Political Theory

Re: "Natural rights"

Anenome — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 08:14:02 GMT

They need to attack and discredit the concept of natural rights because it is the basis of libertarianism, and libertarianism is its natural consequence.

Ultimately, to deny natural rights is silly. Like all physical things, man has a nature he cannot escape. Rights derived from this nature are the only rational basis of deriving rights.

Ironically, the idea of man having a nature was attacked in the past as being somehow a religious concept. It is anything but.

Re: "Natural rights"

Clayton — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 06:48:34 GMT

Natural law is ... a myth invented by the Austrian "economists"

How ridiculous. Natural law dates back to the medieval Scholastics. The Austrian school arose during the 19th century. You need to work on your timeline.

Clayton -

Re: "Natural rights"

Clayton — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 06:47:14 GMT

@als: "i already did. it makes at least one more pointless axiom than everyone else."

This is just dodging the question. Even if Austrian social science "makes ... one more ... axiom than everyone else" [sic], that doesn't make it false. Again, Occam's Razor is not about seiving true from false theories on the silly idea that "the theory with the least assumptions must be true" but, rather, it is about selecting between two theories both of which explain the facts.

Clayton -

Re: "Natural rights"

gotlucky — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 02:57:40 GMT

Malachi:

I'm not going to debate semantics with a marxist, lol. Property is a social relation. If you refuse to have meaningful and productive social relationships, then who cares about your opinions on how meaningful social relationships dont exist

QFT.

Re: "Natural rights"

Malachi — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:37:27 GMT

So you think using and controlling something amounts to having something as property?

I'm not going to debate semantics with a marxist, lol. Property is a social relation. If you refuse to have meaningful and productive social relationships, then who cares about your opinions on how meaningful social relationships dont exist

Property is the violent exclusion of everybody except the proprietor from use. I don't see how this relates to using your body to debate. It is a relation of using something. No property is involved.

mores the pity

This debate about Hoppe's debating theory is settled, anyway. You can find some additional arguments in this article.

I thought you just said you didnt see the relation? Its easy to think the debate is settled when you dont even understand the other side. And its easy to link to someone who has done the work of, you know, making an argument. "property isnt one thing, its another" ok so is value lol

Re: "Natural rights"

LibertarianMarxist — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 21:42:07 GMT

@Malachi

So you think using and controlling something amounts to having something as property? I showed that this is not true. I can show it again: A user of a public road does not own it. As somebody who breathes air I don't own it. However, the capitalists who pollute it obviously own it. A tenant does not own her apartment, her landlord does. A homeowner possibly is not the proprietor of her home, probably her bank is.

Property is the violent exclusion of everybody except the proprietor from use. I don't see how this relates to using your body to debate. It is a relation of using something. No property is involved.

This debate about Hoppe's debating theory is settled, anyway. You can find some additional arguments in this article.

Re: "Natural rights"

David B — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 19:24:25 GMT

To use your words, I'm not the concept you have in your head of an anarcho-capitalist.

Oddly, at the heart of most socialists, is this deep anger about injustice in the world which occurs due to the hegemonic nature of so many realitionships. In particular the poorer and politically marginalized. It's a real issue, I dont think libertarians do enough to point out that we're as outraged. That the same motivations drive us.

If we thought welfare made poor people better off without devastating the economic conditions around them and destroying the wealth that prevents everyone else from being as poor or poorer, we'd argue for welfare in all of its forms. But it can't, and we can demonstrate it.

Capital investment is what improves everyone's lives, the poor among us benefit from cheaper roads, cheaper health care, cheaper cell phones, cheaper energy, cheaper food, cheaper homes, cheaper vacations, cheaper entertainment, cheaper transportation. Not lower quality, less expensive.

Re: "Natural rights"

David B — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 18:44:59 GMT

alsdjfalsdjfos:

you've accepted most of my criticism so i dont see the need to respond

Cmon, don't run away now...

I haven't accepted your criticism, I've showed you that you have a naive view of Libertarians, Austrians, Economics, and Natural Property Rights.

Your "criticisms" were straw men about the viewpoints of the community, not the parrots who run around lambasting people, but the people actually thinking reasonably about these issues.

I too can run to a neo-con board, or a liberal board, or a socialist board or a <insert socio-political view here> board bring a caricature of the position held by members of that board and attack it. But a more impressive interaction would be one like the one of @Fool on the Hill. He asks the questions at a deep and probitive level. He interacts with the ideas themselves.

Re: "Natural rights"

alsdjfalsdjfos — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 18:16:48 GMT

you've accepted most of my criticism so i dont see the need to respond

Re: "Natural rights"

David B — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 16:53:06 GMT

I'm trying to figure out if there's a socialist version of the Postmodernism Generator. I swear LM is using one. I think he punched in some different names, but it seems to be the same thing. The structure of an argument without any substance or meaning behind it.

The bottom line is the Marxist will always assume that a person who appears to be supporting capitalism is inherently supporting economic disparity and hegemonic relations. That they are providing an apology and support for the "exploitation" and economic oppression of people who work for wages.

The argument we keep coming back with is a simple one. It's not a desire to create those situations. We keep telling you why and how the world works such that those situations arise. We tell you what will necessarily happen if you make certain changes.

If you come and tell me you want to fly and you have a plan for wings made of bird feathers. I pull out physics and aerodynamics and I say, ok, let's look at the design. How will it work?

If I come back with, "Wait it doesn't work!" It's not because of a desire to oppress mankind, who yearns to fly freely, with his own two arms. It's because the science that we know says it can't work. If you think it will work, show me where my application of the science is wrong, or build a prototype and demonstrate that something about science must be wrong because it does work.

An industrial economy can't work without savings and investment. Can't. The only way one can conceive of making this happen in some communal society requires a social singleness of thought and conformity that isn't in mankinds nature. We are autonomous individual beings. We are greedy and self-inerested. We are not peaceful, we are fearful and angry at our core in the face of uncertainty or threat. We are not the Borg. On small scales, in families perhaps, some amount of "communal" accumulation of wealth and "public ownership" within the group are in fact possible. But they require at minimum some type of hegemony within the group's interpersonal relationships. "The manager", "The parents", "The chief", "The council", etc. As soon as you introduce this hegemonic interaction, you recreate all of the "problems" of every society at every time and in every place.

If we can't eliminate hegemony, because it's not a real possibility in reality, what CAN we do in accordance with the laws of social science to counterbalance the inherent inequity of a hegemonic relationship?

Secession. To disconnect from the relationship. Whether it's quitting a job. Emancipating oneself from one's parents. Disowning and firing are also effective. Excommunication or switching denominations. etc. etc.

It's the only tool that fits in accordance with the Praxeology. So again, if you ask me what we can do? Push secession as a concept in all it's forms.

Support any effort by any social group to emancipate itself from a hegemonic bond.

Re: "Natural rights"

Malachi — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 16:16:55 GMT

You don't have to be a proprietor of your body to debate. You only need to use and control some body parts to debate.

...does this even require a rebuttal? You dont need to "debate" in order to debate, you just need to structure your ideas and responses in a suitably rhetorical fashion.

Re: "Natural rights"

gotlucky — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 15:08:53 GMT

Re: "Natural rights"

LibertarianMarxist — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 14:09:48 GMT

Natural law is nothing but a myth invented by the Austrian "economists" in order to a priori legitimate (sic!) their envisaged property regime, their dystopia of racist neo-feudalism, their totalitarian anarcho-capitalism, the absolute rule of capital over wage laborers. Their ideology goes under some more appropriate names like Apriorism or Propertarianism. Its main dogma is: Anything I say is "axiomatically" true because I, the Austrian moron, say so. To protect my ignorance I reject evidence and falsification.

In fact, there is now law without a lawmaker (i.e. state) and a law enforcer (i.e. state). The Austrians seem to be captivated by an extreme legalistic world view. They tend to dissect everything into legal and illegal. They are possessed by a fetishistic belief in a mythical origin and universal validity of "the property law". Like children in kindergarten, having grasped the concept of rules of the game and the power of controlling the rules, they try to establish an arbitrary rule and manipulate it such that they are its beneficiaries. In the case of the Austrians the arbitrary rule is universal property and their goal is to manipulate it such that the Austrians are its beneficiaries, that they alone are the proprietors of the world with the rest of mankind as their slaves. To disguise their agenda they have adopted the term "libertarianism" from the left and talk about "liberty". What they mean is the liberty for themselves to kill and enslave anybody as they please.

Take for example this Hoppe sociopath, racist, and wannabe mass murderer. He tries to establish property as a precondition for debate. So, according to him, any Marxist who engages in a debate with an Austrian Übermensch, enlightened by the eternal knowledge of the Mises, Rothbard, and Rand gods, must accept that property exists. This, of course, is utter nonsense, a fabrication of Hoppe's sick, psychopathic mind. There is no such thing as property or self-ownership of one's own body by nature. You don't have to be a proprietor of your body to debate. You only need to use and control some body parts to debate. We don't have to own the air we breathe while debating in order to debate. We don't have to own the internet to debate over the internet. We don't have to own the space we live in to debate. If it was the case that one had to own everything one uses, this would be a perfect argument against the private property of the means of production.

Re: "Natural rights"

David B — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 05:01:32 GMT

>True, including government. What's your worldview? This feels more like an exercise (for you) in rhetoric.

don't change the subject please

...

my world view can be tested more comprehensively than yours.

Your world view is on topic.

ok... So you dumped everything I said on my "derailment" about quantum physics. And the nature of abstraction which is the essence of communication. Epistemology and metaphysics.

So, maybe I should be more selective about my choice of comments from you? Instead of responding to each point?

but back to your diatribe...

you lifted your understanding from a rothbard textbook

No, I didn't and if you've read any Rothbard, you'd know this. Mises, Hayek, and more recently Hoppe are who I start with before I do my own thinking and reasoning on Praxeology itself. If you want to know other places I get a fair amount of understanding from you'd have to include some Hume, and Kant, and Popper. Another favorite is Daniel Dennett, for the way in which he constructs thought experiments, his exposition of the difference between design space and implementation, and his distillation of the theory of evolution as an algorithm. Who's altar do you kneel at?

referring to one set of arbitrary rights and laws as "natural" and not applying the same term to another set is misleading (purposefully, as you admit)

Communist Russia used a set of naturally occuring rights, embodied in the social structure. The nature of their society flowed directly from it. Now, there is one difference. The rights that emerged could NOT follow Marxist theory.

Personally I'd like to see individual city-states, where people could "up and move" if the local tyrant became overly oppressive. I don't know if we can move forward.

If you looked and read other posts I've made, you'd know that I actually think Praxeology is science. Social institutions and behaviors are technology. They are implemented in reality praxeology is the science that explains the phenomena. But just like we design various devices and processes using the physical sciences, we do the same in the social realm. Most of the institutions are emergent. Recently (1700s+) we've begun to try to architect the political solutions. We're not very far along, but hey running the experiments takes 100s of years. Unless they're really bad political structures (USSR) then it only takes about 50.

Politics is a realm that at it's core seeks through social mechanisms to provide an answer to the question of legitimate use of scarce means in reality. It must be a praxeological science, and not just rooted in human action, but in social action.

Government and law are political technologies, no matter what form they take. They establish a set of norm and rules that at their root, always describe who gets to do what when things are scarce.

in your usage, as it applies to the entire sample space it is meaningless, whereas in common usage it refers to a subset of the sample space.

Ok, this is interesting. This is what gives me hope that there might in fact be someone interesting to talk to. When you refer to a "sample space" this seems to be analogous to what I refer to as design space, it's an interesting concept from Daniel Dennett, though it may have other roots.

If this is in fact the same thing, then my question to you is what is the substrate of the design space? I submit that there is a substrate for this design space. That all designs (or samples) in this space, have a common underlying set of rules or principles that govern how they work.

David B : The distinguishing feature of dogma, is that it is authoritative. The laws of nature are also authoritative aren't they? Does this mean that any system of knowledge or theory is dogma? Are physicists, pushing the physicists dogma? If you think so, you and I are stuck even having a conversation. Everything said by either of us must therefore be dogma, there is no truth. What you then are railing at isn't me, but that your experience in the reality you inhabit is one which violently and capriciously oppresses you.

the other key feature is belief. austro-libertarianism is founded upon an assumption, the action axiom, which will never change whereas true science is founded on empiricism. physicists do not preach dogma, as their teachings can be altered with the scientific method. our understanding of the laws of nature constantly changes, as too does our understanding of human nature, whereas austro-libertarianism is content to posit human nature and construct a model that may or may not have anything to do with reality.

No, no, no my friend. That's not a feature of dogma. All knowledge is based in belief. Even your beloved empiricism rests on belief. And you know it, the test of empirical science is not whether or not it's true, but whether or not it's falsifiable. You can only know that something isn't true, you can never be sure of it's validity, that requires faith :).

So, how did Newton's Laws get invalidated? What happened to them? Our understanding of the laws of nature does not change all the time. There's a lot of theorizing, and a lot of construction of new hypotheses. We don't actually disprove the laws we've previously proven, if they ever worked under any conditions, they continue to work under those conditions. When they get 'altered' what actually happens is we find conditions where we expected the law to apply and it doesn't and then look for new broader laws that cover more of the data. All of our laws have always been approximations. You and I both know that in spite of what we've learned about the curvature of space, engineers continue to use Euclidian Geometry and Newton's Laws of Physics to construct solutions to engineering problems, not because they're perfectly right, but because they are sufficiently correct.

Our understanding of the inner workings of he human mind is changing and evolving. This is one of my favorite areas of science. I'm a programmer and constructing systems that behave in intelligent ways is an area of interest.

But you misunderstand what praxeology says. It simply says that man acts. That acting is core and fundamental to what it is to be a man. That doing things is fundamental to every man's experience of himself. Do you do stuff?

Mises stated clearly that we cannot know what it would be like to be a different type of intelligence. We can't know the categories that another type of intelligence, higher or lower has. The one unique thing about human action, from all other phenomena in reality is that we experience it from the inside. We know what it feels like to be human and to act. You can deny that you act. You can deny that you form plans in your head which you then act them out using things in reality to accomplish your goal. But I'm sorry, you're typing on a computer to put words on a page, to antagonize an audience. It has a purpose... You get something from doing it, otherwise you wouldn't. You can say this isn't true...

You use the categories of human action in thinking about my behavior. You anticipate making someone on the other end of the web, sufficiently irritated to try to answer you back. All of the categories of human action are the ones you assume, you cannot think of interacting with human beings as human beings without using the categories of human action. You don't use the behaviors you would use if you thought I was a dog. You have categories that you use to interact with animals. They're based on your experience and categories you formed from that experience. But not the categories ou use to interact with man. See, you don't know what it's like to be a dog, but you do know what it's like to be a man. In fact if you look at the history of anthropomorphic religions, you find a progressions through which man begins to realize that he alone is unique in thinking and acting. Man slowly discarded his perception of the behavior of the universe as intentional, in the same way that a man's is.

So continue to rail about how it's not empirical. Fine, where's your data, about the subjective experience of man? Oh wait, we don't have tools for measuring anything about consciousness do we? So then is there science that's apodictic and a priori, but not measurable and quantifiable?

I'd ask that you look back at logic, euclidian geometry and mathematics. "But they don't apply to reality." Yes they do we use them all the time.

Back to dogma, the feature you're trying to refer to is the feature that involves one man using force or coercion, explicit or implicit to prevent argument.

That's not what praxeology does. Though they do say you can't argue because it's apodictic. But it's not "you have to believe this." that's not the argument.

If someone wants to calculate the amount of material they need for wall, what tools do you give them? Math and geometry, euclidian geometry. Not because you're being dogmatic. But because it's the only tool that we have to solve that problem. Man has a solution to the uncertain but regular nature of the world. It's knowledge, logic, action. There are features of that tool. Just like there are features of geometry. We don't argue about whether or not geometry is useful. We just use it.

The same is true of human action. It's simply the tool that we have. IT's the only way we know to do things with purpose. because action is doing stuff with purpose.

If there is another way to think about the actions of man, then propose it, let's think about it and understand it. I'm more than willing to consider other points of view on the behavior of man. Lay it on me.

your concept isn't me. if your concept has "liberty", that has no bearing on whether i have liberty. i exist in the real world.

My concept is you. I'm in my subjective reality. That's all you can be to me. I'll take it on faith that you're more than my concept. But I don't know it. I don't know what liberty means to you. You have to decide that for you. I have my categories, you have yours. Your views provide your worldview. Mine provide mine. Oh wait, that's off-topic.

If you want to change my concept of you. Then that's for you to do. I can try to fill in details, by using abstract concepts. I could put a class label on you if that would make you feel better. I could attach bowtie lovin' *ssh*le in my mind to my concept of you, if you think that would help me understand you better. If you're subjective reality is the real one, what am I in then?

>Praxeology is not a plan to be implemented.

yes it is. it posits humans as having a certain nature. as clayton said:

No praxeology is not a plan to be implemented. You seem to misunderstand what posit means. To posit is to assume something as fact. Not to "plan" something. If I attack a false theory, I attack the logic or the assumptions. I don't call it a plan.

I don't agree with that particular formulation of Clayton's. His point was this : "If man wishes to live for more than 20 minutes, he MUST breathe oxygen in." I'm making a guess, I forget what the current world record is.

"If man wishes to change the world in some way that satisfies him, he must act using means to attain ends. He must assume a causal relation between his actions and the world."

Those are a couple of statements I would stand behind and say, prove I'm wrong. Falsify them. Meanwhile, while you try that, let's invert that statement and see if it holds true?

"If a man acts to change the world in some way, he has assumed a causal relation between his action and the world he wishes to attain. And I can know that this action is designed to create a world which is more satisfactory to him than the one that he currently expects at that same time."

The only question that remains is to determine whether or not he meant to do what he did. Did you mean to type your post? If you did, I can know that you assumed a causal relationship between your typing and the words that showed up on the internet, and made their way to my browser. I can know that you preferred the world to have those words, than to not. You may regret them now, but at the time, that action was intended to make the world better, better to you.

You can argue all you want, but I'm right... The only way to show me I'm wrong is... you can't. All you can do is answer back, and again, show me all the categories of human action.

the final goal for rothbardians being anarcho-capitalism, which cannot exist (not for any a priori reason, but for mundane reasons like information asymmetry, power differentials, the finite nature of time and space and externalisation of costs and benefits). since anarcho-capitalism cannot exist, its supporters will have to "settle" for a night watchman state in the palms of oligarchs. all pushes towards anarcho-capitalism will benefit the oligarchs. the democratic and republican parties understand this, hence their desire to co-opt ostensibly libertarian projects like the tea party movement.

Let the rothbardian animice go, you're not helping your cause. Now, I do have some thoughts about Praxeology and Political Science. I think asymmetric dynamics in wealth and influence are absolutely important aspects of the realities of Politics. I made this very argument in another post.

But before we do that one thing you have to start with is discarding any concept of even distribution of wealth, ability, resources, opportunity, etc. The real world isn't uniform. "Sample space" or "design space" contains all possible instances of a thing. The simple fact that men are different will generate different outcomes in the individual stations in life.

We can even be sure that those who have accumulated wealth will jealously try to protect it. Those who are poor will try to acquire it. At the same time someone has to generate it. Can we construct a society where there is uneven distribution of wealth and power, not because we want it, but because society cannot prevent it without destroying itself and wealth creation completely. Can we construct a society that also protects wealth accumulation? Can we construct a society where wealth can flow down and enrich those who are poor without theft or violence? Can a system motivate all members of society to play some part in producing wealth in spite of or perhaps through their own myopic greedy nature?

I completely agree with yourcynical view of the way that democratic governments work. And yes the hegemonic nature of certain types of social relationships is an issue that is impossible to eliminate.

We figured out how to stop killing and attacking each other at the tribal and even larger community levels, and instead to coexist peacefully in societies that embrace the division of labor. I too have reservations about how one can possibly conceive of a society that still has hegemonic social interaction, without sliding into authoritarian despotism. I think there's more thinking to be done, in this area. Even if one assumes that DROs would work and not somehow collapse into state entities, there's still the question of how one would even get to such a society pragmatically. That's a subject that ought to be talked about much more.

praxeology did not spring out of the nether fully formed, it was designed in the minds of men who wished to justify capitalism during a time of great social upheaval. why did hayek and mises address socialism and communism in so many books? why is your forum so obsessed with marxism? the purpose of praxeology and other utopian right-libertarian ideologies is to justify the status quo, even as they denounce it as horribly tainted by statists and marxists and what have you.

The only interesting question here is "Why did Hayek and Mises address socialism and communism in so many books?"

Menger has no interest in socialism. He simply wanted to fix the value problem and fell onto the right solution. Marx however, wanted to solve the profit problem. If you go back and look at the history of social thought, profits were considered to be a form of usury. A sin. Marx assumed this was true and took the flawed labor theory of value and constructed what he thought was a sound argument that showed this to be true.

The problem was, that if profit is a sin, why does it have to happen for production to occur? Meaning, that if there is no profit, no "usury", no interest paid on a loan, the thing itself disappears, and all of the benefits that flow from it, in particular higher order goods, longer more cicuitous productions never happen without interest and profit.

If I can't get more fish with the net than without, I don't make a net. It flows all the way down into the most basic forms of production that an isolated man performs.

Bohm-Bawerk answered Marx, not because of any animice, but because a lot of people were paying close attention to what Marx was saying. He simply had a better explanation of what was going on.

Socialists attacked Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, and Hayek. Mises and Hayek didn't just answer... They slammed the door shut. They thoroughly destroyed the idea that any economic behavior could happen under socialism. The soviet union argued that it was socialist, but it wasn't. They tried, they really did. And after 40+ years of not completely collapsing. People started to believe there might actually be a way to do economic calculation and to run an economy on the socialist model. But it collapsed... under the economic failure of the planning.

You don't get to cry about the fact that Mises and Hayek thoroughly destroyed any logical argument for socialism. You don't get to whine that they forced Marxists to attack logic itself, and go with a polylogic interpretation of classes. They lost the ideological fight on the merits years and years ago. You also don't get to whine about how socialism has never "really" been tried. Set up an empirical experiment.

The only tool left to the socialist is propoganda and disinformation. But I'm sure you're not a Socialist, so that shouldn't bother you.

Praxeology is not the tool for capitalism. It's a science that analyzes any political system or economic system. Capitalism, liberalism, mercantilism, socialism, monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, tribal elder : Praxeology can tell you things about how it works, where the feeback loops are and the side effects of specific actions in the market place.

a "truly" free market has never, will never and can never exist.

please, do opine about nasty statists subverting True Human Nature and denying us our garden of eden. no doubt the role of the tree of life is played by the gold standard and the tree of knowledge by fiat money, but who plays the snake? hammurabi?

I'm not going to argue about what 'truly' free means. Personally, I'm simply looking for freer markets. Less interference from anything other than competitors and legal action for harm caused to others.

What garden of eden do you imagine? I don't imagine one. I do imagine more wealth, more science, more economic freedom, more social freedom. But I don't imagine that to be True Human Nature. In fact I would argue that while the individual tends to try to improve his own conditions, we have bad social habits of attacking and destroying the other man especially if he's not in our social group. Kind of like you're trying to do here.

vulgar in that it seeks to address and understand only the surface of capitalism (divining "the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere") rather than the underlying social relations which have caused so many changes to human societies (and in turn, through socialisation, "human nature")

What is the "surface of capitalism"? I don't know. How does that have any relationship to being vulgar.

Who said "the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere?" I don't understand what that means.

What are the "underlying social relations"? I know what a social relationship is. I've had hundreds of them and each has had its own unique impact on me. I actually think of these things in terms of the other person on the other end though. Is this what you mean? I don't find them to be "underlying" though, unless it was dating... Then she might be underlying, or me depending on how she liked it.

Ok, I can't keep going I'm getting tired. I have to sleep.

Re: "Natural rights"

alsdjfalsdjfos — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:18:48 GMT

>True, including government. What's your worldview? This feels more like an exercise (for you) in rhetoric.

don't change the subject please

>I'm me, not someone else. This is my understanding of the world. So, if you want to compare my understanding of the world with yours do so, but don't tie me to someone else. Don't tie them to me.

you lifted your understanding from a rothbard textbook

>I've never said they didn't occur naturally.

referring to one set of arbitrary rights and laws as "natural" and not applying the same term to another set is misleading (purposefully, as you admit)

>Anyone who holds knowledge they think has value will try to "garner support."

not clayton:

>The action axiom isn't something that Austrians are interested in persuading people to agree to

the term natural as applied to one set of arbitrary rights and laws but not to another is purposefully misleading. in your usage, as it applies to the entire sample space it is meaningless, whereas in common usage it refers to a subset of the sample space.

>The distinguishing feature of dogma, is that it is authoritative. The laws of nature are also authoritative aren't they? Does this mean that any system of knowledge or theory is dogma? Are physicists, pushing the physicists dogma? If you think so, you and I are stuck even having a conversation. Everything said by either of us must therefore be dogma, there is no truth. What you then are railing at isn't me, but that your experience in the reality you inhabit is one which violently and capriciously oppresses you.

the other key feature is belief. austro-libertarianism is founded upon an assumption, the action axiom, which will never change whereas true science is founded on empiricism. physicists do not preach dogma, as their teachings can be altered with the scientific method. our understanding of the laws of nature constantly changes, as too does our understanding of human nature, whereas austro-libertarianism is content to posit human nature and construct a model that may or may not have anything to do with reality.

>I don't know how you exist. But in order to interact with you I must hold a concept of you in my mind.

your concept isn't me. if your concept has "liberty", that has no bearing on whether i have liberty. i exist in the real world.

>Praxeology is not a plan to be implemented.

yes it is. it posits humans as having a certain nature. as clayton said:

> Hence, we can say things like "if you are a human being, then you ought to _______"

the final goal for rothbardians being anarcho-capitalism, which cannot exist (not for any a priori reason, but for mundane reasons like information asymmetry, power differentials, the finite nature of time and space and externalisation of costs and benefits). since anarcho-capitalism cannot exist, its supporters will have to "settle" for a night watchman state in the palms of oligarchs. all pushes towards anarcho-capitalism will benefit the oligarchs. the democratic and republican parties understand this, hence their desire to co-opt ostensibly libertarian projects like the tea party movement.
"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." ~ grover norquist, author of the taxpayer protection pledge which 95% of republican representatives have signed

>Wait, it justifies something? So you think it provides good arguments for capitalism? That's not the fault of praxeology.

praxeology did not spring out of the nether fully formed, it was designed in the minds of men who wished to justify capitalism during a time of great social upheaval. why did hayek and mises address socialism and communism in so many books? why is your forum so obsessed with marxism? the purpose of praxeology and other utopian right-libertarian ideologies is to justify the status quo, even as they denounce it as horribly tainted by statists and marxists and what have you.

>Define vulgar here? I'm not sure how it's vulgar. I've never seen any "bad words" in either the exposition of or application of the axioms of Praxeology.

vulgar in that it seeks to address and understand only the surface of capitalism (divining "the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere") rather than the underlying social relations which have caused so many changes to human societies (and in turn, through socialisation, "human nature")

>Government is the tool of private interests. It's the source of legitimization of criminal behavior. There is no other way to "make it ok" to rob, kill, rape. Look back at the history of business and government. You'll find that it's a history of mercantilism, not capitalism.

a "truly" free market has never, will never and can never exist.
please, do opine about nasty statists subverting True Human Nature and denying us our garden of eden. no doubt the role of the tree of life is played by the gold standard and the tree of knowledge by fiat money, but who plays the snake? hammurabi?

> I don't see the causal link between someone wanting lower taxes, a return to the gold standard, or wearing a bowtie and someone else in Africa shooting a miner.

more's the pity

>All of geometry, mathematics, and logic, are products of man's interpretation of reality. Products of the mind. My job is not to justify or defend their use. Your job is to deny their usefulness because they don't in fact give us knowledge that we can apply to reality.

there is "having no predictive capability without outside inputs" and there is "not useful". they aren't the same thing. praxeology isn't useful because it tries to take the place of models in various fields like economics, sociology, political science (and even quantum physics if i'm to believe the above derail) without allowing itself to be improved through testing. given that what we know about human nature is constantly changing, it's risible to think we can build predictions in so many spheres of knowledge on an almost century old piece of anti-communist propaganda. indeed austrian economists have had a laughable track record in predicting crises, with the austrian poster boy of the 2007 crisis, schiff, originally saying we'd have weimar levels of inflation by now

>It seems to allow me to argue more robustly than you.

my world view can be tested more comprehensively than yours. you would be forced to deny the validity of evidence that contradicts your axiom, i could simply change my models to accommodate the evidence