This argument does not apply as clearly as you suggest to social phenomenon, bec

http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/06/three-ways-to-go-wrong.html?spref=fb1) This argument does not apply as clearly as you suggest to social phenomenon, because of causal density, and un-testability. That we can argue against induction is of course correct as an analytical statement. But that does not mean that we cannot argue in favor of general principles necessary for consensual action. This is the difference between abstract truth and knowledge necessary for action. The first is irrelevant. The second is how humans make collective decisions in commons.

2) Data will, within the next twenty years or so, give us evidence that eliminates our need for philosophical argument, and instead, will allow us to make empirical arguments. RIght now, voting data, which is demonstrated preference, provides most of the data useful for our arguments.

This is the underlying problem with current libertarian popular argument: fighting the last war. We fought the war on socialism on philosophical grounds because a) we lacked the data to do otherwise, and b) central planning results show up faster than self organizing results. So the other side had more better data than we did. That’s changed. The problem today is not central planning, or socialism, or social democracy. It’s Postmodernism, which has replaced ‘scientific socialism’ as the religion of choice of the state. So most libertarians fight the last war, using last war’s rhetoric, rather than data against postmodernism. (Which is what those few of us do on the edge of the ‘reformation’ in libertarianism.)

3) Non aggression is an epistemological TEST to which we can subject statements. It is not a positive proscription for action. Rothbardian/Hoppiean Libertarianism is philosophically rigid, and an attempt at a complete theory, but that completeness is beyond the use of even the educated classes. As such that complexity has been reduced to the single test, which can be employed without such study and rigor.

We DO have a necessary and sufficient theory of liberty. We just have an insufficient and necessary explanation of morality. Rothbard did a good job but he was wrong in relying upon the ethics of the ghetto instead of the ethics of the soldiery. Ghetto ethics are why libertarianism remains a minority movement. Mises did a good job, but in failing to incorporate opportunity costs he failed to formulate his Praxeology as a the closed science that he suggested it to be.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle.

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev.