StrangeLoop:I'm a recently de-radicalized libertarian
Statism isn't radical accept as a revolt against nature.
StrangeLoop:I'm not even sure I qualify as a libertarian anymore.
I could have told you this 3 months ago.
StrangeLoop:and I tend to support Burkean reforms
Another whig is born.
EmperorNero:Well if credit ratings agencies were a government-imposed cartel, why is it faith-based to say "Don't blame the market! Look at what the government did!". That's not faith-based, that's an empirical observation. They are right, then.
Of course they're right; that's why I told you about it!
Here's my point: libertarians are quick to say, "We don't need the government; we'll figure out how to do it privately!" Why don't they also say, "We'll figure out how to do it despite government interference!"?
No matter what the circumstances might be in a stateless society, libertarians believe private solutions will magically materialize. Why don't private remedies to government intervention also materialize? That is, we can consider such interference a cost like any other.
"I'm not a fan of Murray Rothbard." -- David D. Friedman
StrangeLoop: I. Ryan:Sure, but why would that mean that we should coerce them or something? To save lives.
I. Ryan:Sure, but why would that mean that we should coerce them or something?
To save lives.
The logic of an authoritarian. To make better people off, we have to force them to do things they don't want to do.
How original.
liberty student:The logic of an authoritarian. To make better people off, we have to force them to do things they don't want to do. How original.
What if those people, statistically, are known to regret previous decisions? (Lung cancer victims--more often than not--regret smoking, for instance.) However, in circumstances like that (cancer, old age, etc.), there is no repeated opportunity for learning (i.e., if you didn't save for old age, you're not going to learn from your mistake and "do better next time").
StrangeLoop: I. Ryan:So you want to try to save people from their own stupidity? For some, yes. For instance, I consider forced savings for retirement to be a serious policy idea (Austrians, using their economic theory alone, have no reason to believe that individuals will adequately save for retirement).
I. Ryan:So you want to try to save people from their own stupidity?
For some, yes. For instance, I consider forced savings for retirement to be a serious policy idea (Austrians, using their economic theory alone, have no reason to believe that individuals will adequately save for retirement).
After all this time, you STILL do not understand AE?
Unbelievable. I mean, I can believe it, I just can't believe you have the gall to keep returning to the scene of the crime so to speak, since you've been shown to be very ignorant about Austrian economics by at least a half dozen people here.
Full marks for effort, you truly do not have any quit in you.
liberty student: StrangeLoop:I'm a recently de-radicalized libertarian Statism isn't radical accept as a revolt against nature.
Oh, so the richest, freest, and least violent societies of all time are a "revolt against nature"?
StrangeLoop:What if those people, statistically, are known to regret previous decisions?
What if?
Who has the ability to act as God and predict value changes?
liberty student:After all this time, you STILL do not understand AE? Unbelievable. I mean, I can believe it, I just can't believe you have the gall to keep returning to the scene of the crime so to speak, since you've been shown to be very ignorant about Austrian economics by at least a half dozen people here. Full marks for effort, you truly do not have any quit in you.
Show me where I misrepresented or displayed ignorance of Austrian economics.
Assertions without substantiation are cheap.
liberty student:What if? Who has the ability to act as God and predict value changes?
Uhm, we do it all the time. It's called parenting.
No, because you have not explained why my explanations were insufficient.
From what I see you just point out why you've been de-radicalized but you fail to provide detailed explanations. Explain why unions are good for the economy, explain why business encourages stupidity and explain why that matters?
Why is it relevant to the point I made? You could explain inadequate retirement savings by claiming that individuals--at the time of choosing--optimized according to a high time preference. So what?
Inadequate, really, now your going to tell people how much money they should have when they retire?
To emphasize the irrelevancy of your retort, let's take a sojourn into evolutionary psychology.
Ohhh goody, pseudo-science, can't wait to find out what my "ancestral roots" are.
where food easily spoiled or was looted and where lives were short--having a high time preference was adaptive and biologically rooted.
Yes, my ancestors food spoiled because he had no storage and somehow from that he develloped a "biological instinct" that he passed to his descendants. Apparently, me wanting to eat my chocolate now rather then later has something to do with my genes. What if I don't want to eat and I'm more of a frugal person by nature? Was my ancestor a frugal person too?
However, in our industrialized world, such preferences are increasingly irrational, but remain tempting nevertheless (due to biological instinct).
Again, you are assuming that people don't knwo what to do with their money but somehow you do.
Thus, we could predict insufficient retirement savings due to our biology. So, what do we do? I say we force savings!
Insufficient? define that, while you are at it why should we care? What if I don't plan on retiring and choose to keep money to spend it now, in the moment, what then will I go to jail?
Answer my previous post while you are at it, the one concerning the bailouts.
Thanks
Drew,
Parents are not the same as states.
The richest and freest societies became richer and freer by granting the state less power.
Freedom has always been the only route to progress.
StrangeLoop: liberty student:What if? Who has the ability to act as God and predict value changes? Uhm, we do it all the time. It's called parenting.
And which humans are capable of being parents to other humans? By what authority?
A.G.B:Again, you are assuming that people don't knwo what to do with their money but somehow you do.
Consider the society I propose and consider the society you propose: which one of us wants to more radically alter the choices people make?
You are taking much more of an elitist stance than I am (you know how to re-engineer our social order to provide better lives for people than they have created for themselves).
liberty student:And which humans are capable of being parents to other humans? By what authority?
The authority governed by social norms--e.g., teachers to students, elected politicians to constituents, religious leaders to the faithful, employers to employees, judges to litigants, etc.
What if those people, statistically, are known to regret previous decisions? (Lung cancer victims--more often than not--regret smoking, for instance.) However, in circumstances like that (cancer, old age, etc.),
What if these people have to take responsability for their own actions, because if they don't someone else will.
Why should someone else take responsability for their actions.?
Lung cancer victims perfectly knew that smoking was not "good" for them(so is candy) yet they ignorantly continued their habit, why shouldn't they pay the consequences?
there is no repeated opportunity for learning
Life works like that, yes.....your point?
(i.e., if you didn't save for old age, you're not going to learn from your mistake and "do better next time").
That's too bad.
^Markets exist with or without a state.
StrangeLoop: You are taking much more of an elitist stance than I am (you know how to re-engineer our social order to provide better lives for people than they have created for themselves).
That's a pretty interesting point.
If I wrote it more than a few weeks ago, I probably hate it by now.
Consider the society I propose and consider the society you propose: which one of us wants to more radically alter the choices people make? You are taking much more of an elitist stance than I am (you know how to re-engineer our social order to provide better lives for people than they have created for themselves).
Calling names..O_O I see. Apparently I'm the one who wants to tell people what to do with their money. I didn't know that.
I don't propose any society, you on the other hand are offering ways on how to coerce people.
A.G.B:Lung cancer victims perfectly knew that smoking was not "good" for them(so is candy) yet they ignorantly continued their habit, why shouldn't they pay the consequences?
Because luck swallows everything.
Of course, more economically, I would posit that the benefits for all of us outweigh the costs (increased productivity and well-being from individuals is better for us all).
A.G.B:I don't propose any society, you on the other hand are offering ways on how to coerce people.
Do you endorse the status quo?
People already buy almost all other services on the market, especially very important ones.
StrangeLoop:The authority governed by social norms--e.g., teachers to students, elected politicians to constituents, religious leaders to the faithful, employers to employees, judges to litigants, etc.
Those are consensual relationships, not coercive ones. Where they are coercive, they clearly are not social norms or they wouldn't need violent enforcement.
This entire line of Whiggism is so hilarious. Every ancap who can't hack it, becomes a Whig and an authoritarian. It's been going on here for 3 years and it is just as funny now as it was the first time. One Whig leaves and another appears. It's like whack-a-mole for bizarro conservatives who don't understand libertarianism.
Libertyandlife:^Markets exist with or without a state.
That's true. However, the extent of self-enforcing contracts can be limited; thus, government can actually extend the reach of markets.
strangeloop: A.G.B:I don't propose any society, you on the other hand are offering ways on how to coerce people. Do you endorse the status quo?
I'm going to answer that, if you offer me an explanation on my previous post.
liberty student:Those are consensual relationships, not coercive ones. Where they are coercive, they clearly are not social norms or they wouldn't need violent enforcement.
Is the State granted power because it grabs it coercively or because the people legitimize it through belief and consent?
@LibertyStudent
If you don't understand the moral reasons to be a libertarian, it's very easy to crack under social pressure to bend towards the state for solutions; to social issues that the state makes us think we need it to solve.
Thus they become Whiggs.
I think we should take this to another thread.
StrangeLoop: Is the State granted power because it grabs it coercively or because the people legitimize it through belief and consent?
Some consent, and others don't. The former supports oppressing the latter.
StrangeLoop:Show me where I misrepresented or displayed ignorance of Austrian economics.
Your claim about AE in this thread is false.
(Austrians, using their economic theory alone, have no reason to believe that individuals will adequately save for retirement)
StrangeLoop:Assertions without substantiation are cheap.
I did substantiate it by quoting it. It should be obvious to anyone familiar with AE where your statement is methodologically wrong.
Try sticking with an ideology for longer than 3 months, and then maybe someone will take you seriously when you try to tell everyone about your latest political and economic epiphany.
liberty student:Where they are coercive, they clearly are not social norms or they wouldn't need violent enforcement.
This is an outrageous claim. Since the dawn of mankind social norms--of all sorts--have been enforced violently. Many unjust acts within a stateless tribe, for instance, have been penalized with death.
StrangeLoop:Is the State granted power because it grabs it coercively or because the people legitimize it through belief and consent?
Who are "the people"?
^Doesn't make it right.
liberty student: Your claim about AE in this thread is false. (Austrians, using their economic theory alone, have no reason to believe that individuals will adequately save for retirement) It should be obvious to anyone familiar with AE where your statement is methodologically wrong.
It should be obvious to anyone familiar with AE where your statement is methodologically wrong.
Then, please enlighten me.
liberty student:Who are "the people"?
Eskimos. I've been talking about Eskimos this whole time.
http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/23495/407455.aspx#407455
StrangeLoop:This is an outrageous claim. Since the dawn of mankind social norms--of all sorts--have been enforced violently. Many unjust acts within a stateless tribe, for instance, have been penalized with death.
I made a logical claim. Attack my premise. An appeal to history is a waste of both of our time. Oh wait, you're a Whig. Your entire position rests on appeals to history. Well, good luck with embracing a fundamentally illogical ideology. I'm sure you will have yet another one in a month or two and be back here to announce it.
Oh all-powerful logician of this Internet hideaway, can you please just enlighten me on how I misrepresented Austrian economics first? Afterward, I'll take your kindly advice to heart and begin purging myself of all historical knowledge (which is wholly useless, of course, when one can master a priori reasoning).
Eric:Without government regulation, industry does not properly label food products.
How do you know this? I buy health food items that are labeled very explicitly with what they don't contain and how the product was manufactured. The information I specifically need. The government doesn't require this sort of labeling and yet the industry does it on their own in response to customer demand.
Eric:I am not going to argue this point again as I already did in another thread.
I just proved your claim incorrect. That should matter to you if you are interested in intellectual honesty.
Eric:So there is another example where government regulation is beneficial and the cost is minimal, and it is saving people who don't have their stupidity to blame.
Government regulation always benefits someone. No one is contesting that. But at what cost? Because you don't want the market to decide, you have no idea what the tradeoffs were. This is basic Bastiat. You should know this stuff, you have been around here for years.
StrangeLoop:Here's my point: libertarians are quick to say, "We don't need the government; we'll figure out how to do it privately!" Why don't they also say, "We'll figure out how to do it despite government interference!"? No matter what the circumstances might be in a stateless society, libertarians believe private solutions will magically materialize. Why don't private remedies to government intervention also materialize? That is, we can consider such interference a cost like any other.
Because that's not their ideology. Libertarians believe in spontaneous order. If the order is social engineerd then it is not spontaneous. Of course libertarians believe that the market to a certain degree compensates for interventionism; if you put up a barrier and the water will flow around it. We do consider interference a cost like any other. But a lot of the time the market can't get around the interference if it's enforced with guns. Usually the market does well despite interventionism. Meaning that for every bad thing that happens, there's usually some regulation to blame.
StrangeLoop:What if those people, statistically, are known to regret previous decisions? (Lung cancer victims--more often than not--regret smoking, for instance.) However, in circumstances like that (cancer, old age, etc.), there is no repeated opportunity for learning (i.e., if you didn't save for old age, you're not going to learn from your mistake and "do better next time").
That's outsourcing personal responsibility to the state. Can you name one example in history where that ever worked? It sounds good in theory, but it never works. The notion that you can outsource responsibility to the state is based on the assumption that responsibility is fixed regardless of the need to be responsible. The assumption is that humans are by nature too stupid to do exactly what they fail to do right now, there's x amount of irrationality in the human animal (such as an inability to plan for ones retirement), and you can supplement that with a law forcing them to be responsible in that regard. What the lawmakers then soon discover is that people found some new way to be stupid. Then you need more state intervention to take care of that. Pretty soon you have a population of children that's worse off than if you build a system where they can fail. It's like safety signs where there's holes in the street because of construction. If people don't expect a warning, they look where they are going and don't fall into holes. But if people know there's going to be a sign at every danger, they stop being careful and have more accidents.
I. Ryan: Some consent, and others don't. The former supports oppressing the latter.
When people are actually oppressed, the benefits of fleeing increase. If the costs of this "oppression" are so immense, why not settle in a region of the world unmolested by State governance (they do exist)?