require regulation to undo. In some cases, conspicuous market failures require either government incentives or government provision (such as for roads and schools.) In some cases, government institutions were under-performing (such as representation of the indigent in courts: the solution was access to free legal services.) And sometimes government is oppressive: hence the ACLU.

Progressivism has often been defined by its history and people. The history of progressivism is usually a list of issues that progressives have fought for such as 8 hour work days, universal enfranchisement, antitrust, etc. What unites all these issues is that they were viewed by progressives as solutions to the problems they saw for human flourishing. Lengthy work days provided no opportunity for leisurely pursuits, education, family matters, health issues, etc. Voting restricted to men meant women's issues (such as their legal status, whether they could own property, etc.) were not attended to. Monopolies and trusts created hardship for farmers and the poor by keeping prices artificially high.

Viewing progressivism by its history and people, rather than by its basic objective, causes a "can't see the forest for the trees" problem. But a moderately good list is available at Progressive Living.

Libertarian corporate catspaws.

2009-08-04T07:58:00.004-04:00

The American Enterprise Institute has published a very successful propaganda piece opposing Michael Pollan that is being widely circulated on the web. But it's not a real argument: it's denialism. Luigi over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog noted the black and white framing: that's a good guideline for spotting the propagandistic nature of the article.

As propaganda, you can't trust any provided numbers or anecdotes: the turkey drowning story is an urban myth. His calculations on the amount of table scraps needed for fertilizer make all sorts of ridiculous, inefficient assumptions.

And of course, the techniques that he endorses such as no-till were developed precisely to deal with "agri-intellectual" complaints against loss of topsoil to erosion. And they were developed by "agri-intellectual" researchers at public universities. And it took a whole lot of convincing to get farmers to begin using them.

50 years ago, Hurst would have written a screed against "agri-intellectual" concerns about topsoil loss. He wouldn't have had the vision to dream that solutions could be found, so he would deny the problem, ridicule the identifiers of the problem, and claim it couldn't be solved anyhow. Hurst has that same lack of vision for these newer concerns.

The American Enterprise Institute is a propaganda organ for conservative corporate capitalism. They don't really care about Pollan's book: all they care about is that they can present another
denialist club for bashing liberals and progressives who criticize capitalists for trampling over our health, environment, politics, and culture.

There's a good criticism at The Big Money.

Austrian Economics can't count.

2009-08-03T15:29:00.002-04:00

Austrian economists are notorious for their rejection of mathematical models in economics. Considering this evidence that they can't count, we can guess what their REAL reason is.

Seven Periodicals

Our monthly The Free Market examines the economic and political scene from a classical-liberal viewpoint. The Austrian Economics Newsletter links our academic network with in-depth interviews. The Mises Review surveys new books. The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (the successor journal to the Review of Austrian Economics), is the premier setting for new research and ideas in economics. The Journal of Libertarian Studies is the scholarly venue for political theory and applications.

They say seven, but only list 5 (or 6 if you give them the benefit of the doubt.) Taken from About the Mises Institute.

Now why would they want that?

2009-07-21T08:10:00.002-04:00

I asked for silly Reason articles, and here's a doozy:

Hands Off Hitler! It's time to repeal Godwin's Law by David Weigel.

Now, Godwin's Law has several interpretations:
(1) If a discussion goes on long enough, EVENTUALLY a Hitler/Nazi analogy will be made.
(2) An observation that when a Hitler/Nazi analogy is invoked, meaningful argument is over.

Since the invention and popularization of Godwin's Law, libertarians feel hobbled when they want to lump all their opponents with Nazis and Hitler. The propaganda and hyperbole don't work when they can be so easily ridiculed with a pithy invocation of the words "Godwin's Law".

Now, Weigel assembles a well-documented pseudo-intellectual argument for "repeal" of Godwin's Law, exploring special cases, history, and persecution when this victimless crime is committed. Why pseudo-intellectual? Well, how can you respond to howlers such as "Thus, despite all efforts at regulation, the market has repeatedly decided in favor of the N[azi]-bomb." What regulation? What market? If anything, you'd expect a libertarian to claim this is an example that should be in Ellickson's book "Order Without Law". Here we have a social institution that has developed without government and without markets. Without markets? Libertarian heresy! There must be a way to purchase the institution!

Evidently Weigel misses the corollary to freedom of speech that others are free to laugh at you for whatever reason. Knowing that others will punish you with derision must make him feel unfree. Poor baby. If only propaganda was easy, and you could always simply tarbrush your opponents without anybody understanding how they were being manipulated!

"We'll be better off rolling back Godwin's Law and admitting the all-purpose usefulness of Nazi analogies. It's exactly what the Germans wouldn't want." Ah, and here we have the ultimate justification. Stick it to the Germans! Wow, what a lot of intellectual traction THAT argument has!

I think Reason Magazine should be more properly named Prejudice Magazine. The article-writing process is rather obvious: start with the conclusion and bend facts, history, and argument until your point is "supported". A dark ages scholastic approach. About the only nice thing I can say about Weigel is that he's far from the only one at Reason who writes this way.

Extreme cases.

2009-07-07T13:45:00.002-04:00

I saw this over at Marginal Revolution and just had to laugh.

Imagine the extreme case -- a 100% income tax. No matter how much you make, you actually receive nothing. Therefore, no one works. Result: 100% unemployment and GDP=0.
Obviously, smaller taxes will have less extreme effects. But increasing a tax can surely make a recession worse.
Posted by: Robert A. Book at Jul 7, 2009 12:47:48 PM

I love the world of economics. Imagine the extreme case--no taxes. Assuming we weren't taken over by some other country, we would have no army, a fragmented system of private toll roads, unlimited immigration, warlord armies fighting over territories. Kind of like Somalia. Obviously this proves the more taxes the better, and that taxes will make everything better.
Posted by: es32 at Jul 7, 2009 1:33:11 PM

The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

2009-06-11T05:13:00.002-04:00

The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

Reason Magazine, ever delighted to snipe at others, points out a load of silly hype from Time.

If only what was good for the goose was good for the gander: no, wait! Is it possible that Reason Magazine has published something that was ridiculous hype? Could they have published some libertarian point of view that is ludicrously alarmist or otherwise silly in hindsight?

Let's collect a top 10 silly articles from Reason. Pick a back issue at random and look at it for the ridiculous. Extra bonus points for black helicopters!

Seasteading redux.

2009-05-30T13:47:00.003-04:00

Seasteading: Libertarians Set to Launch a (Wet) Dream of 'Freedom' in International Waters

Brad Reed takes an amused look at Patri Friedman's seasteading plans, yet another repeat of utopian libertarian daydreams for the wealthy.

This must be at least the fourth or fifth version of this sort of plan. As I see it, all the old ones foundered on the problem of distrust of their centralized planning by incompetent or downright criminal organizers.

In the "Freedom Through Technology" index. Hat tip to Markus Cavanagh for this one!

Parable of the ship: why Austrian Economics fails.

2009-05-02T06:06:00.003-04:00

Many libertarians and other conservatives look to Austrian economics because they find their preferred positions explained with clear moral stories. But the great fault of Austrianism is that it is not scientific. Science is a better way of knowing than philosophy, because scientific theories have to explain close to all the scientifically collected data. For all the faults of conventional economics, it is far closer to a science than Austrianism because it relies heavily on data. Austrianism has a methodological disrespect of data. It is structured as a medieval philosophy based on authority, rather than systematic adherence to real-world data.

I've collected criticisms of Austrian economics for many years in my index Austrian Economics. But a sheaf of miscellaneous criticisms may not be as clear as a parable.

The owner of a ship noticed that his ship was filling with water. Being an educated man (if not nautically trained) he knew there were many possible causes for water in a ship: leaks in the hull, the bilge pump being broken, waves washing over, condensation, and even the crew urinating in the hold. He heard the bilge pump running, he saw water from waves pouring in the open hatches, but worst of all he smelled urine in the hold! Being sensible, he ordered the crew to shut the hatches and then gave them a lengthy, stern harangue on hygienic use of the head. While he was lecturing the crew, his ship sank due to a combination of causes: large, unobserved leaks in the hull, a bilge pump that was running but not pumping correctly, and condensation that had shorted out warning circuitry.

Now, it's easy to write a story to justify or ridicule any course of action, any philosophy. Indeed, that described Ayn Rand's fiction. But my purpose here is to illustrate ways in which the owner failed to think correctly. Ways which are STRONGLY analogous to Austrian economic methodology.

In every theory-rich subject, there can be a multitude of explanations of cause. For example, there might be 5 possible causes for a specific problem, be it inflation or disease or whatever. All or none of those causes might be valid. If all of them are valid, some might be unimportant because they cause very little of the problem or cause the problem very infrequently or cause the problem only under specific circumstances. But more than one of the causes might be quite important, singly or in combination. Economics is just such a theory-rich subject.

There is no way to identify from philosophy which of these might be the case. You need to be able to observe enough to quantify these factors. However, Austrianism is staunchly against measurement: indeed, it is innumerate because it does not use measurement. Rothbard, Mises, and Hayek railed about how measurements were philosophically invalid.

In the parable, the owner did not investigate condensation; he presumed the pump was working correctly without measurement; he did not attempt to measure leaks; he presumed (again without measurement) that the water sloshing in the hatches was the right amount to explain the filling; and he distracted the crew from finding the real problems with his own assumptions and moral haranguing.

Since Austrians are innumerate, instead they must rely on their assumptions, which needless to say tend to have a very right wing bias. Science does not work that way. Nor can Austrians really defend their assumptions: no assumption about the real world is totally true which means that there is fallacy in all their logic about the real world. They make up for this in bluster and old-fashioned appeal to their own authority.

When confronted with real-world problems that could have multiple causes, logical verbal models are insufficient. You MUST introduce measurement and mathematics into your models if you want to have any hope of valid answers. Logical verbal models are sufficient to specify possible chains (or networks) of causation, but telling which are significant is a quantitative problem that requires measurement.

This is not a new position: it is basic to science and ought to be basic to philosophy. Hume said it very clearly 260 years ago:

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 12, "Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy"

Two new Milton Friedman critiques.

2009-03-18T21:09:00.000-04:00

Over in the Milton Friedman index.

Going Galt part two: others point out the stupidity.

2009-03-17T08:15:00.004-04:00

As UUbuntu pointed out in comments to the previous Galt post,

Steven Colbert rips apart the Going Galt theme in his Rand Illusion sketch. I'm afraid the ironic humor might not mean as much to folks who come back to this in later years.

In addition, In Contempt comics has an excellent "Galt Gestalt" comic with accompanying commentary that will make clear the issues to folks who come late to this contretemps. If you don't have the background for Colbert's sketch, read this first.

A friend of mine, early internet jokester Rich Rosen ("we are all Rich Rosen"), sent me a link to his essay: When Atlas Shrugs, People Listen... But Why? He does have an indignant, serious side.

Hoisted from his comments is The Last Person On Earth To Turn To Now Is Ayn Rand by Johann Hari at the HuffPo. He points out at length a number of Randian idiocies.

Building on a response to that last one, I'd say that Ayn Rand was the unattractive Ann Coulter of her time. Except worse in that she was a cult leader, was even more divorced from reality, and a horrible writer.

Going Galt: the latest propaganda.

2009-03-08T07:06:00.002-04:00

Hilzoy writes: It's a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue....

I agree with Hilzoy about the reference. He says it's strange that the producing entrepreneurs seem to be staying in place.

Much more obvious is that it is not the Randian Ubermensch that are dropping out: it is the workers/consumers. They've closed their pocketbooks and ceased spending as much, starving the entrepreneurs who now have unaffordable overhead on their idle productive capacity.

The interesting thing is that Rand had wrong in so many ways if you want to consider this analogous to "Atlas Shrugged". The causes were a real estate bubble and interlocking dependencies between banks. The players are essentially all from publicly owned corporations, rather than privately held corporations led by the owners. I haven't read Rand in 35 years (who could stand it as an adult?), but I don't think she mentions bubbles or bankers or non-owners as causing the collapse.

So if anybody is using the term "Going Galt", they're WAY OFF, and probably trying to pretend they're powerful in this crisis, rather than helpless. They'd like our supplication, not our scorn.

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

2009-03-07T06:44:00.003-05:00

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

Thanks to Paul Trombley for pointing this one out. A perfect illustration of "Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism" from my Libertarianism in One Lesson.

The simplest reason that Jesus was obviously not a libertarian is because he does not condemn slavery: instead he tells slaves to be like their masters. A five-second google search for "jesus" and "slavery" turned up SLAVERY and the BIBLE, which details all the missed opportunities Jesus had to condemn slavery.

If I wanted to be as stupid and anachronistic as the author, Butler, I'd also point out that Jesus doesn't preach for a right to keep and bear firearms. Or any more temporally-correct form of weapons.

It's been added to my Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism as an example of amazingly awful reasoning crossing the line into self-parody. Not to mention Libertarian Revisionist History. The idea that Jesus was a libertarian is one of the most amazingly stupid anachronisms I've ever heard.

What is Political Capitalism?

2009-02-08T08:39:00.002-05:00

A week ago, I wrote a response to a Marginal Revolution post about "political capitalism". I wrote:

"Political capitalism" is yet another far-right think tank spawned pile of crap. Every few years, the right needs new, less boring clubs with which to beat their opponents. We've seen a number of them in the past: trickle down, Laffer curve, etc. Austrianism is required to believe in this one, according to the author.

You need only look at the biography of the author to see just how pathetic this is. His PhD was under Murray Rothbard at the now-defunct International College in Los Angeles, and pretty much all of his work has been based on Austrianism.

The author, Rob Bradley, responded.

Sorry to see that one participant has turned the discussion into argument against the person.

Two comments: One, a review of my dissertation, published as Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, was published in the Southern Economic Journal by Tyler Cowen.

Two, a major endorsement of my "political capitalism" theme comes from Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian out of the Marxist tradition, who stated on the back cover of my new book, Capitalism at Work: "Fascinating, comprehensive ... far surpassing my own history of political capitalism done in the 1960s."

I tried to respond again, but my post was supposedly filtered for too many links (no other responses appeared.)

So rather than waste my efforts, I'll post here so that I have them for reference....

Bradley criticizes me for "argument against the person", and defends himself with appeal to authority.

Take a look at Tyler's review of his published thesis which is as fine an example of damning with faint praise as I've ever seen.

Yet another review says "it is ironic that the main criticism one can direct against him relates to his ideological a priori attachment to the belief that any form of government intervention in the market economy must always and everywhere be pernicious and counterproductive."

If you check the Gabriel Kolko wikipedia page, it points out that "political capitalism" is a term Kolko used for corporatism, but hardly anybody else adopted it in the subsequent 40+ years. There isn't even a wikipedia page for "political capitalism", nor does it redirect to corporatism.

Yet he totally ignores my first paragraph where I point out that two other giant negatives for his credibility: that he is a tool of the right wing think tanks, and that he relies on Austrian economics.

A little reading of his introduction tells the full story. Shorter Rob Bradley: "Enron and Ken Lay failed because they were victims of a mixed economy even though every other corporation that fails or succeeds is in a mixed economy. Fairytale pure capitalism, as fantasized by Ayn Rand, would be free of these problems."

Comic quotations:

"Adam Smith, Samuel Smiles, and Ayn Rand elucidated the character traits, mental models, and interpersonal conditions behind success and failure, while differentiating sharply between free-market entrepreneurship and political rent-seeking."
Right. Female industrialists swooning before the economic might of mighty male industrialists, as in Atlas Shrugged.

"In the twentieth century (chapter 3), the philosophy of Objectivism, formulated by Ayn Rand, explains how Enron’s financial bankruptcy was at root a philosophic one."
Shorter Rob Bradley: It's only because Ken Lay was not an Objectivist cultist, unlike every successful CEO.

"Smith, Smiles, and Rand did much to frame what can be called heroic capitalism"
Most of us outgrow moralistic stories of heroes by the end of our teens. And Smith was much more sensible than Smiles or Rand: he showed good and bad in capitalism. Not simple heroism.

"But why did inferior thinking in the social sciences and humanities prevail? [...] The answer is the by now familiar one: arrogance."
Ah, the classic crank explanation for why everybody else is wrong, and he's right. How humble of him to proclaim that they're arrogant, every one!

There are so many stupid things in this introduction that it beggars description. Essentially, he wordily describes the Enron/Lay problems as hubris, but attributes the hubris to the mixed economy. Sorry, jack, but hubris doesn't need mixed economy to occur.

He also declares that he worked at Enron (and for Lay) for years. That's honest, but it sure points out that he has an incentive to find somebody else to blame. Was he the one point of light at Enron who wasn't suffering from the moral flaws that brought Enron and Lay down? Somehow, I doubt it.

I guess I'll finish by quoting my Libertarianism in One Lesson and Libertarianism in One Lesson; The Second Lesson, because Rob Bradley embodies these caricatures:

Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.

Require perfection as the only applicable standard to judge government: libertarianism, being imaginary, cannot be fairly judged to have flaws.

Government causes pollution, crime, discrimination, slavery, poverty, and all the other evils of the world. Businesses and individuals only produce wealth: they are not involved and not responsible for any of those problems.

There are no market failures, only government failures. Which is why we should abolish corporations, patents, copyright and other intellectual property; they are established by government interference with free markets.

Libertarian loser of the week.

2009-01-25T19:26:00.003-05:00

Every now and then, another libertarian writes another stupid rebuttal to my FAQ, and the sycophants gather around and cheer because they're no smarter, and can't recognize the errors.

One such twit, "KipEsquire", wrote an addition to the latest and made all sorts of stupid errors.

I responded with corrections to his errors, and pointed out that I am a Madisonian social contract fan, as opposed to Locke or Hobbes.

Kip replied without anything more than ad hominem and berating me for not appealing to the authority of Hobbes and Locke.

I pointed that out, and explained that I didn't need to appeal to social contracts that were philosophical fantasies when Madison created an actual, practical social contract. After all, why would I appeal to flying horses and flying carpets when I could talk about airplanes?

I tried to check back, and Kip had locked me out. So I used an anonymizer, looked, and sure enough the coward had deleted my response. What a baby. I wrote another taunting him, which he'll probably delete.

It's funny how many libertarians can't defend their claims, and instead have to rely on deletion and lockouts to silence their opponents. They really are authoritarian when they feel threatened, and shut down free discussion by hiding behind their property rights.

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands: Solution

2009-01-17T10:12:00.004-05:00

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands:

FOUR OF A KIND and FULL HOUSE are both inside THREE OF A KIND and TWO PAIRS, but do not overlap.

THREE OF A KIND and TWO PAIRS are both inside PAIR.

ROYAL FLUSH is inside STRAIGHT FLUSH.

STRAIGHT FLUSH is inside STRAIGHT and FLUSH.

PAIR, STRAIGHT and FLUSH are all inside HIGH CARD.

Because any hand has a HIGH CARD and HIGH CARD includes all the others, HIGH CARD is identical to ALL HANDS.

The above diagram is topologically correct, I think, so it doesn't really matter what sizes or shapes the boundaries take.

An additional problem, for those who love easy combinatorics, would be to show the numbers and probabilities for all the regions. This requires a slightly different interpretation of the labels: for example, HIGH CARD is interpreted to mean "HIGH CARD ONLY" which excludes PAIR, FLUSH and STRAIGHT.

Biomimicry of evo-devo patterns.

2009-01-17T08:57:00.003-05:00

The evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) idea is that organisms have basic developmental core processes (a toolbox) that are regulated during development by other genes. Thus basic mechanisms such as development into segments can be regulated to produce few-segmented organisms such as insects or many segmented organisms such as snakes.

There is a surprising analogy in the UNIX (and thus LINUX) operating system design philosophy: "Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines." The short version is "mechanism, not policy".

The X windows system, written about 25 years ago, made heavy use of this design principle. X provided the mechanism for user interfaces that did all the hard work of drawing and reacting to user input in a very concise and general way. Specific user interfaces such as Motif and OpenLook (that looked very different) could then be created just by controlling the use of X mechanisms.

A more recent development (10 years) exploiting this design principle has been the addition of cascading style sheets to HTML. The underlying HTML of a web page can be displayed in radically different ways depending on the style sheets applied to it. (For explanation and some amazing variations, see Zen Garden.)

Another possible example of this biomimicry is the Constitution of the United States, as I explain in Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand. This one predates modern evo-devo ideas by quite a bit, but is my own (possibly crank) interpretation.

The evolution (in the sense of change over time by modification) is obvious in all three of these examples.

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands

2009-01-01T20:24:00.005-05:00

A couple of years ago, I took a course on teaching Discrete Math at Tufts. While we were talking probability, we used Venn diagrams to illustrate how to compute some probabilities. And it occurred to me that it would be interesting to make a Venn diagram of all the types of poker hands. After I did it, I looked on the web to see if there was one posted any where, searching with "venn" and "poker", but couldn't find any. This is the best I found today:

It's obviously got some gross mistakes. For example, the straight circle is by itself, rather than including straight flush. And the non-straight circle is an abomination.

The challenge is to make a correct Venn diagram of the poker hands. Every kind of hand should be properly nested in all the simpler kinds of hand. I'll post my answer in a week or so. Alternatively, if you can find a better answer on the web or elsewhere, I'd like to know where.

Update 1/17/09:
Here is the solution. No peeking until you've solved the problem!

Moderation Policy

2008-11-28T06:32:00.002-05:00

I've been participating in online community discussions for about 35 years now (starting with the Plato System in 1974.) I've seen numerous discussion groups start, grow, become diseased (with trolls, hostile opponents, etc.), recover, mature, senesce, and die.

I was among the first on Usenet Groups (which were an imitation of the newsgroups on the Plato System), and if you want to read some of my early (1984) Usenet postings, search google groups for "Huybensz" (my maiden name, which nobody ever pronounced or spelled correctly, now shortened to Huben) or "mrh". Google's cache of early postings is very incomplete.

So when moderation policy issues come up, I do think I know something about it. Sometimes they have come up here, sometimes people who dislike my position or style bring them up in their own blogs.

Here, as a heuristic, I tend not to allow anonymous comments. It is trivial to create a pseudonymous google (or other) identity: that's no real obstacle, despite protests from fools like Skeptico. It does deter the most casual annoying commenters. But the big win is that it allows us to have lines of argument person by person, rather than a contradictary chorus of an anonymous crowd.

I also rarely delete comments. I'm reluctant to do so, but sometimes there are good reasons that are not encapsulated by simple rules.

The best explanation of managing comments in blogs that I've seen is from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, her post NOT titled Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space.

Here are her principles:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes.

All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

The One Ring

2008-11-20T17:49:00.003-05:00

I don't really have a personal blog (just how many should I have?) but I want to stash this somewhere on the web.

I teach Precalculus, and one of the key ideas for explaining the trigonometric functions is the unit circle ( with a radius of 1.) Tolkein fans might appreciate how appropriate this poem is:

The One Ring
(Great Circle Of Power,
Math Student's Bane)

One Circle to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
Unit circle to calculate all,
and in trigonometry bind them.
In the study of Precalculus where the functions lie.

Lame Duck Ideological Sabotage Deterrence Bill

2008-11-13T04:43:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, there was an NPR report that the Bush administration is charging ahead with plans to change regulations in industry-friendly ways that Obama would not be able to undo. For example: bypassing environmental regulations, approving various applications, etc.

This could be forestalled with a Lame Duck Ideological Sabotage Deterrence Bill. The idea is to get the threat out there that any company that benefits from lame duck regulatory changes (before Obama and Congress get to act) will be socked with a massive penalty tax, far in excess of the profits expected from the regulatory change.

Of course, this could be prettied up and done informally.

Alternatively, Obama could be negotiating with Bush not to do this. Obama has a major bargaining chip: how freely he will unleash the furies to discover and prosecute Bush administration crimes and malfeasance. I'd settle for a truth and reconciliation commission, though I'd love to see Bush and Co. extradited to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes such as torture. Bush cannot pardon anybody for international crimes, only for crimes against US law. I don't think Obama would ever use this club against Bush, but it sure would make me feel good.

Sarah Palin Proudly Ignorant

2008-10-26T20:34:00.002-04:00

Sarah Palin's speech ridiculing fruit fly research earmarks as wasteful has spawned an enormous reaction. However, that reaction is almost as wrongheaded as Palin.

When I read the criticism at Skeptico, I just couldn't resist deflating that (sometimes good and reasonable) windbag again for his confidence in his ignorance.

So many people are so wrong about this, that I've decided to post my response here as well. I wrote:

While it seems many people have their hearts in the right place on this subject, the press (and this site) are showing an incredible ignorance as well.

The common name "fruit fly" is used for SEVERAL FAMILIES of flies. The olive fruit fly (Bactrocera oleae) is in the family Tephritidae, while the common fruit fly of genetic research (more accurately called a vinegar fly or pomace fly) is in the family Drosophilidae.

Olive fruit flies have NEVER been important for genetic research, and anybody implying that this earmarked research is important for genetics is a fool ignorant of the differences between flies. I've yet to see the research proposal itself, but the few words I've seen describing it make it sound as if the research was for biological control through release of sterile irradiated males: a technique that has been used successfully to control several pest fly species such as the screwworm fly. That's economically valuable research that Palin is wrong to ridicule, but it also has nothing to do with genetics.

Once again, we see Skeptico (this time following the herd) making comments on a subject where he is extremely ignorant, where anybody familiar with the subject (like me: I had a course in fly systematics at Cornell) could immediately spot the howlers. I suppose his excuse is that he's as ignorant as most people, and doesn't have the sense to consult an expert in the RIGHT FIELD before he regurgitates bullshit from experts in the wrong field, who can't tell one family of flies from another.

Ayn Rand is not the source of the problem.

2008-10-26T09:14:00.002-04:00

A correspondent wrote "Was just curious if you thought that the vast economic problems we're now facing could possibly be tracked to ideologies that Ayn Rand so cleverly designed and sold?"

A lot of people are trying to pin this down on Rand. But that makes no sense to me.

The basic source is the plutocracy of corporations and their owners. They are the first class citizens: government, business, and entrepreneurs serve them first. Rand was merely an entrepreneurial repackager and popularizer of plutocratic ideologies. As was Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard. As are CATO, Heritage, and a host of other think tanks.

I'm sure that the plutocracy would much rather we misdirected the blame at libertarians and other cats paws.

The financial crisis and libertarianism.

2008-10-20T19:31:00.002-04:00

Jacob Weisberg has a new Slate article titled The End of Libertarianism: The financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.

It's not a perfect article, and it may claim a bit more than is justified, but the basic point is sound. Financial markets cannot regulate themselves in ways necessary to prevent disasters, contrary to libertarian propaganda.

The largest cause of the financial contagion has been the credit default swap. These are unregulated, high-leverage derivatives that were created to circumvent normal insurance regulations. Without these derivatives, the damage done by the housing bubble collapse would not have paralyzed the entire lending industry.

Libertarians love to claim that markets swirl around and circumvent attempts at government control. Now we see the result of letting them do it. Numerous people called for this to be regulated, but the market fundamentalists were too influential.

Krugman wins his Nobel Prize

2008-10-13T13:37:00.002-04:00

Many years ago, Steve Kangas pointed me to Paul Krugman as a really good economist. I've followed his writings in numerous sources since then, and have at least ten of them in the Critiques indexes. (Go to the All Links page and scroll to the first mention of his name.)

Krugman has many harsh things to say about libertarianism and Austrian economics. The one that is really relevant today is The Hangover Theory: Are recessions the inevitable payback for good times?.

Why we won't have Mars or Moon colonies for a LONG time.

2008-09-21T07:43:00.002-04:00

A thought while driving.

I've long loved the science fiction / futurist dream of establishing extraterrestrial colonies. But I've realized why it won't happen any time in the next century or so.

A colony requires a technology of production that will (in combination with trade) allow self-sufficiency and growth.

If we look at past successful colonizations, we can spot the technologies. Europeans brought technologies for dominance and agriculture, and were able to adapt technologies of the native peoples. Polynesians brought marine and agricultural technologies.

Now, some polyannas might claim we have the technologies for the Moon or Mars, and start listing solar power and other Heinlein/Clarke stuff, but it's obvious to me that's wrong. Yes we have those technologies, but they are not right or sufficient. We have a very simple demonstration why, right at our doorsteps.

Antartica.

It would be far easier to colonize Antartica than anywhere in space, and yet we haven't in roughly 100 years. We have some stations there, but NOTHING IS BEING PRODUCED for local consumption or for trade. (Yes, you could argue that scientific information is being produced, but face it: a real colony has a COMMERCIAL life that supports its own population.) Other excuses are easily made (for example international treaties), but if there was commercial opportunity due to technology in Antartica, we'd exploit it as fast as we exploited offshore oil: the treaties would change.

We haven't even colonized tropical shallow waters, let alone under water. Offshore oil fields are not colonized. Vast commercial opportunities await in those locations, but no colonies. Because it isn't enough to have a technology for commercial exploitation only: you must have an array of technologies for daily living of a community before you really have a colony. Otherwise you're just an outpost. It can be argued that Chilean's have a permanently occupied Antartic colony, and that satisfies the daily living technology requirement. But I'd point out that it is not a commercial success: it is a highly subsidized investment in geopolitical claims staking.

Paying for the bailout.

2008-09-20T06:46:00.002-04:00

I know I've got maybe 3 readers but I want to be on the record with this one.

All the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the general public having to pay for the bailout seems to be missing three little words.

Capital. Gains. Tax.

Nice populist ring to them: but you won't hear them from somebody like McCain.

Now, I don't know if that makes any economic sense as an idea, and I'm not proposing it as a serious solution because I'm not knowledgeable enough to think it through. But I'm shocked that nobody's using the words yet. Populists could use the bailout as a justification for continuing or increasing the CGT. Plutocrats could use the CGT as justification for the bailout -- what have they been paying for all this time? Spin could go either way.

A further source of joy for me is to hear all the howls of "communism" coming from the usual capitalism-uber-alles lunatics. Here they have the most compliant right-wing presidential lapdog they could ever have asked for. But when faced with the possibility of being branded the second Herbert Hoover for bringing on a second world-wide great depression, he scurries to nationalize. Maybe that sounds as if he's working against his patron capitalists, but chances are it will boil down to government handouts to the corporations and the rich.

Enough pissing match with Skeptico for me.

2008-08-31T16:24:00.002-04:00

This answer to Skeptico is being held for review by him. So in the mean time...

The discussion with Skeptico is getting tedious, so I'm not going to answer everything (we know how that would lead to exponential growth) but instead will pick the low-hanging fruit.

Like many pompous people, Skeptico seems to think his reasoning is logical, and other people's fails to be logical because he sees them as rife with fallacies of logic. That's simply a delusion: we ALL engage in defeasible reasoning except in a very few excruciatingly precise circumstances where we start out with agreed upon precise meanings of terms, assumptions, and premises and apply only logical operators. In short, it doesn't happen much outside of mathematics. We see lots of examples of this delusion in Skeptico's latest response: I'd love to see him identify ONE example of where he uses a logical argument with unquestionable assumptions, definitions, and 100% true premises. He says, for example, "...not one shred of evidence in there that you are right and I am wrong about anything..." What perfection! I couldn't make up better examples. But of course, he can only make that dishonest claim because he is referring to the introduction, not the evidence that follows. The term for that is "quote mining" or "taken out of context".

Skeptico describes my introduction as "poisoning the well". Would Skeptico ever commit such a heinous crime? Well, let's see: a quick google search for "woo" turned up 454 hits at his blog. But is it really poisoning the well? I'd say it is an abstract presenting a model, and the remainder of my post was evidence supporting the model I presented. Thank goodness we have folks like Skeptico to show us that science journals worldwide have been utilizing such fallacies of argument!

"In fact, I don't think I've ever mentioned low food prices before, although I could be wrong." Well shucks, perhaps you should learn to search your own postings, or perhaps maybe even remember what you said.
"If GM actually did produce low food prices, most people would view this as a good thing."
But here is only one of many uses of weasle words by Skeptico: he pre-excuses himself when it is convenient to write something and he doesn't care if it is a lie.

"Random factoid (of debatable veracity), also a straw man and I believe even a Reductio ad Hitlerum logical fallacy. (And don't deny that - what other context of the German phrase "uber alles" is there but "Deutschland uber alles" and Hitler?)"
Well, if you look at what Wikipedia says about it, August Heinrich Hoffmann [...] wrote the text in 1841[...] The first line, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt" (Germany, Germany above everything, above everything in the world), was an appeal to the various German sovereigns to give the creation of a united Germany a higher priority than the independence of their small states. It has been the national anthem of Germany since 1922 during the Weimar Republic. Its origin and adoption had no connection to Hitler or Naziism. Your contention that there is no other context is merely due to your own cultural ignorance, susceptibility to WWII propaganda and lack of research.

"Here's the thing Mike. You are on the Internet, using what may be your real name or what may be an alias, conversing with others who may or may not be using aliases. You don't know who they are even if they tell you. We don't know who you are even if you tell us."
Ooo, don't the Hare Krishna's use something like this? Non Krishnas are demons and will lie, so we don't need to pay attention to their arguments? Or are you taking pyrrhonism to ridiculous lengths, denying the possibility of knowledge of my identity and qualifications? It so happens that if you do a little bit of homework, my identity and knowledge can be confirmed. And you don't even need the net (though you can): I am pictured on the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper today. Is that main stream media good enough for you? My resume, picture, and lots of other information are at my web sites, and have been for many years. If you're still worried about my identity, I can provide references. Twit.

"The evidence matters."
Yes, evidence does matter: but so does the framework of understanding which is necessary to judge it. You, and most of the readers here, don't have that understanding, any more than you have the necessary understanding of any number of other technical fields. Your conspicuous errors repeatedly show that you know little of the field. (Ugh, a pun.)

You have stated no qualifications in the subject of agricultural economics. I, on the other hand, have been following it for the past 35 years since I was a freshman at Cornell. That's why you bungled the difference between yield per acre and productivity.

"Now remember, I started my reply with 'I think you're saying...' - which any rational and mentally stable individual would have taken as a person's honest attempt to understand your point."
Ah, general purpose weasle words once again. Now, does that translate into "I declare that you are saying" or "It's possible that you are saying"? Or someplace in between? If you had wanted to convince anybody that you were making a decent attempt (rather than spewing the first foolish thing that came to your prejudiced mind), you would have considered more than one possible meaning and justified why you chose that one. Before you invented a litany of reasons why your misinterpretation meant that I was wrong.

"Reading your posts again I realize you don't show anger, and that I was perhaps projecting my own anger at your style of debating[...] I apologize for calling what you wrote "angry drivel". I was wrong saying that. I should have called it unnecessarily confrontational, aggressive, loud mouthed, smug arrogance."
So let's see. Skeptico is confessing to my accusations of his projection and anger. But not because he's an honest guy or anything, but because it's so damned obvious that even he can see it now. Is it clever sarcasm now to channel that same stupid anger into a backhanded compliment? And to use emotive weasle words like those? We've seen how those work: men are confident, women are smug. Sounds like more projection to me.

Skeptico (and others) quoted my statement: "I get paid to teach (at an elite public high school)". He wrote:
"LMAO. Oh you don't think you're infallible, noooo. You need to write to express not to impress[....]"
Ah, a perfect example of that old creationist favorite, quote mining. In context, I wrote that sentence as part of an explanation of why I would not waste my time answering demands for explanation from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Not as a statement of authority in agricultural economics.

"An honest mistake, especially if expressed with some doubt (as I did), is not a straw man."
Wow, since when did you get to rewrite the rules of logic to grant yourself exceptions when you've used weasle words? And we're to believe you're honest when you've already confessed to being angry and projecting? Lots of creationists think they're honest when they misinterpret evolution: will you exempt them too? Or do they always forget to use the mystical weasle words?

"And Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM? Source please. And not just a graph of prices going down. A source that shows prices are going down due to technological improvements. Correlation is not causation. Source please."
If you want sources for basic knowledge in a field, you're rather ignorant. But here you go: Agricultural productivity at wikipedia. "Changes in TFP are usually attributed to technological improvements[...] As farms become more productive, the wages earned by those who work in agriculture increase. At the same time, food prices decrease and food supplies become more stable." The wikipedia Green Revolution article has a similar statement, though it is unsourced.

"“claque”? If you really meant “an organized body of professional applauders” (as Wikipedia defines it), this is just absurd."
Ah weasle words again: "If you really meant". However, if Skeptico had the competence to use a real dictionary, it would be obvious that I meant another, more common, and modern usage: a group of fawning admirers. It amazes me when people seem to go out of their way to reinterpret plain statements by selecting blatantly inappropriate definitions.

“why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if doing so reduced their overall profits and/or increases their debt? If GM makes them more competitive then they must be better off (ie not reduced profits) even after the cost of the GM seeds.”
Still whining, because you haven't enough understanding of the field to create a simple hypothetical example? I'll take pity on you and give you one.

Assume two farmers, A and B, both of whom have identical farms and grow identical traditional crops. Both net $50K/year.

Farmer B switches to GM seed, which gives him a lower cost of production (we'll assume that he produces the same yield, though that's not necessary.) The lower cost of production comes from less use of fuel that offsets the higher cost of seed. Now, A makes $50K, and B makes (lets say) $70K. Oooo, looks like GM is a good thing and doesn't hurt farmer A!

But wait! Farmer B has shown that this land can be more profitable. That means that the value of the land goes up, which means that the rent or taxes or both go up. No matter how little they go up, farmer A is worse off. The GM seed company observes the profitability, and as a monopoly, raises its price to consume that new profit. Indeed, the seed company can raise the price until farmer B makes as little as farmer A, because B's alternative is to do the same as A and make as little. Now both farmers are worse off. But because of the stickyness of land prices and long terms of loans, mortgages, and property tax rates, the lower earnings can stick.

It gets worse. Because there seems to be new profitability due to GM, more farmers plant more acres to GM and the supply increases. Pushing down the price of the crop, and reducing profitability still further for A and B.

All of these changes are more or less independent from each other, and not coordinated by government or markets.

In addition, there can be a prisoner's dilemma sort of race among farmers to be the first adopters of newly profitable technologies. The payoff if all adopt can be much lower than the payoff if all refrain. But because the payoff for a defector who adopts alone is highest, and the payoff for the sucker is lowest of all, there's no end to the defection.

Now this is a hypothetical example that answers Skeptico's questions. Very similar issues are the bread and butter of agricultural economics. The basic facts of US agriculture are very difficult to explain without such models: the enormous reduction of family farms, the enormous reduction of profitability of farms for families, the rapidity of adoption of technological change, and the increasing corporate ownership of farms. I'd also note that I assumed the GM changes didn't increase yield, but many have. Increased production can have nonlinear effects on prices and thus profits.

I don't expect you folks to believe this: doubtless some of you will be stupid enough to trot out equilibristic economics arguments for a subject that is famously not so. But once you've got as complicated a system as this one, simplistic ahistorical arguments like Skeptico's just aren't convincing.

The basis of skeptical argument.

2008-08-30T08:09:00.002-04:00

Very few arguments are explicitly syllogistic: it is seldom that assumptions. inferences, and conclusions are all stated together in plain view. Consequently, most arguments rely heavily on background information and assumptions (facts, history, models, biases, etc.) that are not likely to be made explicit.

If one party to a discussion about some field is lacking the necessary background information and assumptions, they are unlikely to be able to make correct arguments. They will have omitted or incorrect assumptions. No matter how explicitly syllogistic such an argument seems to be, it is fallacious if an assumption (present or omitted) is incorrect. This is why expertise and authority is considered important to an argument. Without expertise, like a stopped clock you might sometimes be right, but much of the time you will be wrong.

So what does it mean when one person professes subject expertise in an argument and the other has no such expertise? Is that an invalid argument from authority? It could mean several things. It could mean "my analysis is based on better background information, so check the other guy's more carefully". No fallacy there. It could mean "if you need a heuristic clue as to who might be right, this is a defeasible shortcut." This is an informal fallacy of logic, but a very practical heuristic method of reasoning with non-monotonic logic. (See my Distrust in logic article.) Or it could mean I am right because I am an authority", in which case it is the informal fallacy argument from authority. Perhaps it could mean other things as well. Only that third option is the argument from authority, IMHO. The other two are USEFUL, perhaps more useful than classical logic as I explain in my article.

While arguing with Skeptico, I pointed out the differences between our expertise, and a number of his supporters have accused me of the argument from authority. To logically make their case, they would need to exclude the other possibilities. But what they really are doing is applying a weak form of defeasible logic: "he has sinned (never mind that we all are sinners, and don't you dare measure how egregiously or frequently we sin.)"

Jimmy_Blue, to his credit, found an excellent set of links that provide substantial background for this debate. Background that I assumed from long experience, which Skeptico plainly lacked. Background that confirms pretty much all the points I made in my initial response to Skeptico: Response to Skeptico: Must Pay for GM Seeds? I'll add one more reference, On the adoption of genetically modified seeds in developing countries... which confirms my claims about farm productivity increases and GM seed monopoly. "...these technologies can bring about major cost savings in pest control and reduce negative environmental externalities through reductions in the use of toxic pesticides. Studies by Qaim and Zilberman (2003) and Thirtle et al. (2003) reveal that GM crops can also increase yields in situations where pesticides are underused."

Jimmy_Blue writes:

Mike Huben I think makes a relevant point that does appear to be a fairly reasonable answer to Skeptico's question - that farmers must buy GM seed in order to remain competitve because of the various pressures on farmers resulting in particular from technological advances reducing commodity prices. Combine this with the possibility of monopolistic supply of GM seed, and economic pressures could result in a stark choice - buy GM seed or don't farm anymore.

The must comes from the fact that if a farmer wanted to stay a farmer, they would have to buy GM seed to remain competitive with other farmers - particularly the large corporate ones. Almost a compulsion by choice if you will.

Correct me if I am wrong in this summation.

Spot on. In my book, Jimmy_Blue is an excellent life-long student: not because he agreed with me, but because he constructively resolved a controversy with his own directed research, and shared the results. He avoided the mistake of confirmation bias (if he started with Skeptico's position), which often afflicts us skeptics just like ordinary people. I can get really pompous here and declare that was one of my motives, to goad people into learning for themselves, but it's obvious to me that Jimmy_Blue doesn't need to be taught by me. My hat's off to you!

Jimmy_Blue also spends a lot of his response fisking my style of argument, rather than the content. I can live with that. I've adopted an "afflict the comfortable" style, which I find handy for ridiculing pompous bullshitters (and Skeptico is one in this political subject. He's merely pompous in more scientific subjects.) Jimmy_Blue concludes "your argument does come across as probably valid but expressed by a total tosser" Probably valid: that's a much better judgement than I expected from any of Skeptico's supporters -- thank you Jimmy_Blue. Am I a "total tosser"? Well, since Jimmy_Blue spends his response showing how I do the same obnoxious things Skeptico does, shall I infer that he also thinks Skeptico is a "total tosser"? I can live with that: that's one of the things I set out to demonstrate.

A last couple of points about Skeptico's apparent ignorance of the subject that it would be good to clarify.

First, Skeptico and I have not been as clear (in our terminology) as we should have been about productivity of GM crops. Skeptico is correct that GM crops generally do not increase YIELD PER ACRE, which is one measure of productivity. But that measure is too narrow for this discussion, as anybody with a background in agricultural economics should know. The normal meaning of the word productivity in agricultural economics is yield divided by total costs of production, which include land, labor, and capital. GM crops have been designed to increase that latter form of productivity, and there is substantial evidence that they do (as documented in my additional reference.) That latter form of technologically-driven productivity is why farmers MUST buy GM seed or go bankrupt.

Skeptico's statement "There are no low food prices. Don’t you follow the news – they’re at record highs." is just wrong. As anybody at all familiar with agriculture knows, the prices of agricultural commodities have (long term) been declining for many decades. Jimmy_Blue's sources affirm that. Skeptico said something very stupid, based on short-term price information and his own ignorance. Unless you want to believe that he was intending to mislead us.

Skeptical infallibility

2008-08-26T13:30:00.002-04:00

A little bit of knowledge can be laughable. We're all familiar with the newbie who, having learned of informal fallacies of argument, denies true claims because they are backed by arguments that could be incorrect due to their form. If I say that I see the sky is blue, the newbie squeals "argument from authority!" And then there's the guy who's taken freshman microeconomics who knows that the world runs by markets, and the whole world should be understood by perfect market assumptions. A close relation is the victim of "Atlas Shrugged". And most laughable of all, the religious/creationist zealot who has discovered the power of parroting arguments to bamboozle the unprepared. These people all get drunk on the "power" these learnings give them to argue with others less prepared.

The secular counterpart to the religious/creationist zealot is the dogmatic skeptic. (See Denialism for corporate-sponsored examples.) Armed with some preferred extreme position, having out-argued a few particularly stupid opponents by reciting arguments (which are sometimes good, unlike religious/creationist arguments), this sort of skeptic seems to think he is infallible in his pronouncements. The problem is when this sort of skeptic stumbles upon an argument he's not familiar with and attempts to respond.

The syndrome is a familiar one to those who argue with the religious. Some common responses are to:

(1) misconstrue the argument as one he can parrot a response to
(2) attribute strong emotions to the opponent while displaying them himself (psychological projection)
(3) attempt some combination of stand on dignity/sneering
(4) blame his mistakes on the other person's poor writing
(5) conveniently ignore clear refutations and throw out random factoids as if they adequately responded to a point
(6) deny clear misbehavior
(7) attempt to shift the burden of proof
(8) stubbornly insist on false dichotomies when presented with third options
(9) and proclaim himself the winner.

All these are ways of dealing with the harsh, ego-deflating failure to make a good argument, a form of self-delusion. Spaghetti forbid that the dogmatic skeptic should actually question whether his argument was competent, whether he really knows enough to make a good response, whether he has taken a correct position. He is righteous! The opponent must be wrong! He must be infallible!

Let's look at how Skeptico has responded to me for an example. These correspond to the 9 points above.

(1) Skeptico rewrote my clear statement, and now claims that he didn't understand it: how could he rewrite it accurately if he didn't understand it? He should make up his mind. I wrote "Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM." Perhaps it is too difficult for him to understand that other technological improvements have been reducing commodity prices since the inventions of the horse collar, steam engine, reaper, hybrid seed, etc. Having rewritten it, he made a specific (partly wrong) claim for GM seed, which did not address my more general statement.

(2) Skeptico writes: "angry drivel", "idiocy", "so-called arguments", "what the hell did you mean", "babbling", "Oh give me a break", "an arrogant, angry jerk". Who's displaying angry emotions here? Nor is this the first interchange where he's done this. "Perhaps if you calmed down a bit before you pushed post…" I notice that I thought on my response for 5 days, whereas his went up in two hours or less. Who's not calm?

(3) Let's see: for sneering we have "Wow – pretty desperate tactics. I’ll ignore most of your idiocy...". For stand on dignity, we have "You’re one to lecture about humility. You come across as an arrogant, angry jerk." Somebody needs to tell him the little secret that when you use these in combination, they add up to unconvincing.

(4) "If I misunderstood something you wrote, that would be your fault for being a crappy writer." Could there be a better example of how Skeptico cannot be at fault, because he must be infallible?

(5) When I was pointing out that soybean prices had been falling for roughly the last 25 years (in response to his irrelevant point that they were up this year), he responds that "GM has only been planted for ten. Kind of ruins your complete argument, doesn’t it?" This too is irrelevant.

(6) "I made no strawmen." A clear denial of his rewriting what I posted.

(7) Skeptico wrote "I’m sure it’s true that GM hasn’t (yet) resulted in significantly higher productivity or lower costs." When I pointed out a specific sales pitch that contradicted him and asked him for his source, he turns around and asks me for mine. No response to the request for his own source.

(8) Skeptico seem incapable of realizing more than a dichotomy when discussing why farmers oppose GM. He states the choices as (a) buy or (b) don't buy. But it is obvious that there are at least 3: (a) buy from a monopolist or (b) don't buy from a monopolist or (c) don't allow a monopolistic entry into the market.

(9) And here's the funniest one of all. Skeptico proclaims himself the winner of the debate! "You need to learn not only the humility that you hilariously think I need, you also need to develop a coherent argument and learn how to write it down. Because you haven’t even come close to making your case so far." Ooo, he's qualified to judge me and my argument, despite the fact that he has no visible qualifications at all. And he expects us to believe him. Because he's got to be infallible, no doubt.

We skeptics are not infallible, and when we argue with each other, we cannot make the presumptions we make when arguing with the dogmatic. Dogmatic responses of our own are adequate for run-of-the-mill purposes so frequently that some skeptics seem to feel they must be infallible, and forget the critical reading and thinking skills that are essential to creating new, customized arguments.

Response to Skeptico: Must Pay for GM Seeds?

2008-08-20T07:36:00.005-04:00

At Skeptico's blog, he has a post: Must Pay for GM Seeds?

I read this post and despair at the smug confidence of nerds who probably never worked on a farm or studied agricultural economics.

Historically (and presently), farmers have been driven off the land, resulting in consolidation and eventual corporate ownership of farmland. There is a conflict between these pressures and the farmer's own ideas of the way they'd like to live and work. In most cultures, a farm represented sufficient resources and food security to raise a family, with surplus for markets. In the US, this was the basis of the Jeffersonian economic policy (which had the added benefit of omitting landlords.)

Forcing farmers off the land has been done directly (via enclosure acts) and indirectly by taxation and market pressures leading to foreclosure/bankruptcy. Farmers are forced to enter the market system to pay taxes. There, they must compete with other farmers in production of commodities. The prices of commodities are continually pushed downwards by increasing productivity of capital-intensive technology.

Farmers have always disliked this vise of economic pressure, and wished for freedom to simply farm and raise their families. Many years ago, they resented hybrid seed because it increased the pressures: if you didn't buy it, you couldn't survive at the now-lowered price of the commodity and you had to buy it year after year because it didn't come true from seed. That meant you had to finance the seed and its increased fertilizer, which made you more prone to bankruptcy in a bad year. The one good thing about hybrid seed was that there WAS competition, because the technology was developed and dispersed by state and federal research without patents. Indeed, when you look at Plant Patent law, it excludes patents on plants propagated by seed partly to keep seed prices low.

GM seed is generally patented. Most GM seed at this time is a monopoly: there's very little competition. And when you get a monopoly in a chain of production, generally the monopolistic link is able to profit at the expense of most of the other links by being a price maker. This means farmers make less profit, even as they are producing more. In addition, the greater investment for the seed, herbicide, and fertilizer for the crop makes farming even riskier. Corporations owning dispersed and varied farmlands can self-insure, but it is costly and difficult for small farmers. This tends to drive more land out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of agribusiness.

GM seed is only the latest of many technological pressures on farmers, but perhaps the most monopolistic pressure since the railroad shipping and grain elevator monopolies.

Now that I've given you a little background, let's look at Skeptico's statements again.

"Note the wording, farmers must pay for GM seeds year after year, rather than save seeds. Must. Apparently they have no choice. Which is funny, because I didn’t think that farmers were compelled to use GM seeds."

Yes, they are compelled by the stark choice of GM or bankruptcy. Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM. Unless their productivity can keep up, they will go bankrupt.

"But I’m willing to accept I might be missing something here, so please tell me exactly what I am missing – why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if doing so reduced their overall profits and/or increases their debt?"

Does that answer your question? Saving seeds would reduce their income because commodity prices drop. And debt (an investment) is not so much a problem as the uncertainty (risk) that a crop may fail and thus bankrupt the farmer. It's a racheting process that has been driving farmers off the land for more than a century in the US, and that is going on worldwide today.

So the farmer's opposition to GM seed comes partly from this latest of a long set of severe, inescapable pressures. They feel like they're in a nightmarish, involuntary game of musical chairs: every round, more farmers are driven out of their independent way of life. The solution would have to be a systemic solution, not just prohibition of GM seed. All the latter would do is buy some time. In Europe and Japan, they've adopted both systematic and anti-GM solutions to protect their farmers.

Destruction of crop genetic diversity is also a side effect of a capitalist system of industrialization of agriculture, and not specific to GM. GM is merely the latest competition with heirlooms, landraces and other reservoirs of genetic diversity.

The major problem that I perceive with GM is safety. Modern commodification of food conceals sources while ensuring widespread exposure. Remember the recent melamine contamination of pet food? That was traced quickly because it killed quickly. Say that some GM food had a thalidomide-like effect, that took close to a year to show? And that it was present in a widespread food such as soy or wheat? Or that it had an even slower to detect hormonal or carcinogenic effect? Do we really want to test GM foods on entire populations first? How costly would it be to expose the entire population to some unforseen harm that, say, caused improper development in children due to hormonal interference? How much testing should GM foods undergo before they are tested on the population at large? This question makes the European and Japanese anti-GM positions look much more reasonable.