Source: Facebook

http://cafehayek.com/2013/07/thomas-sowell-and-immigration.htmlLIBERTARIANS ARE WRONG ON IMMIGRATION. AND IF THEY”RE RIGHT, PROGRESSIVES ARE RIGHT ON DEBT.

(How do you like that one?)

Reposted from Comments on Cafe Hayek.

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ACK. POSITIVISM.

How do we measure the cost to current political friction?

How do we measure the cost of the decline in property rights?

How do we measure the cost of the decline in the rule of law?

How do we measure the cost of the decrease in the civic society?

How do we measure the opportunity cost of what might have been?

How do we measure the cost of the decline of the nuclear family?

How do we measure the cost of declining trust due to diversity?

I can generate constant economic growth by conducting two centuries of constant warfare, while increasing credit loads predicated on the ongoing success of that warfare. So what?

How many unmeasured costs of normative, social, and institutional capital are absorbed by immigration?

I can’t take the time address this problem other than to just make a very long list. To which the ONLY response by libertarians would be correlative empirical nonsense. There is no reason if these intangibles PRODUCE the high trust society and the rule of law, that their sacrifice isn’t a COST that undermines the high trust society and the rule of law.

After all, the production cycle of high trust norms it looks like, is from 200-700 years, and the production cycle of an economy is months or years. I mean, just how IRRATIONAL is it to measure the NOISE generated by profit, loss and GROWTH, instead of the SIGNAL of social and human capital? I mean, how absolutely ridiculous… it’s essentially numerology – attributing magical properties to numbers, and falling into the vapid positive error of INDUCTION.

IMMIGRATION IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE GOOD and ECONOMIC MEASURES are contrary indicators of the growth of normative, social and human capital.

If positivism on this scale is right, then the progressives are also right. All you do is confirm the idiocy of the Krugman-Stigliz-Delong left. And their goal is not economic -it’s political. It’s to undermine the aristocratic high trust society and replace it with the totalitarian equalitarian state.

Sigh. It’s no wonder that we lose the ideological battle with even the conservatives. At least they understand it even if they speak in allegorical terms.

Exasperating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58AWELCOME TO THE STATUS OF FARM ANIMAL: THE STORY OF YOUR ENSLAVEMENT – IT”S WORSE THAN ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM

I am not a libertarian that requires every one of our factions to put forward rigid analytical arguments in pursuit of some absolutely persuasive scripture.

Like Roderick Tracy Long, proposes, I think any advocate of liberty must be accommodated if at all possible, as long as they expand interest in and passion for liberty. We scribblers largely debate other scribblers, but political movements are won or lost by numbers, and ideology aims not to produce either internally consistent argument or empirical evidence for purposes of persuasion. The purpose of ideology is to motivate the passions of the many to act. If religion required articulated reason, and empirical support, the world would be populated by atheists.

Now, Molyneux’s attempts at analytical philosophy are pretty weak. But his sentiments, his analogies, his narratives, and his advocacy advance ideological and sentimental liberty, even if they don’t really contribute to analytical rigor in our field.

Stefan’s recent video “The Story Of Your Enslavement” is exceptionally well done. It promotes a very simple meme by analogy to farming, that unites the sentiments and aggravates the passions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A

It’s great work. And please share it. Even those of who dismiss ideology and seek the certainty of the ratio-scientific can appreciate the craftsmanship – the ARTISTRY, in this kind of message.

It’s brilliant.

Curt

(PS: If you don’t think so, then you’ve never seen the effect of Schoolhouse Rock. 🙂

NECESSITY VS PREFERENCE

It is all well and good to attempt to construct political and ethical philosophy as the family becomes the village, the tribe becomes the city with a division of labor, and the people become the nation with an anonymous market.

It is necessary to do so.

But preferences must compete with necessities. We may prefer something but it must in practice be possible.

We can temporarily distort necessity, as we with fiat money – because we can. We can permanently distort morality by sanctioning competition as virtuous – because we can.

But in human history there are many preferences and few necessities.

Those tools that compensate for our limited intellectual abilities: our senses, perception, memory, reason, calculation, and planning are the necessities of human existence.

We adapt our norms and institutions to those necessities. Not the other way around.

We are not wealthier than our cave dwelling ancestors. The only human currency is time.

But through the division of knowledge and labor we have increased the purchasing power of our time to levels unimaginable to those who came before us.

Romantic, egoistic, anthropocentric vanities encourage us to believe we make directional choices in our evolution but we do not. We seize opportunities good and bad. We forgo opportunities good and bad. And we pay or gain the consequences – by trial and error.

Then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom, and justify to ourselves our errors.

The future is opaque and kaleidic.

At best, we can attempt to improve our suite of tools, and choose those norms and institutions that increase our sense, perception, memory, calculation, planning, and information sharing.

So that we constantly narrow the scope of our trial and error, and in doing so, increase the purchasing power of out time in this earth.