Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

FYI: TRYING TO CREATE A DISCOURSE WITH THE RATIONAL AND SCIENTIFIC LEFT.

Dear Lord Keynes,

Becker-Posner?

Given that our criticisms of the status quo and past are the same, but our solutions overlap or are different, it might be interesting, beneficial for both of us, and beneficial for the Alt’s both left and right, if we updated and replaced the Becker-Posner debate.

I can see educating both sides, and perhaps allying both sides against the status quo. But at the very worst, it would increase the reach for both of us.

Neither of us have worthy debate partners. So our arguments are often lost in a swamp of sophisms. Improving the quality of the debate means improving the message, explanation, and nuance.

And I don’t necessarily want us to debate each other. It’s more that we could both make our cases about specific questions and let the ‘jury’ decide, as did Becker and Posner.

In other words, you make the alt-(new)-left and I make the alt-(new)-right arguments. And we draw both audiences into the discourse.

Just a thought.

Curt.

**Lord Keynes**

Apologies, I only just saw this now. By Becker-Posner debate, do you mean a debate about the virtue of Keynesian economic policy versus Neoclassical/Austrian policies? I am happy to have a Facebook debate or written debate at some blog or appropriate place

**Curt Doolittle**

Glad you responded.

Now to start with, I don’t see myself as an ‘austrian’, so much as understanding what the german austrian(monarchists), jewish austrian(Separatists), classical liberals(protestants), french democratic socialist(catholics), Fascists(reactionaries), communists(everywhere) were attempting to achieve. And that I sort of started out as a classical liberal and ended up between the german austrian (monarchist) and anglo-rule-of-law(protestant) position. But I make use of economic operationalism: a demand for sovereignty over transfers. (I’ve spent quite a few thousand words deflating and defrauding the entire jewish austrian program of mises, rothbard, and hoppe. Ironically, while living around the corner from Mises’ home in Ukraine.)

But rather than rehash the past, I was thinking more about discussing present and future, with each of us providing a criticism and solution to questions from the new-left, new-right perspectives. So, I would not so much want to debate each other, but to say “my suggestion to this problem is…” and let the jury decide. Although, this requires good faith on both sides of the debate, assuming the good faith of the other party.

Now, you and I have both been at this a long time and you were already ahead of me when I started. And I don’t know your ambitions or level of interest in affecting the public debate. But I would like to, and I think there is public interest in, raising the level of discourse in the ‘new’ (post-postwar) era debate, when we have a century of evidence and data to work with rather than extensions of the enlightenment fantasies about what human nature might be – and what ‘good’ means.

Karl Smith and I talked about this a few times but he and his peers got nabbed by Forbes. And I think the world needs it. The problem is it’s nearly impossible (it is impossible ) to find people that understand these issues from both sides. I the sense that they understand the truths, goods, and preferences, that lead to current assumptions that economic and political policy solves for. In fact, I am not sure I know many people other than you who do.

I thought we might achieve a couple of things together:

… (a) change the current moral and ideological debate into a rational and scientific one. The people need to hear debates that are both morally intuitive to them and scientifically explicable to them. The current debate, just like all 20th century debate, emphasizes the technical while assuming an unstated moral, and this disconnects people from the arguments. The primary reason being that in the early 20th we were moving people from lack of consumption to the point where we brought almost everyone into the consumer classes, then to the point where too man are seeking little but consumption for the purpose of obtaining signaling, while others are stagnating. (in my view, top and bottom against the middle).

… (b) Demonstrate that new/old left and new/old right criticisms of the status quo and the past are the same, but that our solutions to those criticisms differ quite a bit. And that it is a difference in moral bias, that those moral biases are not arbitrary but meaningful, and that those meaningful moral biases are the reason these questions are either not understood by anyone, not explained to the people, of too much political use to explain to the people, or if the truth of those differences is unpalatable to the people.

… (c) To improve our arguments a great deal (I think of the Alan Coombs vs Sean Hannity discourses as too low, and the becker posner debates as about right, and the nonsense we see between the Krugman/Stieglitz/DeLongs and the Ferguson/Mankiws as obscurantist.)

… (d) to raise our visibility and the visibility of our arguments, and to see if, over time, we can get picked up by one of the media venues that are looking for quality content – and see if we can have even more influence. Not that I have a lot of time for this, or time for that, but I have enough time to crank out something every day, few days, or week.

I don’t particularly need more visibility. I have enough already. And when I publish this year I’ll get a lot more attention both good and bad.

Anyway, I hope you take this as the compliment I mean it to be.

-Cheers

**Lord Keynes**

(1) The first point of difference (I imagine) is the Austrian/Neoclassical idea that free markets have a tendency towards general equilibrium and hence economic coordination by flexible wages and prices and a (supposed) coordinating loanable funds market that equates savings and investment. You will never get anywhere unless you realise that this is false: it is the product of marginalists from the 1870s onwards who had physics envy and wanted to model a market economy like a self-equilibrating physical system.

(2) The Neoclassical/Austrian model is false because

… (i) market systems are complex human systems subject to degrees of non-calculable probability and uncertainty. Investment is essentially driven by expectations which are highly subjective and even irrational, and come in waves of general optimism and pessimism

… (ii) the loanable funds model is a terrible model of aggregate

investment (partly because the mythical natural rate of interest

can’t be defined outside one commodity worlds) but very

importantly because of (i)

… (iii) the price and wage is highly inflexible, and even if it were flexible all sorts of factors prevent convergence to equilibrium states anyway (e.g., debt deflation, failure of the Pigou effect)

(3) also, the obsessive/compulsive fixation with the supply-side is what cripples Austrian/Neoclassical economics. In our capital-rich Western economies, what mostly constrains our prosperity is the demand-side

**Curt Doolittle**

Yes of course. And I don’t understand this response to my question.

As I said, *I am not an austrian* but a critic of it – and libertarianism for that matter.

So, we share the same criticisms. And I probably support very similar solutions. (Direct distribution of increases in money supply to the consumer.)

But I do understand that there are differences in the moral and political biases, and what i want to discuss is those solutions. And I think our differences would be in moral and political biases.

I think there was far more going on than modeling on physical systems. Instead, it was moral and class and cultural biases, with the modeling a justification.

*What do we do about the demand side and how do we manage the political consequences?*

And that difference will be between the conservative(meritocratic) and progressive(equalitarian) biases.

I think this is the better discussion to have. For the simple reason that the answer will become a necessity on the visible time horizon.

**Lord Keynes**

(1) I think all attempts to argue for absolute property rights based on deontological moral theories fail. I find Rothbard’s natural rights theory so lacking in any defensive foundation that I’m surprised people take it seriously:

(2) all objective ethical theories have problems and weak points. The one that (to my mind) has **the least serious problems and is most defensible** (compared to all others) is some kind of consequentialism that takes account of fairness and rationally-justifiable rights as also ends we should aim at, on order to make human societies flourish:

Strong but qualified property rights are justifiable. Absolute property rights are not. E.g., your property rights are worth jack once your nation becomes Brazil.

(3) I suppose on the conservative/meritocratic versus progressive/equalitarian issue, you are talking about Bell curve differences in distribution of IQs? And the standard conservative complaints that welfare states are dysgenic, and that fertility differentials in the West are now dysgenic? Maybe. But we are smart people and I don’t doubt we can fix such problems with genetic engineering and other reproductive technologies, quite possibly even before the end of this century

Rothbard’s Argument for Natural Rights and the Absolute Right to Private Property is Totally Flawed

And it is easy to demonstrate so, and I expand below on an old post of mine. First, Rothbard did not attempt to justify his natural rights…

**Curt Doolittle**

(0) The mainstream and Keyensian models do not account for all, or sufficient changes in capital (balance sheet) and instead only account for changes in income (income statements) that measure velocity. In other words, I view the mainstream as operating under a portfolio of measurements that are the result of cherry picking.

(1) Agreed on absoluteness of property *as you mean it* – not constrained by externalities. But this says nothing about the method by which we limit it. The question is, how do we limit it? (what do we use as the means of insurance?)

(2) Yes, to consequentialism, but that results in political decidability being provided by your item (#3) –

… (a) Eugenic/homogeneous/monopoly/large polities (china and japan) vs

… (b) Eugenic/homogenous/market(federation)/small equalitarian-polities (northern europe) vs

… (c) Dysgenic/heterogeneous/large/caste-polities (indian empire, brazil – and all of south america, the islamic empires, the Roman empire.).

(3) It’s not true that something can’t be done about it. You’re starting with these presumptions:

… a) A ‘we’ that preserves current state and political order.

… b) There is an unlimited value to the scale of a polity.

… c) We must compromise with one another rather than separate by moral bias.

… d) And, to extend Camus:

… … i) the first question of personal philosophy is ‘why do I not commit suicide?’

… … ii) the first question of ethical philosophy is ‘why do I not kill you, take your things?’

… … iii) the first question of political philosophy is ‘why do I and mine not kill you and yours, and take your land and your things, and enslave your women and children?’

(4) That separatism by moral bias into large/dysgenic/heterogeneous/caste-polities vs small/eugenic/homogenous/egalitarian-polities would not produce higher standards of living for BOTH dysgenic and eugenic polities. In fact, the evidence is that it DOES produce superior results when these polities specialize: Europe and china evolve rapidly, and heterogeneous polities degrade and stagnate.

And so, (given that we are in the midst of a cold civil war at the moment), since we both agree that the status quo is somewhere between immoral and pseudoscientific or both, it would be informative to hold a debate about what we might do about it.

Because as far as I now, I know, and a few of us know, that it is entirely possible to end the financialism of the economy and the upward redistribution that results from that financialism – and to do so by direct distribution of increases in money supply to the population and extraction of that redistribution through taxation of the resulting profits of individuals, business, and industry. It is also possible and likely preferable to abandon the use of consumer credit in parallel to the direct distribution of increases in the money supply.

The social consequences of which would likely reverse our current immoral and pseudoscientific condition (and the associated social problems.)

So I would like to talk about those two options, whether we talk about them as separate polities, or a combined polity that compromises.

The reason being is that I am fairly certain this cold civil war will turn hot in a visible time horizon. And the only way to avoid it is to provide a solution that makes that hot civil war unnecessary.

And I thought that together we might ‘alter the intellectual status quo’ by discussing it.

There are precious few people who can discuss these things. In no small part than because those of us outside of the academy are the only people who feel free to do so.

-Cheers