CARING ABOUT LIBERTARIANISM
(humor)(truth)
“The reason I seem to care so much about libertarianism is because I believe a correct understanding of the science of economics puts severe limits on what government can accomplish” – Peter Boettke
I agree. Although, the reason I care so much about libertarianism, is because the government can accomplish so much. And almost all of it turns out to be bad, or worse. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-14 18:03:00 UTC
http://mises.org/daily/6587/The-Economics-of-ObamaCareIT THE WHOLE THING WAS AN INCREMENTALIST CHARADE
all we had to do was give people catastrophic insurance.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-14 08:05:00 UTC
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/robert-j–shilleron-whether-he-is-a-scientistANOTHER NON-ANSWER: ON ECONOMICS AS A SCIENCE
I was actually offended by the hypocrisy of Shiller’s post, given that economists, at least those who act as public intellectuals, by speaking and writing, do almost nothing EXCEPT advocate or criticize policy. They do little BUT legitimize the state’s conduct of involuntary experiments on us while maintaining plausible deniability, statements of clean hands, and outright denial.
I drafted an essay on this topic to point out the reasons for confusion, as to which statements, concepts actions and methods in economics are scientific and which are not.
I’m tempted to call it, for marketing reasons ‘THE FINAL WORD ON …” economics as a science.
Since nothing can actually ‘be’ anything, the correct question is: “Which actions and propositions practiced by people who work in the field of economics reflect the actions and propositions demonstrated by scientists in the hard sciences, and which are not?”
I just tried to sketch the different ideas here, and I can’t do it quickly and put any meaning into it. So that will just have to wait until I have a weekend to work on it. But the answer is obvious: Its really useful investigation. But whether it uncovers constant relations is questionable, and whether it has predictive power is certainly false, and where it embraces moral hazard with bloody hands is damning.
FURTHERMORE
On the same lines, the more interesting question is, given any problem, are mathematical statements or computer science statements more scientific?
Given mathematical platonism, and that mathematical platonism is an empty verbalism obscuring causality (yes it is) because no mathematical statement is free from representation in operational language, are mathematical statements made in math department language true, or are they falsified, or are they merely analogies or riddles?
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 16:22:00 UTC
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/11/the_decline_of_4.htmlTHE DECLINE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
Cause?
1) The loss of relative technical advantage due to world adoption of consumer capitalism, and abandonment of marxism, socialism, and communism.
2) Export of production and jobs due to high domestic taxes and cheap foreign labor.
3) The distortionary effects of credit on innovation – favoring short term speculation rather than long term innovation: a general shortening of time horizons
4) The misallocation of capital to reinforcing short run sectors including housing.
5) The misallocation of human capital to finance, government, and housing.
6) The failure to reform the education system out of its labor origins.
7) The dilution of the work force by third world immigration
8) The policy emphasis on consumption growth rather than innovation growth.
9) …..
I’ll just stop there…
HOW MUCH ARE ECONOMISTS RESPONSIBLE?
A lot actually. Because economics, as it is practiced, is a positivist enterprise incapable of measuring ‘what matters’: informal institutional capital.
Civilizations fail, for very simple reasons: the instruments of production, calculation, coordination, and cooperation, cannot adapt to changes in circumstances, nor can they resist regressive results under the auspices of ‘innovation’. The reason we get wealthier is in fact ‘science’ or rather ‘extension of empirical tools of calculation’ that allow us to create increasingly complex divisions of knowledge and labor. Accounting is a far better weapon than cannon because one cannot produce a lot of cannon without accounting, nor an army and supply chain to support it. Laws are important but common laws are more important than other forms of law. Geometry is important but calculus is more important than geometry for many categories of problems. Perhaps most importantly, OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE is more important than mystical or allegorical, or moral language, and operation language requires the presence of scientific, operational, evidence. And further, operational language requires quite a few more IQ points than allegorical language.
WILL TECHNOLOGY SAVE US FROM PROGRESSIVE DESTRUCTION OF THE WEST?
It is an act of faith. You cannot extrapolate a trend. Most of our gains have been largely the product of harnessing fossil fuels so that we could teach people to read.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 01:55:00 UTC
HELPING OTHERS WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY….
… is just a cheap way to demonstrate conspicuous consumption because of your wealth. It’s Status seeking. It’s selfish. If you want to change the world, then pay for it yourself.
It doesnt take much. Just a little self sacrifice.
But everyone is a wanna-be. A pretender.
“Artificial feel-good.”
If it doesn’t cost it doesn’t have value.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 15:03:00 UTC
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/11/justin-fox-what-weve-learned-from-the-financial-crisis-noted.htmlWHAT DID THE LEFT LEARN FROM THE FINANCIAL CRISIS?
(They never learn anything. As Brad Delong demonstrates yet again.)
What “we” Learned is more interesting.
(a) Capital flows were catastrophically risk producing.
(b) Regulation of financial instruments was too weak to prevent fraud on a massive scale, and government created the incentive to commit systemic fraud, and the need to conform to systemic fraud because of a lack of regulation.
(c) That the state allowed, and encouraged, the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.
(d) That the state still prevents individuals and organizations from suing individuals and institutions from regulating company, and financial system behavior via the courts, by declaration of standing, as a means of preserving the political right and responsibility for regulation of those institutions – and thereby creating the incentive for political influence and corruption. That they both create the problem and then offer to solve it isn’t lost on some of us.
(e) The Austrian theory of the trade cycle is correct, yet again. Expanding credit causes misallocation and eventually, structural unemployment.
(f) That the left blocked attempts to produce a compromise deal for spending that suited left leaning supporters, and reforms that suited right wing supporters. And that this block continues today.
(g) We tried very hard, and, it looks as though it is possible to bankrupt the state if we work at it long enough. And either we bankrupt it or it bankrupts us and our families. Our view is that our families are family and that the state is an arbiter, not that all citizens are ‘family’.
BUT THEN AGAIN, We aren’t positivists. 🙂 And the left is. Because it’s convenient.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 10:51:00 UTC
Bitcoin bus, train and taxi fares? hmmm…
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 07:32:00 UTC
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-generational-injustice-of-social.htmlWHY PROGRESSIVES ARE IN DENIAL….
….over the immorality of GROWTH via CONSUMPTION and IMMIGRATION, rather than GROWTH via CONSTANT POPULATION and INVENTION.
Because if they don’t stay buried in denial, they have to admit that their greatest ‘achievement’ of the 20th century was a catastrophic failure that destroyed the inter-GENERATIONAL system of calculation, cooperation and incentives.
You know, there isn’t much difference between the necessity of money and prices for temporal coordination, and for the necessity of credit and interest for short inter-temporal coordination, and for the accumulation of wealth, and borrowing for long term, intergenerational coordination. These means of calculating are necessary, not arbitrary.
FACTS
The following are true;
(a) consumption requires that population increases.
(b) growth requires that innovation increases
(c) consumption is not growth it is expansion – there is a difference.
(d) consumption can finance growth.
(e) the limit of consumption to finance growth is determined by the rate of invention produced by the financing of consumption.
(There is a tidy graph defined here, but I”m not interested enough to go draw it, so I’ll leave it up to your imagination.)
I don’t need to bring up that growth via consumption is dysgenic, and growth via invention is eugenic. We have to think about THE PLANET after all.
I also don’t need to bring up that growth via consumption is the (mindless) female reproductive strategy that depends on regulation by nature, and that growth via invention is the (mindful) male reproductive strategy, and that this largely provides the explanation for the differences in voting behavior.
NO FREE LUNCH
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 02:31:00 UTC
THE LOWEST AMERICAN PARTICIPATION IN THE WORK FORCE SINCE 1978
“On Friday, the Labor Department reported that 720,000 Americans left the labor force. This exodus pushed the labor force participation rate down to 62.8%, the lowest level since 1978. One out of three adults in neither working nor actively looking for work”
MORE THAN ONE THIRD OF AMERICANS ARE OUT OF IT. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-08 14:15:00 UTC
RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY
“Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomplete sentence. “Man must act to serve his interests” is the full sentence. And completing the sentence demonstrates it’s irrelevance. The meaningful problem is that “Man must voluntarily cooperate.” And that is where the problem becomes difficult. Because man must actually “calculate and choose to outwide the current course of events”.
We call Reductio ad absurdum arguments rhetorical fallacies for a reason. ANy act of simplification or categorization is necessarily eliminative. “
One must be careful not to eliminate the causal properties of that which is required for later deduction from first principles.
It’s a cute trick of obscurant logic. And the genius is in constructing the (false) obscurant logic. Not in what we can deduce from it.
Human cooperation requires the voluntary payment of vast opportunity costs, for which they expect something in return. No activity is conducted for altruistic reasons. All activity is conducted in exchange for something. Most of it for insurance on inclusion in future opportunity.
Which Mises ignores and Rothbard intentionally avoids.
It’s possible to fix Mises’ Praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics, but only by restoring the recognition of those costs, and the consequential impact those costs have on the program of ethics we libertarians rely upon.
Fixing those errors then, returns LIBERTY TO ARISTOCRACY, truth and clarity, and rescues it from the ghetto of obscurant, deceptive language meant intentionally to mislead.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-08 07:21:00 UTC