Roofs and Ceilings
Robert J. Kolker
There is not the slightest hint of Marxist ideology
contained in it. It is a reasoned piece showing that
rent control leads to a shortage of both rental and
non rental housing. Hazlitt himself could not have
made it clearer.
If Rand saw crypto-marxism in this essay, I would
say she was 4 jokers short of a full deck. Her
conclusions are nonsense.
Read the essay yourself if you don't believe me.
I got in in a collection of economic writings:
The Market Economy: A Reader by Doti and Lee.
ISBN 0-935732-25. It will cost you about
$13.00 if you want to buy it (I did).
Bob Kolker
David Friedman
<bobk...@usa.net> wrote:
> I finally read the essay.
>
> There is not the slightest hint of Marxist ideology
> contained in it. It is a reasoned piece showing that
> rent control leads to a shortage of both rental and
> non rental housing. Hazlitt himself could not have
> made it clearer.
The "Marxism" (more properly, collectivism), from Rand's standpoint, was
mostly in what wasn't in it--no passionate protest against the rights
violation implicit in rent control. Obviously if someone doesn't make
what Rand thinks is the only good argument against collectivism, he must
really be for collectivism.
--
David Friedman
http://www.best.com/~ddfr
robert...@hotmail.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>> The "Marxism" (more properly, collectivism), from Rand's standpoint,
was
> mostly in what wasn't in it--no passionate protest against the rights
> violation implicit in rent control. Obviously if someone doesn't make
> what Rand thinks is the only good argument against collectivism, he
must
> really be for collectivism.
>
is un-nuanced thinking at best and total insanity at worst. It reminds
me of Paul of Tarsus criticising the etheopian and coptic churches for
being lukewarm.
During the late and unlamented French Revolution, individuals who did
not show the requisite amount of revolutionary zeal were hauled before
the People's court and sent on a short one-way trip to the Guilotine.
I share Rand's hatred of collectivism, but I am not crazy enought to
expect any and all to share my passion (such as it is) on the matter. If
a person is not pro-collectivist I can hardly fault him for not being
anti-collectivist. The anti-collectivist position is reached after much
thinking and integration of a great many facts and principles.
Rand's monomaniacal mindset is a measure of her lack of reason.
If she had taken a gradual approach towards teaching others her thoughts
she would have made a greater difference than she has. As it is, she has
encouraged a quasi cult of zealot crazies who will not make a dent in
the Nanny Welfare Abomination we all suffer under. They will snipe at
the entrails of perceived rivals and heretics (vide the dispute with the
Kellyites) while the real Bad Guys rob us blind and waste our time.
Bob Kolker
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
NPGreeley
><bobk...@usa.net> wrote:
>
>> I finally read the essay.
>>
>> There is not the slightest hint of Marxist ideology
>> contained in it. It is a reasoned piece showing that
>> rent control leads to a shortage of both rental and
>> non rental housing. Hazlitt himself could not have
>> made it clearer.
>
>mostly in what wasn't in it--no passionate protest against the rights
>violation implicit in rent control. Obviously if someone doesn't make
>what Rand thinks is the only good argument against collectivism, he must
>really be for collectivism.
>
I haven't read the article, but what I wonder is: What is the importance of
Rand's statement? If she was wrong in accusing Milton Friedman of writing a
Marxist article -- and I'm open to the possibility that she was -- what larger
point does this prove? Maybe it just means that she made statements in private
correspondence that don't measure up to the rigor of her published writing.
Rand never claimed to be omniscient or infallible.
Mises made a similar comment when he stormed out of the Montpelier Conference,
damning the participants as socialists. To both Mises and Rand, socialism and
capitalism were an eithor/or proposition; the mixed economy was just a
transition phase between the two. Therefore, economic theory that was not 100%
capitalist must have had a socialist aspect to it. Looked at in this context,
the statements of both Mises and Rand are more understandable.
Bill Greeley
dd...@best.com
> I haven't read the article, but what I wonder is: What is the importance of
> Rand's statement? If she was wrong in accusing Milton Friedman of writing a
> Marxist article -- and I'm open to the possibility that she was -- what l
> arger
> point does this prove? Maybe it just means that she made statements in p
> rivate
> correspondence that don't measure up to the rigor of her published writing.
> Rand never claimed to be omniscient or infallible.
I briefly sketched why I thought it was interesting in a previous postpart
of a long thread on the subject (under a different title).
1. Because it is interesting to see whether orthodox Objectivists are willing
to admit that Rand made a mistakeunder circumstances where no reasonable
person could doubt it.
2. Because the mistake might point at more fundamental mistakes in Rand's
ideasin two directions:
She thought that someone couldn't honestly hold the position that Stigler and
Friedman argued, hence they must be collectivists dishonestly pretending to
argue against rent control. But there is massive evidence that they did hold
the position they arguedwhich implies something wrong with Rand's
understanding.
Stigler and Friedman were responsible for very large changes in what Rand
would have considered the right directionStigler, among other things, was
the intellectual father of the deregulation movement. They caused those
changes by following out what Rand passionately argued was the wrong
strategyarguing with people on the left by trying to show, not that what
they were doing was wicked, but that it wouldn't work, that free markets
would do a better job of producing what those people wanted than collectivism
would. That is pretty strong evidence that she was wrong about what
strategies could work.
> Mises made a similar comment when he stormed out of the Montpelier Confer
> ence,
> damning the participants as socialists. To both Mises and Rand, socialis
> m and
> capitalism were an eithor/or proposition; the mixed economy was just a
> transition phase between the two. Therefore, economic theory that was no
> t 100%
> capitalist must have had a socialist aspect to it. Looked at in this con
> text,
> the statements of both Mises and Rand are more understandable.
This is, of course, the same Mises who wrote in Human Action that those who
opposed conscription were the enemies of freedom. I believe he also was in
favor of state subsidy to opera, although I don't have a source on that one.
So far as I can tell, while his arguments took a different form than those of
the Chicago economists, his conclusions were no more pro-capitalist than
theirs.
Eric
>2. Because the mistake might point at more fundamental mistakes in Rand's
>ideasin two directions:
There seem to be a few faulty underlying ideas in your post.
First off, if Rand made a mistake in any particular instance, it
proves what? In that particular instance Rand made a mistake.
Nothing more.
Secondly the underlying premise seems to be that Objectivism is a
belief system, and that Rand is either the deliverer or interpreter of
the holy scrolls of Objectivism, or both.
In essense you argue that the sum total of what Rand said, in every
respect, and at every point in time is equal to the philosophy of
Objectvism. And that if Rand was wrong in any respect that
Objectivism must be wrong. Is that your position?
For some who would label themselves as Objectivists, but are not
Objectivists, your reasoning might be sound. But from what I
understand of Objectivism you cannot be an Objectivist and accept
anything on faith. You must, by a logical reasoned process, reach
your own conclusion. Thus if you accept anything Ayn Rand said on
faith, you are by definition not an Objectivist. And if you don't
accept Objectivism on faith, than Ayn Rand being wrong in one
instance, or every instance, cannot have any bearing on your reasoning
process.
>strategyarguing with people on the left by trying to show, not that what
>they were doing was wicked, but that it wouldn't work, that free markets
>would do a better job of producing what those people wanted than collectivism
>would. That is pretty strong evidence that she was wrong about what
>strategies could work.
And lastly your posts relates to political strategy. Well without an
underlying philosophy and principals, all political strategy is
largely pointless. The net effect is at best chaos and at worst
horrors.
In effect this misguided political strategy treats individual rights
(the desired outcome I hope we can agree) as the red card in a n card
monte game with all other cards being black.
Your argument is that the Stigler strategy led to finding the red
card. You are suggesting that Stigler told people that the approach
they were using would get them black cards and that his approach would
find the red card. People, out of pragmatism or trust, decided that
they try should try the Stigler strategy. And trying the Stigler
strategy they found a red card. Thus anyone who says that this
approach to strategy cannot work is incorrect. I think that is your
argument.
The fact that the red card may have been found in no way validates the
solution. The fact that the participants adopted this strategy only
on the basis of Stiglers persuasivness or their pragmatism, and not
out of philosophy or principals, just means that these same
participants are doomed to follow all sorts of Stiglers down all sorts
of roads, with no way to discern truth from falsehood, or good
reasoning from bad. Their means for evaluting their actions, and who
to follow, is in essense, does it sound good? If they follow the
wrong guy, they may be able to choose another. Or it may result in
death. Hardly a good strategy.
They are doomed to be used by every demagogue and to find lots of
black cards. Of course the demagogues will always tell them that the
next approach is really going to find the red card. And they will
make is sound awfully good.
Gee, sounds a lot like politics and the actions of politicians, to me.
Eric
Just thought I'd point out that I post under the name Eric too so maybe we
should use Eric and our last name initial to differentiate...not sure you
want to be associated with an anarcho-capitalist such as myself. :-)
-EricK
jam...@echeque.com
> was mostly in what wasn't in it--no passionate protest against the
> rights violation implicit in rent control. Obviously if someone
> doesn't make what Rand thinks is the only good argument against
> collectivism, he must really be for collectivism.
Rand frequently attributes collectivism, and evil motives, to authors
who are clearly not collectivists and clearly do not have evil
motives. Nonetheless, she has a valid point. Utilitarian arguments
will invariably lead to the conclusion that the best solution is some
wise and good person to impose from above the solution that maximizes
utility -- a conclusion most unlikely to maximize utility.
------------------------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the
kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald
David Schwartz
jam...@echeque.com wrote:
> Rand frequently attributes collectivism, and evil motives, to authors
> who are clearly not collectivists and clearly do not have evil
> motives. Nonetheless, she has a valid point. Utilitarian arguments
> will invariably lead to the conclusion that the best solution is some
> wise and good person to impose from above the solution that maximizes
> utility -- a conclusion most unlikely to maximize utility.
The conclusions apply equally well to non-coercive consensual
arrangements as they do to government economic planners.
DS
NPGreeley
>Friedman argued, hence they must be collectivists dishonestly pretending to
>argue against rent control. But there is massive evidence that they did hold
>the position they arguedwhich implies something wrong with Rand's
>understanding.
I do believe Rand must be faulted for not understanding that she was different
from most people. She thought her genius was merely a matter of honesty. I've
known a lot of honest people and none was an Ayn Rand. This is a minor fault
at worst; all she is really guilty of is seeing people as better than they
really are. She saw what we are all capable of if we fully integrate her
method of thinking into the subconscious. Maybe she had to see the best within
us to maintain her benevolent sense of life.
>Stigler and Friedman were responsible for very large changes in what Rand
>would have considered the right directionStigler, among other things, was
>the intellectual father of the deregulation movement. They caused those
>changes by following out what Rand passionately argued was the wrong
>strategyarguing with people on the left by trying to show, not that what
>they were doing was wicked, but that it wouldn't work, that free markets
>would do a better job of producing what those people wanted than collectivism
>would. That is pretty strong evidence that she was wrong about what
>strategies could work.
Possibly, in the short run. But in the long run -- which, as a philosopher,
she thought in -- her moral argument is the only one that will save capitalism.
The collapse of the Republicans since '95 is a perfect example of what happens
when altruists try to defend capitalism. They came into congressional power in
'94 talking revolution; as soon as the Democrats said they were mean-spirited,
the revolution fell apart. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. This year
the two most prominent Republican candidates for president in the primaries
were Bush and McCain: one touts "compassionate conservatism" (welfare state as
usual) and the other idolizes Teddy Roosevelt. Looks to me like the any free
market advances of the past are imperiled.
Bill Greeley
EricL
I guess, from what it sounds like, that it is someone who believes in
laissezfaire capitalism and no government, but that is literally just
a guess.
I am really not sure what I think about anarchy yet. I am in the
process of thinking about it. I realize that all government is
problematic. But I don't understand how one protects oneself from
initiation of force in an anarchistic society. Force wielded by
individuals and by other societies or governments of men.
It would seem that in such a society he who has the biggest guns and /
or the most money makes the rules (wins). I do understand that what I
have just described is exactly what we have in the US at this time, as
well as in all other countries. The government, and those who
purchase its favors, monopolize the use of force, make all rules and
laws, and extort money in return for protection schemes of various
sorts.
So after thinking about it for a bit, it seems to me that anarchy
leads in effect, to what we have now<g>. And from what I can see
most all forms of government, as they have in fact existed, have led
to the same basic conditions.
Realizing that this analysis leads me to think that there is and
should a very limited role for government, I am still not sure how men
can create such a government, and so limit it, that the end result
will not be, exactly what we have now.
I am still thinking about all this but would be interested in hearing
what an anarcho-capitalist has to say.
David Friedman
<lang...@itsdata.com> wrote:
> On 19 Apr 2000 00:38:28 GMT, dd...@best.com wrote:
>
> >2. Because the mistake might point at more fundamental mistakes in
> >Rand's
> >ideasin two directions:
>
> There seem to be a few faulty underlying ideas in your post.
>
> First off, if Rand made a mistake in any particular instance, it
> proves what? In that particular instance Rand made a mistake.
> Nothing more.
Do you learn only from proofs?
If Rand reaches an incorrect conclusion, that is evidence--not proof,
but evidence--that there is something wrong with her approach. The more
incorrect conclusions we observe, the stronger that evidence becomes.
> Secondly the underlying premise seems to be that Objectivism is a
> belief system, and that Rand is either the deliverer or interpreter of
> the holy scrolls of Objectivism, or both.
Where in what I wrote do you find that premise?
> In essense you argue that the sum total of what Rand said, in every
> respect, and at every point in time is equal to the philosophy of
> Objectvism. And that if Rand was wrong in any respect that
> Objectivism must be wrong. Is that your position?
Of course not. Where in what I wrote do you find any indication of that?
Do you really believe that "might" is a synonym for "must?" If you
don't, I find it difficult to see how you can interpret my "mistake
might point at more fundamental mistakes" as meaning "If Rand was wrong
in any respect ... Objectivism must be wrong."
I'm sure you find it easier to win arguments when you get to make up the
other side's position, but it seems a pointless exercise to me.
> >strategy arguing with people on the left by trying to show, not that what
> >they were doing was wicked, but that it wouldn't work, that free markets
> >would do a better job of producing what those people wanted than
> >collectivism
> >would. That is pretty strong evidence that she was wrong about what
> >strategies could work.
>
> And lastly your posts relates to political strategy. Well without an
> underlying philosophy and principals, all political strategy is
> largely pointless. The net effect is at best chaos and at worst
> horrors.
Do you believe that what we observe in the real world has any relation
to what is true? If so, don't you think the question of whether people
following this political strategy did or did not succeed in changing
anything might be relevant to deciding whether your theoretical
assertion is true?
As I have pointed out before, the net effect of the work of the Chicago
School economists was to radically alter the accepted views in economics
in a direction favorable to free markets. The net effect of Rand's work
on philosophy is that there are about half a dozen professional
philosophers with respectable academic positions, out of (I suppose)
thousands, who consider themselves objectivists.
Do you think that observation might be of some relevance to finding out
what strategies work?
In any case, I said nothing about people not having an underlying
philosophy or principles. I was talking about people whose underlying
philosophy and principles were different from Rand's--and, of more
immediate importance, about people who thought that starting the
argument by talking about the underlying philosophy and principles was a
poor strategy.
> In effect this misguided political strategy treats individual rights
> (the desired outcome I hope we can agree) as the red card in a n card
> monte game with all other cards being black.
>
> Your argument is that the Stigler strategy led to finding the red
> card. You are suggesting that Stigler told people that the approach
> they were using would get them black cards and that his approach would
> find the red card. People, out of pragmatism or trust, decided that
> they try should try the Stigler strategy. And trying the Stigler
> strategy they found a red card. Thus anyone who says that this
> approach to strategy cannot work is incorrect. I think that is your
> argument.
I cannot make any sense out of your description of my argument.
> The fact that the red card may have been found in no way validates the
> solution. The fact that the participants adopted this strategy only
> on the basis of Stiglers persuasivness or their pragmatism, and not
> out of philosophy or principals, just means that these same
> participants are doomed to follow all sorts of Stiglers down all sorts
> of roads, with no way to discern truth from falsehood, or good
> reasoning from bad.
Do you believe that proving false propositions is as easy as proving
true propositions? Presumably not. Do you believe that the proposition
"free markets are a more effective way of making people better off than
government control" is true or false? If it is true, why do you assume
that it is just as easy to argue for the opposite proposition?
Do you believe that Rand has a monopoly on good reasoning? If not, why
do you suppose that Stigler's effect on the beliefs of the economic
profession was unrelated to good reasoning?
David Friedman
<lang...@itsdata.com> wrote:
> I'd be interested in hearing exactly what an anarcho-capitalist is<g>.
> I guess, from what it sounds like, that it is someone who believes in
> laissezfaire capitalism and no government, but that is literally just
> a guess.
You can find one version of the position in my _The Machinery of
Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism_, available from Amazon.com,
Laissez-Faire books, and some other booksellers. Some sample chapters,
including one that sketches the institutions, can be found on my web
site.
For another version, read Rothbard's books.
Robert J. Kolker
Eric wrote:
> There seem to be a few faulty underlying ideas in your post.
>
> First off, if Rand made a mistake in any particular instance, it
> proves what? In that particular instance Rand made a mistake.
> Nothing more.
Combine this with the fact that Rand was a willing and enthusiastic
participant in the doings of the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee of Congress. This unworthy group barely routed out
10 moles, but destroyed the lives of thousands of people, causing
them to lose their jobs and become parahias Yet Rand and some
other Hollywood types enabled this committee to throw a scare
into the (then) owners and operators of the movie industry, most
of whom were immigrant Jews and did not want any problems
with the authorities.
You had to be there to see what kind of evil spell the HUAC and
Joe McCarthy cast over this country. It was horrendous and Rand
was a participant. Shame on on her!
Taken in the entirety, Rand was a paranoid on this issue. She saw
Reds everywhere.
There were altruists long before Marx and Lenin and there will be
altruists in the distant future long after Marx and Lenin are forgotten.
To the extent that Rand fought altruism, one may agree with her, but
making common cause with political thugs is unforgivable.
Bob Kolker
EricL
My intent, overall, was certainly not to defend everything Ayn Rand
did or said. I don't see her as a perfect or infallible being.
I agree with your comments about HUAC. A witch hunt is a witch hunt
whether it is conducted against Microsoft or against communists.
ScheetzBrian
>participant in the doings of the House UnAmerican Activities
>Committee of Congress.
I think that Rand would have told you that HUAC had no right to compel
testimony from any witness or to imprison people either for merely being
communists or for refusing to testify, but *also* that the studio managers were
free to employ or not employ people as they saw fit [subject of course to any
contracts they had executed]. If studio owners decided not to employ people
who said they were communists or who refused to say one way or the other,
that's their business.
Many mixed-economy types would jump up and say, "That's no distinction at all,
the blacklist was horrible, those poor people" etc etc etc. Rand wouldn't have
cared. I have to say that I don't really care. It is reasonable for a
business owner to make a negative hiring decision based on a person's stated
desire to expropriate him. It is also reasonable for a business owner to make
a negative hiring decision based on the consuming public's desire not to
patronize or support individuals who hold certain views. If someone wants to
boycott or blacklist Coors beer, because they don't like the Coors' family's
political views, I don't see people falling all over themselves to denounce it.
ScheetzBrian
>School economists was to radically alter the accepted views in economics
>in a direction favorable to free markets. The net effect of Rand's work
>on philosophy is that there are about half a dozen professional
>philosophers with respectable academic positions, out of (I suppose)
>thousands, who consider
>themselves objectivists.
The problem, I suppose, is that any defense of the free market which relies on
utilitarianism is poised to be plowed under during the next crisis.
Let the stock market collapse, and wait for the chorus of, "You see! You see!
The free market is bad! The free market is bad!" And if your only defense of
the free market is the notion that it has utility, you can't really have
anything to say.
NPGreeley
>Joe McCarthy cast over this country. It was horrendous and Rand
>was a participant. Shame on on her!
I could not disagree more. The most astonishing thing about the McCarthy
period was that some people actually had the courage to stand up against the
left. All this bosh about ruining innocent lives is just so much leftist
propaganda.
We need a new McCarthyism to root out the truth about environmentalism,
multiculturalism and everything else the new left brought us.
Bill Greeley
EricK
EricL wrote in message ...
>
>I am still thinking about all this but would be interested in hearing
>what an anarcho-capitalist has to say.
Try these for starters-
http://home.att.net/~eknauer/in_defense_of_rational_anarchism.htm
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/thesis1.txt
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm
Randy Barnett, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, and Murray Rothbard's books are
all worth reading.
David mentioned his book. Rothbard's ETHICS OF LIBERTY ideal along with
Barnett's STRUCTURE OF LIBERTY. Benson's two books on private law
enforcement deal more with current practical issues.
http://www.laissezfaire.org/ and www.amazon.com carry them or try a good
library.
-Eric
Anthony Argyriou
>Let the stock market collapse, and wait for the chorus of, "You see! You
>see!
>The free market is bad! The free market is bad!" And if your only defense of
>the free market is the notion that it has utility, you can't really have
>anything to say.
During the late 1980s, I was a member of the Republican group at UC
Berkeley, and frequently manned their recruiting table. Black Monday 1987
was interesting. People who called out various short comments got "I sold
short" as a reply (and had I any money to invest then, I would have - the
100 and 200 point drops the thursday and friday before, and the
circumstances around them, made it look like there would be more blood on
the floor Monday). People who came up to the table to get off one-liners got
"see how much damage the Democrats can do in 10 months running congress?".
One only needs to find a _convincing_ way to blame the collapse on
anti-market politics. Recently, I saw an essay pointing out that now that
the .com frenzy is subsiding, money will flow to other sectors of the
economy, especially those who actually have profits, thus making a
utilitarian case for bursting the stock market bubble.
Anthony Argyriou
Unix _is_ user-friendly. It's just selective about its friends.
jam...@echeque.com
> > Utilitarian arguments will invariably lead to the conclusion that
> > the best solution is some wise and good person to impose from
> > above the solution that maximizes utility -- a conclusion most
> > unlikely to maximize utility.
In article <38FD41CE...@webmaster.com>,
David Schwartz <dav...@webmaster.com> wrote:
> The conclusions apply equally well to non-coercive consensual
> arrangements as they do to government economic planners.
If you start from a foolish premise, you will reach a foolish answer.
For a magnificent example of the folly of utilitarian arguments,
consider "Simple rules for a complex world", where Richard Epstein
finds himself advocating the same judicial meddling that he so
wonderfully documents has led to disaster through judges attempting to
supervise matters, such as motor car and aeroplane engineering, that
are far beyond their competence. The arguments he presents, lead to
the conclusion that the judges should have done what they did, (because
car and plane makers are better able to judge design safety than
customers) only done so in a manner that was wiser, more benevolent,
and competent.
For a less conspicuous example of the folly of such arguments, consider
David Friedman's expectation that at equilibrium in an anarcho
capitalist society, almost every defence organization and militia will
have a common judge agreement with almost every other, and this common
judge will have enough power to impose economically efficient positive
law on disputed issues.
If the common judges have that much power, power enough for positive
law to work (which I think unlikely) they will have the power to impose
a cartel of force, and their rulings will not be about economically
efficient law, but that members of the cartel have a special privilege
to use force not possessed by ordinary mortals.
Certainly neither Epstein nor Friedman are collectivists, but the
answers they propose would lead, in the case of Epstein have lead, to
outcomes far more collectivist than they desire or expect.
Gordon G. Sollars
writes...
...
> If she had taken a gradual approach towards teaching others her thoughts
> she would have made a greater difference than she has.
Don't be so sure. The extremism of the Objectivist meme could be vitally
important to its propagation.
> As it is, she has
> encouraged a quasi cult of zealot crazies who will not make a dent in
> the Nanny Welfare Abomination we all suffer under.
But the zealots might play an important role in transmitting Rand's views
to others, who, even though they ultimately modify the ideas, could make
a difference.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
David Friedman
wrote:
> dd...@best.com wrote:
>
> > They caused those
> > changes by following out what Rand passionately argued was the wrong
> > strategy - arguing with people on the left by trying to show, not that
> > what
> > they were doing was wicked, but that it wouldn't work, that free
> > markets
> > would do a better job of producing what those people wanted than
> > collectivism
> > would. That is pretty strong evidence that she was wrong about what
> > strategies could work.
> >
> >
>
> Doesn't this argument rely on the premise that what Friedman and Stigler
> did
> actually "worked"? By one definition it certainly did -- there have
> been
> positive changes. But by another definition, those positive changes
> haven't
> constituted any significant progress towards the overall goal. I believe
> R
> and's
> point -- right or wrong I'm not sure yet -- is that this strategy may win
> the
> battle but it undermines the chances of winning the war. I don't see
> that
> she was
> clearly wrong on this, so therefore I do not see it as clear evidence
> that
> she was
> wrong overall about strategy considerations.
In one sense, we can never have clear evidence. Even if some
strategy--Rand's or the Chicago economists'--brought us all the way to a
free society, there would still be the possibility that that society was
unstable and was going to collapse into tyranny in the near future.
On the other hand, the experiment has been running for about fifty years
now, which is enough to provide some evidence. We know that the climate
of opinion among economists changed radically, and it is pretty clear
that one major cause was the work of the Chicago school.
When I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the early sixties, I remember
being told by another undergraduate, I think a freshman, that he
couldn't take an economics course at Chicago because he would burst out
laughing. Thirty years later, most of the people at Harvard had,
explicitly or implicitly, conceded that they were wrong and Chicago
right on many of the central disagreements. That is a very large change.
And it seems to have had real world consequences. Fifty years ago, the
rulers of poor countries took it for granted that if they wanted to get
the sort of economic progress the rich countries had had, the way to do
it was a strong government, central economic planning, currency
controls, etc. Currently, the rulers of such countries take it for
granted that if they want economic progress they have to reduce the role
of government and shift in the direction of free markets. Many of them
(I'm thinking particularly of China) also realize that those policies
may weaken their own political control--so they end up balancing the
benefit of ruling a richer and more powerful society against the risk
that they will lose power in the process. But that results in a much
more attractive world than the previous version--as witness China and
much of South America.
Meanwhile, Rand's attempt to improve the world by changing everybody's
philosophy has achieved results that are invisibly small to anyone but
Betsy--a tiny handful of professional philosophers who agree with Rand,
a few more who think she had something worthwhile to say, and a vast
majority who either know nothing about her or think she was a nut. She
has achieved a little more through the effect of her books on popular
culture--in particular, she played a major role in creating the
libertarian movement by persuading readers of libertarian ideas. But
even the libertarian movement hasn't achieved all that much--and the
Objectivist faction within it considerably less.
David Schwartz
David Friedman wrote:
> Except that in my system the judges, like the courts of saga period
> Iceland, have no coercive power at their disposal at all. Their
> decisions get enforced not because of their power, but because the
> enforcement agencies have agreed to respect those decisions, and have
> reputational reasons to fulfill those agreements. If the judges start
> trying to impose a cartel of force, the agencies will switch to agreeing
> on different judges.
In fact, in such a system, the only thing judges have is their
reputation. The only value of their decisions is that people will
respect and follow them because it's easier to listen to a judge you
trust than to go through the massive effort of evalulating all the facts
for yourself.
DS
David Friedman
> For a less conspicuous example of the folly of such arguments, consider
> David Friedman's expectation that at equilibrium in an anarcho
> capitalist society, almost every defence organization and militia will
> have a common judge agreement with almost every other, and this common
> judge will have enough power to impose economically efficient positive
> law on disputed issues.
>
> If the common judges have that much power, power enough for positive
> law to work (which I think unlikely) they will have the power to impose
> a cartel of force, and their rulings will not be about economically
> efficient law, but that members of the cartel have a special privilege
> to use force not possessed by ordinary mortals.
Except that in my system the judges, like the courts of saga period
Iceland, have no coercive power at their disposal at all. Their
decisions get enforced not because of their power, but because the
enforcement agencies have agreed to respect those decisions, and have
reputational reasons to fulfill those agreements. If the judges start
trying to impose a cartel of force, the agencies will switch to agreeing
on different judges.
--
David Friedman
http://www.best.com/~ddfr
Steve Davis
> I'd be interested in hearing exactly what an anarcho-capitalist is<g>.
> I guess, from what it sounds like, that it is someone who believes in
> laissezfaire capitalism and no government, but that is literally just
> a guess.
Ah, a mind unblemished by Anarchist propaganda. How refreshing to see such
a thing in HPO. ;-)
> I am really not sure what I think about anarchy yet.
Although I generally consider Robert Bidinotto to be a scumbag, he did write
an excellent treatise on the subject which is available at the following
URL:
http://www.vix.com/pub/objectivism/Writing/RobertBidinotto/ContradictionInAn
archism.html
It is a better discussion of Anarchism than anything I have written (to
date).
--
http://www.stratrant.com
Controversial and provocative essays on
American politics, culture and philosophy.
David Friedman
<dav...@webmaster.com> wrote:
> David Friedman wrote:
>
> > Except that in my system the judges, like the courts of saga period
> > Iceland, have no coercive power at their disposal at all. Their
> > decisions get enforced not because of their power, but because the
> > enforcement agencies have agreed to respect those decisions, and have
> > reputational reasons to fulfill those agreements. If the judges start
> > trying to impose a cartel of force, the agencies will switch to agreeing
> > on different judges.
>
> In fact, in such a system, the only thing judges have is their
> reputation. The only value of their decisions is that people will
> respect and follow them because it's easier to listen to a judge you
> trust than to go through the massive effort of evalulating all the facts
> for yourself.
That's a possible system, but not quite mine. In mine, the agencies have
precommitted--each pair of agencies has agreed on a private court, in
advance. The agreement is enforceable because the agencies are repeat
players in a game with each other, and want a reputation for keeping
their agreements.
So they choose a court in advance on the basis of its reputation, but
they abide by its decision in order to maintain their reputations. They
can get out of that commitment by mutual agreement between the agencies
any time both agencies want to.
avat...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
[snip]
> now, which is enough to provide some evidence. We know that the
>climate
> of opinion among economists changed radically, and it is pretty clear
> that one major cause was the work of the Chicago school.
> laughing. Thirty years later, most of the people at Harvard had,
> explicitly or implicitly, conceded that they were wrong and Chicago
> right on many of the central disagreements. That is a very large
>change.
>
> And it seems to have had real world consequences. Fifty years ago,
>the
> rulers of poor countries took it for granted that if they wanted to
>get
> the sort of economic progress the rich countries had had, the way to
>do
> it was a strong government, central economic planning, currency
> controls, etc. Currently, the rulers of such countries take it for
> granted that if they want economic progress they have to reduce the
>role
[snip]
Are you claiming here that there rulers have been persuaded by
economics professors as opposed to just observing the actual results of
strong central governments (e.g., the collapse of the U.S.S.R.)?
David Schwartz
David Friedman wrote:
> > In fact, in such a system, the only thing judges have is their
> > reputation. The only value of their decisions is that people will
> > respect and follow them because it's easier to listen to a judge you
> > trust than to go through the massive effort of evalulating all the facts
> > for yourself.
> That's a possible system, but not quite mine. In mine, the agencies have
> precommitted--each pair of agencies has agreed on a private court, in
> advance. The agreement is enforceable because the agencies are repeat
> players in a game with each other, and want a reputation for keeping
> their agreements.
If the agencies are reasonable, they would have a clause that allows
them to change the judge they use if the judge starts making irrational
decisions. They wouldn't blindly commit without solid assurances that
the judge would make decisions that make sense for their clients.
If a judge becomes dishonest, it is in the best interests of both
agencies to stop using that judge. I doubt that they would write a
contract that requires the two parties to continue to use a judge that
is against both of their interests.
> So they choose a court in advance on the basis of its reputation, but
> they abide by its decision in order to maintain their reputations. They
> can get out of that commitment by mutual agreement between the agencies
> any time both agencies want to.
In other words, so long as the judge continues to make fair, reasonable
rulings, he continues to have clients. As soon as he stops doing so, he
endangers the reputations of all agencies who use him.
DS
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> As I have pointed out before, the net effect of the work of the
Chicago
> School economists was to radically alter the accepted views in
economics
> in a direction favorable to free markets. The net effect of Rand's
work
> on philosophy is that there are about half a dozen professional
> philosophers with respectable academic positions, out of (I suppose)
> thousands, who consider themselves objectivists.
>
> Do you think that observation might be of some relevance to finding
out
> what strategies work?
David, aren't you the one constantly accusing various people here of
dishonesty, evasion, ignorance, etc.?
The net effect of Rand's work? Surely you jest?
Just for starters, don't you have any idea how many copies of her books
have sold? How many languages they have been translated into? Don't you
know the extent to which her work was circulated underground in Eastern
Europe? Don't you know how many world leaders - including Margaret
Thatcher - have claimed to admire her work?
You may consider Objectivism a tiny, esoteric cult of dogmatic
fanatics, but Ayn Rand's influence is much deeper and more profound
than you obviously realize.
I hate to disabuse you of your illusions, but when the history of this
period is written in the future, it will be Ayn Rand - not the Chicago
School - who will be considered the major cultural force which shifted
the intellectual axis of the world.
And you ain't seen nothing yet!
Fred Weiss
John Fast
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
[snip anecdotal example of the shift in the mainstream viewpoint of
economics from Keynesianism to almost complete laissez-faire]
> And it seems to have had real world consequences. Fifty years ago, the
> rulers of poor countries took it for granted that if they wanted to
get
> the sort of economic progress the rich countries had had, the way to
do
> it was a strong government, central economic planning, currency
> controls, etc. Currently, the rulers of such countries take it for
> granted that if they want economic progress they have to reduce the
role
> (I'm thinking particularly of China) also realize that those policies
> may weaken their own political control--so they end up balancing the
> benefit of ruling a richer and more powerful society against the risk
> that they will lose power in the process. But that results in a much
> more attractive world than the previous version--as witness China and
> much of South America.
>
> Meanwhile, Rand's attempt to improve the world by changing everybody's
> philosophy has achieved results that are invisibly small to anyone but
> Betsy--a tiny handful of professional philosophers who agree with
Rand,
> a few more who think she had something worthwhile to say, and a vast
> majority who either know nothing about her or think she was a nut. She
> has achieved a little more through the effect of her books on popular
> culture--in particular, she played a major role in creating the
> libertarian movement by persuading readers of libertarian ideas. But
> even the libertarian movement hasn't achieved all that much--and the
> Objectivist faction within it considerably less.
At the risk of disagreeing with you, I would say that you're mistaken
about the libertarian movement not achieving all that much, mostly
because I define economists like your father and George Stigler to
be part of it (and can't think of a reasonable definition which would
exclude them).
I'm also wondering what you think has caused the shift in popular
opinion on other issues, like school choice, welfare, or the War
on Drugs. I'd say it was libertarians working in those particular
fields, including folks like Charles Murray and Robert Nozick, who
changed the consensus worldview of opinion-leaders just as libertarian
economists did in economics, and those views have percolated down
to politicians and ordinary citizens.
Rand and other Objectivists have had a negligible influence on
philosophy (or other fields -- I've never seen a film reviewer bother
to refute or even mention the Objectivist theory of esthetics).
Rand's books have had an influence on popular culture, but it's been
almost as minor, compared to other libertarians (and borderline-
libertarians), especially Robert Heinlein.
--
John Fast
<cal...@gate.net>
"Raise consciousness, not taxes."
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-4194A3.2...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
> > As I have pointed out before, the net effect of the work of the
> Chicago
> > School economists was to radically alter the accepted views in
> economics
> > in a direction favorable to free markets. The net effect of Rand's
> work
> > on philosophy is that there are about half a dozen professional
> > philosophers with respectable academic positions, out of (I suppose)
> > thousands, who consider themselves objectivists.
> >
> > Do you think that observation might be of some relevance to finding
> out
> > what strategies work?
>
> David, aren't you the one constantly accusing various people here of
> dishonesty, evasion, ignorance, etc.?
I don't think so. I very rarely accuse people of dishonesty. Evasion,
ignorance, and poor reasoning yes.
> The net effect of Rand's work? Surely you jest?
> Just for starters, don't you have any idea how many copies of her books
> have sold?
A very large number, probably in the tens of millions (one online source
says twenty million). Some significant fraction of the readers of those
books were probably influenced by her ideas, although others read them
because they were good stories, or were assigned in a course, or already
agreed with the politics and ignored the philosophy, or bought them
because a friend liked them and then didn't read them. On net, I expect
she has had a substantial effect on the beliefs of several million
people--which is a considerable accomplishment for one writer, but a
very small part of the population of the world.
If you look at the passage you are quoting, however, you will note that
I didn't say "The net effect of Rand's work is." I said "The net effect
of Rand's work on philosophy is ... ."
I was distinguishing between her effect on philosophy, which I was
comparing to the effect of the Chicago economists on economics, and her
effect on other things. As I put it in another post in the same thread,
which you seem to have missed (or perhaps it hadn't gotten to your News
Server when you wrote the post I am responding to):
> Meanwhile, Rand's attempt to improve the world by changing everybody's
> philosophy has achieved results that are invisibly small
> to anyone but Betsy--a tiny handful of professional philosophers who
> agree with Rand, a few more who think she had something
> worthwhile to say, and a vast majority who either know nothing about her
> or think she was a nut. She has achieved a little more
> through the effect of her books on popular culture--in particular, she
> played a major role in creating the libertarian movement
> by persuading readers of libertarian ideas. But even the libertarian
> movement hasn't achieved all that much--and the Objectivist
> faction within it considerably less.
> How many languages they have been translated into? Don't you
> know the extent to which her work was circulated underground in Eastern
> Europe? Don't you know how many world leaders - including Margaret
> Thatcher - have claimed to admire her work?
The relevant comparison is between Rand's effect on the world and the
effect of Friedman, Stigler, and their fellow workers in the Chicago
School. I suggest that if you use influence on Margaret Thatcher as a
test, Rand loses the comparison by a very large margin. She was
routinely described as a "monetarist," not an "Objectivist."
> I hate to disabuse you of your illusions, but when the history of this
> period is written in the future, it will be Ayn Rand - not the Chicago
> School - who will be considered the major cultural force which shifted
> the intellectual axis of the world.
Perhaps--that future hasn't arrived yet. So far, however, the score is
the other way around. The Chicago school has radically altered belief in
one academic field, Objectivism has had a miniscule effect in another.
David Friedman
(quoting me)
> > And it seems to have had real world consequences. Fifty years ago,
> >the
> > rulers of poor countries took it for granted that if they wanted to
> >get
> > the sort of economic progress the rich countries had had, the way to
> >do
> > it was a strong government, central economic planning, currency
> > controls, etc. Currently, the rulers of such countries take it for
> > granted that if they want economic progress they have to reduce the
> >role
> > of government and shift in the direction of free markets. Many of--
> [snip]
>
> Are you claiming here that there rulers have been persuaded by
> economics professors as opposed to just observing the actual results of
> strong central governments (e.g., the collapse of the U.S.S.R.)
Yes. The change in opinion was well underway before the USSR collapsed.
Obviously observed facts were one important factor--but then, the
Chicago School economists played a major role in pointing out what the
facts were, and so making it harder for the defenders of central
planning to claim that it was really working, aside from a few problems
due to bad weather and counter revolutionary sabotage.
Third world rulers, like other people, borrow many of their conclusions
from the current received wisdom. So far as the facts were concerned,
central planning hadn't worked in 1948 either--but a very large fraction
of the economics profession, and many other academics, thought it had,
and would. By the 1980's that was no longer the case.
Compare Thatcher's approach to economics--well before the Soviet Union
showed any clear signs of collapsing--with the approach of the previous
Tory government. Or look at the deregulation of the airlines--managed,
in the first instance, by an able economist who was a Democrat, but
ultimately a result of work done by Stigler a couple of decades earlier.
David Friedman
<cal...@freedomspace.net> wrote:
(quoting me)
> > Meanwhile, Rand's attempt to improve the world by changing everybody's
> > philosophy has achieved results that are invisibly small to anyone but
> > Betsy--a tiny handful of professional philosophers who agree with
> Rand,
> > a few more who think she had something worthwhile to say, and a vast
> > majority who either know nothing about her or think she was a nut. She
> > has achieved a little more through the effect of her books on popular
> > culture--in particular, she played a major role in creating the
> > libertarian movement by persuading readers of libertarian ideas. But
> > even the libertarian movement hasn't achieved all that much--and the
> > Objectivist faction within it considerably less.
>
> At the risk of disagreeing with you, I would say that you're mistaken
> about the libertarian movement not achieving all that much, mostly
> because I define economists like your father and George Stigler to
> be part of it (and can't think of a reasonable definition which would
> exclude them).
I was using "libertarian movement" in a stronger sense--referring to the
sort of hard core that joins the LP or ISIL or one of the Objectivist
groups. It is only in that sense that Rand played a major role in
creating the libertarian movement. The libertarian movement more broadly
defined, to include people like my father, is simply the modern version
of classical liberalism, and as such predates Rand by a century or so.
> I'm also wondering what you think has caused the shift in popular
> opinion on other issues, like school choice, welfare, or the War
> on Drugs. I'd say it was libertarians working in those particular
> fields, including folks like Charles Murray and Robert Nozick, who
> changed the consensus worldview of opinion-leaders just as libertarian
> economists did in economics, and those views have percolated down
> to politicians and ordinary citizens.
I think Nozick had has a larger effect on academic philosophy than Rand,
although still not all that large. And I agree that there have been
libertarian shifts in public opinion other than those due to the Chicago
School economists. I was simply contrasting the effect of Rand's actions
with those of one of the other groups working for similar goals.
EricK
David Friedman wrote in message ...
>I think Nozick had has a larger effect on academic philosophy than Rand,
>although still not all that large. And I agree that there have been
>libertarian shifts in public opinion other than those due to the Chicago
>School economists. I was simply contrasting the effect of Rand's actions
>with those of one of the other groups working for similar goals.
>
This was from a recent post from an individual at free-market.net-
I just saw Robert Nozick speak at NYU, and am delighted to report that he
seems to have renounced his renunciation of libertarianism. While he did say
that he isn't "as wedded" to the exact position he advances in Anarchy,
State, and Utopia as he once was, he referred to it as "his" political
philosophy. His talk concerned a chapter on ethics from his forthcoming
book, The Structure of the Objective World. He there argues that the
function of ethics is to facilitate "coordination to mutual benefit", and
argues that this has several "levels", the most basic of which is respect
for rights. Nozick argues that there are "higher" or "nobler" levels, which
may involve giving positive assistance to others, but that societies ought
only to enforce/require the first level. This is a huge about face from the
rather muddled essay in "The Examined Life" in which he claims that
societies can require all sorts of nonsense on the grounds that it expresses
symbolically the society's conception of itself. He also told me that he
may, after this book, go back to writing some more political philosophy. We
can only hope!
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>On net, I expect
> she has had a substantial effect on the beliefs of several million
> people--which is a considerable accomplishment for one writer, but a
> very small part of the population of the world.
I'd love to think that it is "several million" but I doubt it. In any
case, the fact that it is a very small part of the overall population
of the world is not relevant. What is relevant is what influence she
has had on the people who count (intellectually). In that regard her
influence has been substantial - even I think in subtle ways among
those who reject her totally. (They worry about her - which we
experience as a rising volume of vicious public attacks, where before
she was ignored.)
> If you look at the passage you are quoting, however, you will note
that
> I didn't say "The net effect of Rand's work is." I said "The net
effect
> of Rand's work on philosophy is ... ."
I stand corrected and you are correct. Her effect on academic
philosophy has been negligible to date. But that's also not surprising.
She never got a "union card" and refused to play their games, most
especially in method. But I wouldn't draw from that that she has not
had an effect on where it ultimately counts - the philosophy of the
culture (which you acknowledge, at least to some extent).
> The relevant comparison is between Rand's effect on the world and the
> effect of Friedman, Stigler, and their fellow workers in the Chicago
> School. I suggest that if you use influence on Margaret Thatcher as a
> test, Rand loses the comparison by a very large margin. She was
> routinely described as a "monetarist," not an "Objectivist."
I didn't mean to imply that Thatcher was an Objectivist, far from it.
Nor do I deny the importance of the better economists. But the
economists alone, even if I were to accept an exaggerated view of their
influence, could not have gotten very far without some philosophical
shift. Adam Smith, you know, was a product of the Enlightenment.
Without John Locke there would have been no Adam Smith.
For the first time, with Ayn Rand, capitalism had a moral argument,
capitalists could take the high road, not just the practical/pragmatist
road (which was probably the point of AR's criticism of your Dad's
essay). Capitalism will never win on "practical" grounds alone,
particularly today when that's already been conceded and it's no longer
the issue being debated.
> Perhaps--that future hasn't arrived yet. So far, however, the score
is
> the other way around. The Chicago school has radically altered belief
in
> one academic field, Objectivism has had a miniscule effect in another.
I'm pleased at the shift in the field of economics. But I think you
seriously underestimate the public's willingness to accept it as a
partial result of the shift in philosophy. I for one - and I'm
representative of some number of people - would never have read or
taken seriously the pro-capitalist economists except for first having
read AR. Perhaps I'm just an anecdote, but I know of many others.
Fred Weiss
jam...@echeque.com
> > consider David Friedman's expectation that at equilibrium in an
> > militia will have a common judge agreement with almost every other,
> > and this common judge will have enough power to impose economically
> > efficient positive law on disputed issues.
> >
> > If the common judges have that much power, power enough for positive
> > impose a cartel of force, and their rulings will not be about
> > economically efficient law, but that members of the cartel have a
> > special privilege to use force not possessed by ordinary mortals.
David Friedman:
> Except that in my system the judges, like the courts of saga period
> Iceland, have no coercive power at their disposal at all.
If common judge agreements were vitally necessary to operate in the
defense business, existing defense organizations would be reluctant to
grant them to new entrants, which would make it very difficult for
newcomers to enter the business, irrespective of the rulings given by
their preferred judges, since they would need agreements with much of
the existing and established businesses, resulting in a cartel, which
would result in some people specially privileged to use force, and
others disempowered.
If the common judge system is strong enough to impose positive law on
matters where reasonable people disagree, it is strong enough to
enforce a cartel.
Conversely, if the common judge system is not strong enough to impose a
cartel, it is not strong enough to impose positive law in matters where
reasonable people disagree. If militias and defense organizations can
get by without common judge agreements, then the offended group is
going to say. "Sorry. We did not like Judge Joe's last decision, so
he will not be acceptable to us in future disputes".
If defense organizations have to have common judge agreements, then the
system will become a cartel. If they do not have to have common judge
agreements, rulings by judges attempting to create positive law will be
ignored.
My expectation is that there will be little money and force available
to enforce positive law, because most of the law that people are
willing to pay money for is natural law. People will be willing to pay
money for protection and vengeance against robbery, murder, rape, and
so forth. They will be reluctant to pay money for enforcement of laws
that reasonable people may disagree on, for such laws are less useful
and important, and more expensive to enforce.
Such laws, to the extent that they exist, will be enforced largely by
reputational means, as the Law Merchant largely was. They will have
very limited coercive backing. They will not be enforced by defense
organizations, will not be part of their business model, though they
will be part of the judges business model, perhaps the most lucrative
and important part.
Since the use of force will primarily arise in matters of natural law,
and not customary or positive law, organizations whose business is
applying force will have little need for a common judge agreement, and
if they have them, they will only determine matters of fact, not
matters of law.
That part of the judges business that requires their expertise on law
will be largely brought to them by voluntary participants, rather than
to deal with cases where people are dragged before them by armed force.
In order for anarcho capitalism to avoid degenerating into an enforced
cartel, and thus to feudalism, the balance of power will need to be
such that when judges make or clarify law, the reputations that matter
are the reputations of organizations other than defense organizations.
And to get back to the issue at hand, the propensity of utilitarian
thinking to lead one into error: In my original posting I intended to
imply that because you naturally looked for a system capable of
imposing economically efficient law, you thus tended to look for
positive law, law laid down by some authority, and you failed to notice
that any system with any substantial body of positive law is likely to
be incompatible with anarchy.
jam...@echeque.com
> > That's a possible system, but not quite mine. In mine, the agencies
> > have precommitted--each pair of agencies has agreed on a private
> > court, in advance. The agreement is enforceable because the
> > agencies are repeat players in a game with each other, and want a
> > reputation for keeping their agreements.
David Schwartz:
> If the agencies are reasonable, they would have a clause that allows
> them to change the judge they use if the judge starts making
> irrational decisions. They wouldn't blindly commit without solid
> assurances that the judge would make decisions that make sense for
> their clients.
To summarize my argument, made more fully in the previous post.
If contracts for common judges usually stick a defence agency with a
judge, like it or not, you will get positive law, and a cartel, and
something like feudalism.
If a defense agency can unilaterally discard a common judge agreement
without inconvenience or embarassment, you will not get a cartel or
feudalism, nor will you get positive law that can be enforced by
violent means.
------------------------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the
kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
David Friedman
> I stand corrected and you are correct.
Thank you. It is more fun to argue with people who will admit their
mistakes.
> > The relevant comparison is between Rand's effect on the world and the
> > effect of Friedman, Stigler, and their fellow workers in the Chicago
> > School. I suggest that if you use influence on Margaret Thatcher as a
> > test, Rand loses the comparison by a very large margin. She was
> > routinely described as a "monetarist," not an "Objectivist."
>
> I didn't mean to imply that Thatcher was an Objectivist, far from it.
> Nor do I deny the importance of the better economists. But the
> economists alone, even if I were to accept an exaggerated view of their
> influence, could not have gotten very far without some philosophical
> shift. Adam Smith, you know, was a product of the Enlightenment.
> Without John Locke there would have been no Adam Smith.
The question isn't whether philosophy matters. The question is whether
the only good way of changing people's political conclusions is by
challenging their philosophical views. That wasn't Adam Smith's method,
it wasn't the method of the Chicago School economists--and both of them
had large effects both on their discipline and on the real world.
Rand's attack on "Roofs and Ceilings" ultimately came down to the claim
that to defend capitalism on the ground that it worked, that it produced
the sort of desirable results that socialists said they wanted, was not
only not the best way, it was such a bad way that it would only be used
by collectivists pretending to defend capitalism in order to attack it.
Hence the authors of the pamphlets must be "reds"--collectivists (I'm
sure she didn't mean specifically party members) who were deliberately
making propaganda in favor of collectivism. That argument applies to
Smith as well.
If you don't believe me, read "Roofs and Ceilings"--someone posted the
collection it is available in a while back, so a Deja News Power Search
should find it--and read Rand's letters referring to it.
Incidentally, Adam Smith's favorite philosopher was his friend David
Hume--Smith refers to Hume as "by far the greatest philosopher of the
present day" in _The Wealth of Nations_ (quote by memory, so possibly
not quite verbatim). According to Rand, Hume was a bad philosopher--and
it is good and bad philosophy on which everything else depends. Hence
the triumph of laissez-faire in the 19th century, based in large part on
Smith's writings, obviously didn't happen.
> For the first time, with Ayn Rand, capitalism had a moral argument,
> capitalists could take the high road, not just the practical/pragmatist
> road (which was probably the point of AR's criticism of your Dad's
> essay). Capitalism will never win on "practical" grounds alone,
> particularly today when that's already been conceded and it's no longer
> the issue being debated.
I like that final sentence. What you just said was "since the Chicago
School won its argument with the rest of the economics profession, it
isn't necessary to make that argument."
But we are talking about an essay published just after World War II, at
the beginning of that argument, when the general opinion among
intellectuals was that only stupid and ignorant people believed that
capitalism was better on practical grounds. And Rand was ferociously
attacking the authors of the pamphlet for arguing to intellectuals that
capitalism was better on practical grounds. It's a little hard to see
how the fact that, over a period of thirty or forty years, they won that
argument demonstrates that they shouldn't have made it.
Anthony Argyriou
>For the first time, with Ayn Rand, capitalism had a moral argument,
oh please. There were people deriving moral arguments for capitalism by
picking and choosing Christian morals long before Rand was born.
>capitalists could take the high road, not just the practical/pragmatist
>road (which was probably the point of AR's criticism of your Dad's
>essay). Capitalism will never win on "practical" grounds alone,
>particularly today when that's already been conceded and it's no longer
>the issue being debated.
That's only temporarily conceded by the opponents of capitalism when times
are good, economically. The gradualist socialists never fully concede the
practical superiority of capitalism; they always have just one more
"improvement" to make.
Anthony Argyriou
> If a judge becomes dishonest, it is in the best interests of both
>agencies to stop using that judge. I doubt that they would write a
>contract that requires the two parties to continue to use a judge that
>is against both of their interests.
That depends. If one agency has bribed the judge to generally favor that
agency in "marginal" cases, then it remains in the agency's interest to use
that judge until the dishonesty is detected.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> The question isn't whether philosophy matters. The question is
whether
> the only good way of changing people's political conclusions is by
> challenging their philosophical views.
It's the most fundamental/most important way - and the way that builds
the deepest roots and has the greatest staying power. That btw is why
we so vehemently oppose libertarianism.
(I also speak from personal history. It's what made the difference to
me. The economics came later.)
>That wasn't Adam Smith's method,
No, unfortunately, nor most other economists - but one can't fully
blame them. They did good and important work and we should be grateful
for it. I certainly am.
But, David, they lost and lost badly. Just look at the 20th Century.
All of their purely economic arguments were swept into the ashes of the
ovens and the ice of the gulags.
But again I don't blame them. I blame the philosophers who did not
provide their arguments with the kind of foundation that could have
withstood the statist onslaught of the 20th Cent.
> it wasn't the method of the Chicago School economists--and both of
them
> had large effects both on their discipline and on the real world.
I don't deny their effects, but I also think you underestimate the
other elements in the "shift to the right" which has occured worldwide.
The academic part of it is only one piece of it and even that doesn't
occur and doesn't stand on its own.
>
> Rand's attack on "Roofs and Ceilings" ultimately came down to the
claim
> that to defend capitalism on the ground that it worked, that it
produced
> the sort of desirable results that socialists said they wanted,
Note your wording "that socialists said they wanted".
was not
> only not the best way, it was such a bad way that it would only be
used
> by collectivists pretending to defend capitalism in order to attack
it.
> Hence the authors of the pamphlets must be "reds"--collectivists (I'm
> sure she didn't mean specifically party members) who were
deliberately
> making propaganda in favor of collectivism. That argument applies to
> Smith as well.
There may be some hyperbole there of which she was sometimes guilty,
but there is a point to what she says. First of all I never concede a
thing with regard to what socialists say they want because I think (and
we've learned) that all they really want (in the end) is death and
destruction. Their motives are perhaps more obvious today, but Rand I
think saw that even back then, way ahead of your Dad and most of the
other bright economists who still erroneously thought that many
socialists were "well-intentioned". Keep her context also in mind. This
is a woman who actually lived (and would have died) under communism.
(You get a sense of this passion right now with the Cuban Americans.
Even I, as a committed anti-communist, cannot fully grasp what it must
be like to live under such a regime.)
> > Incidentally, Adam Smith's favorite philosopher was his friend
David
> Hume--Smith refers to Hume as "by far the greatest philosopher of the
> present day" in _The Wealth of Nations_ (quote by memory, so possibly
> not quite verbatim). According to Rand, Hume was a bad philosopher--
....a very bad philosopher. He was the precursor to Kant, the beginning
of the end of the Enlightenment which Kant then proceeded to
(deliberately and consciously) crush (and succeeded).
and
> it is good and bad philosophy on which everything else depends. Hence
> the triumph of laissez-faire in the 19th century, based in large part
on
> Smith's writings, obviously didn't happen.
The triumph of laissez-faire was the momentum of the Enlightenment -
from Aristotle to Locke to the Founding Fathers. And yes to Smith and
Ricardo. But the foundation they lay was very weak. Within 100 years it
was largely gone.
> I like that final sentence. What you just said was "since the Chicago
> School won its argument with the rest of the economics profession, it
> isn't necessary to make that argument."
Not being up on the ins and outs of the different schools of economics,
I'm not sure I'd give quite as much credit specifically to the "Chicago
School" as you do, though I'll concede for the sake of argument that it
played an important role. I will say that I like knowing that the
economic part of the argument is squared away and at least respected,
if not fully accepted.
But I'd still say that it is far from fully accepted (how many
economists for example oppose the anti-trust laws or would abolish the
Fed and return us to a gold standard?) Furthermore its arguments do not
exactly slide easily off the tongues of our politicians or reporters
(though I admit it is far, far better than it was 30 years ago). The
difference is still philosophy and the deeply embedded commitment to
altruism (and mysticism). Until those are eradicated, capitalism will
not have a sure future. And only Ayn Rand and Objectivism can
accomplish that - and only the full strength and the original version,
not the watered down varieties or the fakes.
>
> But we are talking about an essay published just after World War II,
at
> the beginning of that argument, when the general opinion among
> intellectuals was that only stupid and ignorant people believed that
> capitalism was better on practical grounds. And Rand was ferociously
> attacking the authors of the pamphlet for arguing to intellectuals
that
> capitalism was better on practical grounds. It's a little hard to see
> how the fact that, over a period of thirty or forty years, they won
that
> argument demonstrates that they shouldn't have made it.
Possibly. I'm a bit at a disadvantage not having read the article. Why
do you think in contrast that she so liked and recommended Hazlitt and
Mises - both of whom also essentially just argued for capitalism on
practical grounds? Certainly neither were Objectivists.
Fred Weiss
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-2F50B5.1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> >That wasn't Adam Smith's method,
>
> No, unfortunately, nor most other economists - but one can't fully
> blame them. They did good and important work and we should be grateful
> for it. I certainly am.
>
> But, David, they lost and lost badly. Just look at the 20th Century.
> All of their purely economic arguments were swept into the ashes of the
> ovens and the ice of the gulags.
Except that they weren't. Their economic arguments won, in England,
about 1840, and dominated English policy for about fifty years. They
spread, with somewhat less force, to other countries, with good
consequences. On net, they resulted in the greatest increase in both
freedom and human welfare that the world had ever known--compare the
beginning of the 19th century with the end.
They were then in temporary eclipse in many countries, in particular
Britain and Russia, starting early in this century, in the U.S. starting
a decade or two later. The worst cases during that period were Germany,
which had really never been liberal (in the 19th century
sense)--consider Bismarck--and Russia, which had been just moving into
liberalism when the Bolsheviks took over.
The doctrines of Smith et. al. have been coming back into favor,
starting gradually in the sixties, in part due to the work of the
Chicago School economists, in part due to the real world evidence that
the alternatives did not deliver. That change in doctrine has again
resulted in large scale changes in practice, in a generally positive
direction--deregulation in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, the rise of
relatively free market systems in South America and the Pacific Rim, the
abandonment of any serious commitment to central planning in countries
like India, and the shift of China from a communist tyranny to a mixed
economy tyranny.
A system of ideas doesn't "lose" merely because it isn't always and
everywhere triumphant.
> But again I don't blame them. I blame the philosophers who did not
> provide their arguments with the kind of foundation that could have
> withstood the statist onslaught of the 20th Cent.
So far, we have absolutely no evidence that the philosophical arguments
provided by Rand would have withstood the statist onslaught of the 20th
century if they had been made earlier. You are comparing what one
approach actually did--a revolutionary change over most of the
world--with what you think another approach would have done, and finding
the former inferior.
> I don't deny their effects, but I also think you underestimate the
> other elements in the "shift to the right" which has occured worldwide.
> The academic part of it is only one piece of it and even that doesn't
> occur and doesn't stand on its own.
The two major sources of the shift were the academic arguments and the
real world experience--the failure of everything from Keynesian macro
policy through Soviet central planning to deliver--contrasted with the
startling success of such islands of relative laissez-faire as Hong
Kong. It is possible that Rand's ideas played some role, but I think you
will have a hard time producing evidence that it was a major one.
For what's its worth, I know or knew a fair number of the major figures
in the Chicago School reasonably well (M. Friedman, Stigler, Becker,
Coase, Buchanan, Director), and none of them showed any sign of having
been influenced by Rand.
> > Rand's attack on "Roofs and Ceilings" ultimately came down to the
> claim
> > that to defend capitalism on the ground that it worked, that it
> produced
> > the sort of desirable results that socialists said they wanted,
> Note your wording "that socialists said they wanted".
Yes. I presume some socialists really wanted those results, some didn't,
but all of them believed that most other people wanted such results,
hence it was prudent to argue for socialism by claiming it produced
those results. Hence it was also prudent to argue against socialism and
for the free market on the grounds that socialism didn't and the free
market did--which is what Friedman and Stigler were doing.
> was not
> > only not the best way, it was such a bad way that it would only be
> used
> > by collectivists pretending to defend capitalism in order to attack
> it.
> > Hence the authors of the pamphlets must be "reds"--collectivists (I'm
> > sure she didn't mean specifically party members) who were
> deliberately
> > making propaganda in favor of collectivism. That argument applies to
> > Smith as well.
> There may be some hyperbole there of which she was sometimes guilty,
> but there is a point to what she says.
"Some hyperbole?" Read her letters--she was quite explicit in saying
that it could not be an innocent mistake and that it was an example of a
pattern of collectivist propaganda. Furthermore, she pretty much broke
off relations with Leonard Read, whom she had considered one of the few
pro-free market types worth dealing with, over his publication of the
piece.
> First of all I never concede a
> thing with regard to what socialists say they want because I think (and
> we've learned) that all they really want (in the end) is death and
> destruction.
To begin with, we aren't talking about "socialists" in any strong sense
of the term, we are talking about most intellectuals, including most
economists, c. 1947--opposition to rent control was not a popular
position among academics. That was the audience the pamphlet was
addressed to. Do you really think that all they all wanted was "death
and destruction?" If so, isn't it odd that over the next forty years or
so quite a lot of them altered their views--as they discovered that
government control didn't deliver?
But even if we were talking about socialists, you are still wrong. Try
actually reading stuff by the market socialists--people such as Abba
Lerner and Oskar Lange. They were reasonably good economists, committed
to ideals of individual freedom, and trying to figure out some workable
way of achieving both those ideals and economic prosperity within some
variant of socialism. Lange, for example, discusses ways in which,
within the system he is proposing, the institutions could be used to
substitute the government's view of what people should want for what
they actually want--and how to keep that from happening. The fact that
Rand and her followers believe that anyone who disagrees with them is
probably an agent of the devil doesn't make it so.
Or read George Orwell. Do you think all he wanted was "death and
destruction?" He considered himself a socialist for most of his life,
probably until the end of it. If you haven't read the _Letters and
Essays_, I recommend them, both for a good deal of wisdom and for a
first hand view of the intellectual world of the first half of this
century.
> > Incidentally, Adam Smith's favorite philosopher was his friend
> David
> > Hume--Smith refers to Hume as "by far the greatest philosopher of the
> > present day" in _The Wealth of Nations_ (quote by memory, so possibly
> > not quite verbatim). According to Rand, Hume was a bad philosopher--
> ....a very bad philosopher. He was the precursor to Kant, the beginning
> of the end of the Enlightenment which Kant then proceeded to
> (deliberately and consciously) crush (and succeeded).
That's the official Objectivist history of philosophy, but I can't see
any reason why the rest of us should take it seriously. In any case, I
have offered evidence--Hume influence on Smith, and Smith's on the
world--and you are answering only with assertion.
> The triumph of laissez-faire was the momentum of the Enlightenment -
> from Aristotle to Locke to the Founding Fathers. And yes to Smith and
> Ricardo. But the foundation they lay was very weak. Within 100 years it
> was largely gone.
Looking around me, the foundation seems to have survived pretty well. It
is only the superstructure that got battered through about half of this
century.
In any case, Hume was a part of the enlightenment--unlike Aristotle.
> > I like that final sentence. What you just said was "since the Chicago
> > School won its argument with the rest of the economics profession, it
> > isn't necessary to make that argument."
>
> Not being up on the ins and outs of the different schools of economics,
> I'm not sure I'd give quite as much credit specifically to the "Chicago
> School" as you do, though I'll concede for the sake of argument that it
> played an important role. I will say that I like knowing that the
> economic part of the argument is squared away and at least respected,
> if not fully accepted.
> But I'd still say that it is far from fully accepted (how many
> economists for example oppose the anti-trust laws or would abolish the
> Fed and return us to a gold standard?)
To begin with, neither I nor most other Chicago school economists view
the gold standard as an appropriate objective. What we ought to have is
privately produced money, based on whatever standards turn out to work
in the marketplace. My preference would be, not for a gold standard, but
for a commodity basket standard, since that is much more stable against
random changes in relative prices.
More generally, my point is not that everyone in economics agrees with
the Chicago school about everything but that we have gone from a
situation where the Chicago school was regarded as only a little bit
better than crackpots--I think I already cited my experience as an
undergraduate in the sixties--to one where it is, more nearly than
anything else, the dominant school of thought in the profession. Along
the way Chicago School economists collected about eight Nobel prizes,
with the exact number depending on who you count as Chicago.
The net result is an economics profession where both traditional
Keynesianism and Marxism are essentially dead, and where extreme free
market positions such as mine, while well outside the norm, are within
the range of accepted scholarly discourse.
Contrast that with Rand's effect so far on philosophy--and then try to
defend the claim that her approach to changing the world was not only
better than theirs, but so obviously better than nobody could honestly
prefer theirs.
> Possibly. I'm a bit at a disadvantage not having read the article. Why
> do you think in contrast that she so liked and recommended Hazlitt and
> Mises - both of whom also essentially just argued for capitalism on
> practical grounds? Certainly neither were Objectivists.
Interesting question. I think I understand what was going in with her
interaction with Rothbard (who was, of course, an enthusiastic
Misesian)--two intellectually intolerant people, both with dominating
personalities, clashing, and neither prepared to play disciple to the
other.
In the case of "Roofs and Ceilings," I think Rand may have simply made a
spot judgement based on her erroneous views of the effectiveness of
alternative strategies, made it with her usual confidence and passion,
and stuck by it thereafter. I doubt she knew anything else about either
Stigler or Friedman at that point; they weren't yet prominent.
One rather odd possibility is that Rand's view of the Chicago economists
was in part borrowed from Rothbard, presumably before they split. He, of
course, was hostile to Chicago, a follower of Mises and, I would guess
(although I don't really know) friendly to Hazlitt.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> Except that they weren't. Their economic arguments won, in England,
> about 1840, and dominated English policy for about fifty years.
But those arguments were effectively dead culturally by around the turn
of the century.
> They were then in temporary eclipse in many countries, in particular
> Britain and Russia, starting early in this century, in the U.S.
starting
> a decade or two later.
Precisely. What put them in "temporary eclipse"? Had the arguments
suddenly become false? Had someone disproved them?
> The doctrines of Smith et. al. have been coming back into favor,
> starting gradually in the sixties, in part due to the work of the
> Chicago School economists, ...
And just coincedentally, Atlas Shrugged just happened to have been
published in 1957 when suddenly all these pro free market ideas
suddenly started to "come back into favor". Hmm...I wonder why that
was. For 60 years people had essentially stopped reading or taking the
pro-capitalist argument seriously. All of a sudden...
Once again, David, and I don't think I was unrepresentative, there is
no way in hell I ever would have even looked at the pro-capitalist
argument except for first having read Ayn Rand. There is perhaps no way
to prove this (but I'm pretty sure what future historians will say) but
I'd bet there were 10's of 1,000's of others just like me. And we were
not an insignificant group - we were predominantly the future teachers,
politicians, businessmen, etc who from the time in their late teens or
20's when they read Ayn Rand then went on as they moved into their
careers to influence the economics "coming back into favor".
And I don't mean all these people ever even were necessarily
Objectivists or stayed with Objectivism - but the pro-capitalism stayed
with them.
in part due to the real world evidence that
> the alternatives did not deliver.
Peoples have gone on for centuries with evidence that the "real world"
isn't delivering.
> A system of ideas doesn't "lose" merely because it isn't always and
> everywhere triumphant.
The ideas of the Greeks "lost" for over 1,000 years.
> So far, we have absolutely no evidence that the philosophical
arguments
> provided by Rand would have withstood the statist onslaught of the
20th
> century if they had been made earlier.
Actually we do. We know what the re-discovery of Aristotle did to the
Dark Ages. We know what the ideas of John Locke did to monarchy and the
divine right of kings. We know what the ideas of Adam Smith did to
mercantilism. In other words we know the power of rational ideas.
No one arose to counter Kant. No one. He was unopposed until Ayn Rand.
You are comparing what one
> approach actually did--a revolutionary change over most of the
> world--with what you think another approach would have done, and
finding
> the former inferior.
But we already knew that economic arguments had not succeeded in
countering the onslaught of statism in the 20th Century. They had
failed to stop communism. Failed to stop fascism. Failed to stop the
New Deal. Why wouldn't they have failed to stop the continued decline
of civilization? What were the "Chicagoans" saying that was so
fundamentally new and brilliant, so different from what had been said
before, that it could reverse the course of history?
>It is possible that Rand's ideas played some role, but I think you
> will have a hard time producing evidence that it was a major one.
You'd have a hard time proving to me that anything else even in
principle could have done it because she was the only one saying
something profoundly new and different that could have shifted the
intellectual/cultural axis of the world. I mean no disrespect, but the
free market economists of our time, as good as they were, whatever
minor new insights they brought to the table, were the same old/same
old. Who would have cared?
>
> For what's its worth, I know or knew a fair number of the major
figures
> in the Chicago School reasonably well (M. Friedman, Stigler, Becker,
> Coase, Buchanan, Director), and none of them showed any sign of
having
> been influenced by Rand.
But no one would have read them or been receptive or cared...except for
Ayn Rand, except for Atlas Shrugged. I certainly wouldn't have cared.
> "Some hyperbole?" Read her letters--she was quite explicit in saying
> that it could not be an innocent mistake and that it was an example
of a
> pattern of collectivist propaganda. Furthermore, she pretty much
broke
> off relations with Leonard Read, whom she had considered one of the
few
> pro-free market types worth dealing with, over his publication of the
> piece.
I'll have to read the article to comment any further.
> To begin with, we aren't talking about "socialists" in any strong
sense
> of the term, we are talking about most intellectuals, including most
> economists, c. 1947--opposition to rent control was not a popular
> position among academics. That was the audience the pamphlet was
> addressed to. Do you really think that all they all wanted was "death
> and destruction?" If so, isn't it odd that over the next forty years
or
> so quite a lot of them altered their views--as they discovered that
> government control didn't deliver?
Except we still have rent control. I can't think of a better example of
the fundamental inadequacy of purely economic arguments. Even the NY
Times I believe (of course also on purely economic and pragmatic
grounds)has come out against rent control. "Nobody" believes in it
anymore presumably but it is supposedly political untouchable. And the
only reason it is untouchable is because of philosophy, specifically
altruism.
>>He was the precursor to Kant, the beginning
> of the end of the Enlightenment which Kant then proceeded to
> (deliberately and consciously) crush (and succeeded).
> That's the official Objectivist history of philosophy, but I can't
see
> any reason why the rest of us should take it seriously.
Read Ominous Parallels and he provides very good reason for you to take
it seriously.
In any case, I
> have offered evidence--Hume influence on Smith, and Smith's on the
> world--and you are answering only with assertion.
Hume had no influence I can see, qua philosopher, on the only thing
influential and important in Smith's work: his economics.
> Looking around me, the foundation seems to have survived pretty well.
It
> is only the superstructure that got battered through about half of
this
> century.
But you have no explanation why. It is just an inexplicable void to
you. "Somehow" it got battered. "Somehow" the apparent legacy of this
brilliant work ended up in concentration camps and mass slaughter. How?
Who knows? But, whew, it suddenly out of the blue came back into favor
because of the "Chicago School".
This you want US to take seriously???
>
> In any case, Hume was a part of the enlightenment--unlike Aristotle.
The Enlightenment would not have been possible without Aristotle. Hume
was the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment (and the Aristotelian
influence from which it emerged). He was one of its killers.
> The net result is an economics profession where both traditional
> Keynesianism and Marxism are essentially dead... Contrast that with
Rand's effect so far on philosophy--and then try to
> defend the claim that her approach to changing the world was not only
> better than theirs, but so obviously better than nobody could
honestly
> prefer theirs.
Her approach was essential for anyone even listening to them. They
hadn't before. Why now?
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-5EF466.2...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Except that they weren't. Their economic arguments won, in England,
> > about 1840, and dominated English policy for about fifty years.
>
> But those arguments were effectively dead culturally by around the turn
> of the century.
They weren't dead even in England, merely out of power. And in the U.S.
they were powerful until the depression.
> > They were then in temporary eclipse in many countries, in particular
> > Britain and Russia, starting early in this century, in the U.S.
> starting
> > a decade or two later.
>
> Precisely. What put them in "temporary eclipse"? Had the arguments
> suddenly become false? Had someone disproved them?
Other people had offered other arguments, in large part economic. In the
case of the U.S., what ultimately brought big government was the
combination of evidence that the free market didn't work (misinterpreted
evidence, as it happened, but not unreasonably misinterpreted) plus new
and persuasive economic theory that seemed to explain the failure.
The demonstration that the evidence had been misinterpreted was the work
of the Chicago School, specifically _A Monetary History of the United
States_ by Friedman and Schwartz. So were the arguments--both
theoretical arguments and a string of predictions that turned out to be
more accurate than those made by the Keynesians on the basis of their
theory.
> > The doctrines of Smith et. al. have been coming back into favor,
> > starting gradually in the sixties, in part due to the work of the
> > Chicago School economists, ...
>
> And just coincedentally, Atlas Shrugged just happened to have been
> published in 1957 when suddenly all these pro free market ideas
> suddenly started to "come back into favor". Hmm...I wonder why that
> was. For 60 years people had essentially stopped reading or taking the
> pro-capitalist argument seriously. All of a sudden...
You can speculate all you like, but you are doing it without the
relevant data. I was there. Rand's influence on the economic profession,
which is where the changed happened first, was very close to zero. I
can't swear that none of the important figures had read her, but I can
say with a reasonable degree of certainty that she wasn't a significant
influence on any of them, at least in the first generation--I don't have
as good information on the younger people.
> Once again, David, and I don't think I was unrepresentative, there is
> no way in hell I ever would have even looked at the pro-capitalist
> argument except for first having read Ayn Rand. There is perhaps no way
> to prove this (but I'm pretty sure what future historians will say) but
> I'd bet there were 10's of 1,000's of others just like me.
That's about right--if anything a conservative estimate. And how many
million watched "Free to Choose" or read the book? Or read Robert
Heinlein? Or Mencken? There were lots of cultural influences out there,
of which Rand was certainly one. But in the academic field that was most
relevant to the changes, Rand was unimportant and the Chicago School
economists, following out the strategy that she had so ferociously
condemned, were the major factor.
Simply look at the fact that economics, where she had no influence,
swung sharply in the right direction, while philosophy, which is what
she claimed determined human affairs, didn't.
> And we were
> not an insignificant group - we were predominantly the future teachers,
> politicians, businessmen, etc who from the time in their late teens or
> 20's when they read Ayn Rand then went on as they moved into their
> careers to influence the economics "coming back into favor".
Tens of thousands of people represent well under one percent of that
population. And if they started reading Rand around 1960, it would have
been 1980 or so by the time they started having any visible effect,
assuming that they ever did. By that time the battle in the economics
profession was mostly won.
> in part due to the real world evidence that
> > the alternatives did not deliver.
>
> Peoples have gone on for centuries with evidence that the "real world"
> isn't delivering.
No. The economic systems of the past mostly did "deliver" in the sense
of giving about what people expected from them. Socialism made much
bigger promises, and not only did it fail to fulfill them, it performed
strikingly worse than non-socialist alternatives that were available to
be observed.
> > So far, we have absolutely no evidence that the philosophical
> arguments
> > provided by Rand would have withstood the statist onslaught of the
> 20th
> > century if they had been made earlier.
>
> Actually we do. We know what the re-discovery of Aristotle did to the
> Dark Ages. We know what the ideas of John Locke did to monarchy and the
> divine right of kings. We know what the ideas of Adam Smith did to
> mercantilism. In other words we know the power of rational ideas.
I think you are misusing "know"--you are describing possible
explanations of rather complicated historical events as if they were
known facts.
But in any case, if you are right, what we know is that the ideas of
Locke, Hume, and Smith led to freedom--not that the ideas of Rand will.
> > To begin with, we aren't talking about "socialists" in any strong
> sense
> > of the term, we are talking about most intellectuals, including most
> > economists, c. 1947--opposition to rent control was not a popular
> > position among academics. That was the audience the pamphlet was
> > addressed to. Do you really think that all they all wanted was "death
> > and destruction?" If so, isn't it odd that over the next forty years
> or
> > so quite a lot of them altered their views--as they discovered that
> > government control didn't deliver?
>
> Except we still have rent control.
Do you live in New York City or Santa Monica? Rent control was abolished
essentially everywhere except New York during the years after WWII, and
has been reinstituted in only a few places.
> I can't think of a better example of
> the fundamental inadequacy of purely economic arguments. Even the NY
> Times I believe (of course also on purely economic and pragmatic
> grounds)has come out against rent control. "Nobody" believes in it
> anymore presumably but it is supposedly political untouchable. And the
> only reason it is untouchable is because of philosophy, specifically
> altruism.
Nonsense. The reason it survives is that existing tenants believe,
perhaps correctly, that abolishing rent control would make them worse
off, and they are a powerful voting block.
> In any case, I
> > have offered evidence--Hume influence on Smith, and Smith's on the
> > world--and you are answering only with assertion.
>
> Hume had no influence I can see, qua philosopher, on the only thing
> influential and important in Smith's work: his economics.
I was simply going by what Smith said about Hume. But as it happens,
Hume is probably the inventor of the quantity theory of money.
> > The net result is an economics profession where both traditional
> > Keynesianism and Marxism are essentially dead... Contrast that with
> Rand's effect so far on philosophy--and then try to
> > defend the claim that her approach to changing the world was not only
> > better than theirs, but so obviously better than nobody could
> honestly
> > prefer theirs.
>
> Her approach was essential for anyone even listening to them. They
> hadn't before. Why now?
What do you mean "they hadn't before?" The original triumph of
laissez-faire happened about sixty years before Rand was born.
pape...@my-deja.com
Anthony Argyriou <ant...@alphageo.com> wrote:
> On 22 Apr 2000 11:38:18 GMT, pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >For the first time, with Ayn Rand, capitalism had a moral argument,
>
> oh please. There were people deriving moral arguments for capitalism
by
> picking and choosing Christian morals long before Rand was born.
I particularly like the one about it is as likely for a rich man to get
into heaven as a camel through the eye of a needle.
It was possible to rationalize Christian morals into a defense of
capitalism, by turning a blind eye to the fundamentals of Christianity,
but eventually it became clear that it was the Marxists who were
properly applying Christianity.
If the pragmatist defense of capitalism is bad, the Christian defense
is worse. At least the pragmatist defense has some connection to
reality.
David Friedman
> In article <5pd6gs05gbsf34hq6...@4ax.com>,
> Anthony Argyriou <ant...@alphageo.com> wrote:
> > On 22 Apr 2000 11:38:18 GMT, pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > >For the first time, with Ayn Rand, capitalism had a moral argument,
> >
> > oh please. There were people deriving moral arguments for capitalism
> by
> > picking and choosing Christian morals long before Rand was born.
>
> I particularly like the one about it is as likely for a rich man to get
> into heaven as a camel through the eye of a needle.
Do you happen to know what that reference is to?
> It was possible to rationalize Christian morals into a defense of
> capitalism, by turning a blind eye to the fundamentals of Christianity,
> but eventually it became clear that it was the Marxists who were
> properly applying Christianity.
In your previous post you made historical statements that you could not
know are true without knowing a good deal of medieval history--and it
sounded as though your version of medieval history is not only the
Classics Comics version but about forty years out of date, missing the
developments by which the commercial revolution has now been pushed back
to the 12th century, which is a bit early for Aristotle via Aquinas.
Now you are presenting yourself as an authority on what are the
"fundamentals of Christianity," a question which quite a lot of
intelligent people have spent a good deal of time and effort arguing.
Think how you would feel about someone who knew as much about Rand as
you do about Kant and Hume--i.e. had read attacks on her by someone and
believed them--and proceeded to explain briefly and with entire
confidence why her views were obviously both stupid and evil. Reading
Ayn Rand doesn't make you an instant expert on everything, it only makes
you think you are.
Can you explain Smith's view of morals--a subject he wrote his first
book on? Hume's philosophy? These were smart people--it actually takes
some effort to understand them.
Sorry if I'm getting abrupt--unlike some people here, you actually seem
to be honest and well intentioned. It's just that you are so confident
about things you know so little about, and after a while I find it
irritating.
ScheetzBrian
>know are true without knowing a good deal of medieval history--and it
>sounded as though your version of medieval history is not only the
>Classics Comics version but about
>forty years out of date, missing the
>developments by which the commercial revolution has now been pushed back
>to the 12th century, which is a bit early for Aristotle via Aquinas.
At least, until the revisionists get revisioned. Throw a dart at a timeline
and chances are you'll hit a date that *someone* thinks marks the end of the
Dark Ages. Throw another dart and you'll hit the start date.
>Now you are presenting yourself as an authority on what are the
>"fundamentals of Christianity," a question which quite a lot of
>intelligent people have spent a good deal of time and effort arguing.
Very true. It's still hard to find the side of the argument which isn't
anti-capitalistic, though. Unless you count Nietzsche's image of the Nazarene,
whose "resist not evil" shtick would make him fit in with some libertarians
[*some libertarians, DF, not necessarily *yours*]. But that's not really on
point.
>Think how you would feel about someone who knew as much about Rand as
>you do about Kant and Hume--i.e. had read attacks on her by someone and
>believed them--
Come on, every freshman in college has to read the *Critiques*. Why do you
assume that you have to have a PhD to have any familiarity with this material?
>Reading
>Ayn Rand doesn't make you an instant expert on everything, it only makes
>you think you are.
Well, no. I haven't met anyone yet who thinks that reading Ayn Rand made them
an expert on, say, botany.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > Precisely. What put them in "temporary eclipse"? Had the arguments
> > suddenly become false? Had someone disproved them?
>
> Other people had offered other arguments, in large part economic. In
the
> case of the U.S., what ultimately brought big government was the
> combination of evidence that the free market didn't work
(misinterpreted
> evidence, as it happened, but not unreasonably misinterpreted) plus
new
> and persuasive economic theory that seemed to explain the failure.
>
> The demonstration that the evidence had been misinterpreted was the
work
> of the Chicago School, specifically _A Monetary History of the United
> States_ by Friedman and Schwartz. So were the arguments--both
> theoretical arguments and a string of predictions that turned out to
be
> more accurate than those made by the Keynesians on the basis of their
> theory.
Just so I'm clear on this: are you saying that the pro-capitalist
economists prior to the Chicago School had not adequately explained the
alleged failures of the free market? Which failures?
> You can speculate all you like, but you are doing it without the
> relevant data. I was there. Rand's influence on the economic
profession, which is where the changed happened first, was very close
to zero
I'm not disputing that but you keep coming back to it as if that's the
point I'm making. What I'm arguing is that the receptivity of the
intelligent general public to the economists was greatly increased by
Ayn Rand. In significant numbers people were now reading the Chicago
School, and certainly among our group, Mises, Hazlitt and others.
People who never would have read them before. Now, as a presumed free
marketer you know as well as I do that demand generates supply. If
economists saw a greater interest in the argument for capitalism, don't
you think they would have offered a supply? Wouldn't the Chicagoans and
others been encouraged by the increased interest in their work -whether
they themselves read Ayn Rand or cared less about Ayn Rand?
> That's about right--if anything a conservative estimate. And how many
> million watched "Free to Choose" or read the book? Or read Robert
> Heinlein? Or Mencken? There were lots of cultural influences out
there,
> of which Rand was certainly one.
But hers was the greatest influence and the most important by far - and
all the other influences fed off of each other. I doubt very strongly
that Heinlein and Mencken readers would have produced a major cultural
shift.
You may have forgotten how big AR was in the 60's, but I haven't.
But in the academic field that was most
> relevant to the changes, Rand was unimportant and the Chicago School
> economists, following out the strategy that she had so ferociously
> condemned, were the major factor. Simply look at the fact that
economics, where she had no influence,
> swung sharply in the right direction, while philosophy, which is what
> she claimed determined human affairs, didn't.
Not in academia, true. But the rightward shift was also more than just
economics and academia in general has lagged far behind the shift. The
rightward shift in economics in terms of its actual policy influence is
undeniable and encouraging, but unless I'm reading you wrong or you are
looking at the current policy status with rose-colored glasses we have
a long, long way to go.
I'd still maintain that the economists can talk until they are blue in
the face, but their influence will only go so far without a philosophic
shift.
>....if they started reading Rand around 1960, it would have
> been 1980 or so by the time they started having any visible effect,
> assuming that they ever did. By that time the battle in the economics
> profession was mostly won.
Really? One would think then we'd have laissez-faire by now if
economics was the only issue. I also question just as a lay observer
how much has been actually won in academia. I didn't notice a great
many economists rushing to the defense of Microsoft. I don't see a
great many of them advocating massive cuts in regulations or spending.
If you claim that free market economists are all over the place, they
are either very shy or abysmal cowards.
> I think you are misusing "know"--you are describing possible
> explanations of rather complicated historical events as if they were
> known facts.
>
> But in any case, if you are right, what we know is that the ideas of
> Locke, Hume, and Smith led to freedom--not that the ideas of Rand
will.
Whether they will or not (and I think they will), they'd better. Or
we're dead.
> Nonsense. The reason it survives is that existing tenants believe,
> perhaps correctly, that abolishing rent control would make them worse
> off, and they are a powerful voting block.
They sure are - as are Social Security and Medicare recipients, etc.
But I don't see how your economists alone are going to change their
minds or at least reduce their influence and convince everyone else to
ignore and out vote them. There is more than economics involved here.
> > Her approach was essential for anyone even listening to them. They
> > hadn't before. Why now?
>
> What do you mean "they hadn't before?" The original triumph of
> laissez-faire happened about sixty years before Rand was born.
And no one listened to them.
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-387B5D.1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > Other people had offered other arguments, in large part economic. In
> the
> > case of the U.S., what ultimately brought big government was the
> > combination of evidence that the free market didn't work
> (misinterpreted
> > evidence, as it happened, but not unreasonably misinterpreted) plus
> new
> > and persuasive economic theory that seemed to explain the failure.
> >
> > The demonstration that the evidence had been misinterpreted was the
> work
> > of the Chicago School, specifically _A Monetary History of the United
> > States_ by Friedman and Schwartz. So were the arguments--both
> > theoretical arguments and a string of predictions that turned out to
> be
> > more accurate than those made by the Keynesians on the basis of their
> > theory.
>
> Just so I'm clear on this: are you saying that the pro-capitalist
> economists prior to the Chicago School had not adequately explained the
> alleged failures of the free market? Which failures?
The particular "failure" I was referring to was the Great Depression,
which was widely although mistakenly viewed as evidence of the inherent
instability of a laissez-faire economy. In market equilibrium you aren't
supposed to have involuntary unemployment--certainly not on that
scale--and economics didn't (indeed, doesn't) provide a very good theory
of disequilibrium. Keynes had what appeared to be a convincing theory
explaining what was happening.
One of the things that was demonstrated by _A Monetary History_ was that
what had happened was not laissez-faire--that the collapse occurred not
despite the best the Federal Reserve could do, but in part because the
Fed was doing more or less the opposite of what existing theory said
they should have been doing (assuming they existed and were doing
anything). And more recent scholarship on the 1920-21 episode suggests
that it provides evidence of what would have happened if they had simply
left things alone.
> > You can speculate all you like, but you are doing it without the
> > relevant data. I was there. Rand's influence on the economic
> profession, which is where the changed happened first, was very close
> to zero
>
> I'm not disputing that but you keep coming back to it as if that's the
> point I'm making. What I'm arguing is that the receptivity of the
> intelligent general public to the economists was greatly increased by
> Ayn Rand.
Perhaps, although I think you greatly exaggerate the size of the effect.
But Rand's claim wasn't "the Chicago school approach won't work unless
supplemented by what I am doing." Her claim was that Friedman and
Stigler were actively working against the free market--by following out
the same approach that they continued to follow, with great success, for
the next thirty or forty years. If they had followed her advice, there
wouldn't have been a shift in economic opinion for the general public to
be receptive to.
> In significant numbers people were now reading the Chicago
> School, and certainly among our group, Mises, Hazlitt and others.
> People who never would have read them before. Now, as a presumed free
> marketer you know as well as I do that demand generates supply. If
> economists saw a greater interest in the argument for capitalism, don't
> you think they would have offered a supply? Wouldn't the Chicagoans and
> others been encouraged by the increased interest in their work -whether
> they themselves read Ayn Rand or cared less about Ayn Rand?
Again--you weren't there. That particular supply was created by a
handful of courageous scholars who knew that they were arguing for very
unpopular positions.
I remember a quote from some mildly sympathetic writer at the time of
the first Mont Pelerin conference, to the effect that at that very
moment as he was writing all of the remaining believers in the old
liberal order (I don't remember if that was the term he used, or
laissez-faire, or whatever) were gathered together on a mountaintop in
Switzerland.
Or perhaps you would prefer Leo Rosten's story. He was a writer (_Joys
of Yiddish_, _The Education of Hyman Kaplan_, etc.) who had been a
friend of some of the Chicago people in Grad School at Chicago, and knew
their views. At one point, he asked one of the (not Chicago--I think
MIT) economists what economists thought about minimum wage laws, and got
the right answer--that they tend to create unemployment of low skilled
workers by pricing them out of the market. He asked the economist if
that view was widely held in the profession, and was told it was. He
then pointed out that it wasn't what everyone else thought economists
believed, and asked why they didn't make some kind of public statement.
Answer (according to Leo):
"I suppose we're afraid we would sound as if we agreed with Milton
Friedman."
> But hers was the greatest influence and the most important by far - and
> all the other influences fed off of each other. I doubt very strongly
> that Heinlein and Mencken readers would have produced a major cultural
> shift.
I doubt very strongly that Rand did--although she was certainly one of
the favorable factors.
I live in Silicon Valley, which must be close to the most libertarian
place (in sentiment, not always in government policy) in the country. My
(casual) impression is that at least as many of the people have read and
admired Heinlein as Rand. I don't know what his total sales were, but I
suspect in the millions, although probably a good deal fewer than hers.
Mencken was an earlier generation--Rand wrote him an admiring fan letter
(p. 13 of the Letters), in response to his attempts to help find a
publisher for her first novel. In his heyday he was probably more widely
read than she ever was. Walter Lippman, at some point, called him the
most powerful man in America.
> You may have forgotten how big AR was in the 60's, but I haven't.
I remember--and it wasn't very big. The Rand enthusiasts, at least where
I was, were heavily outnumbered by the new leftists, and probably even
by the hard leftists. If Howard Hood were still posting here we could
ask him what the total membership of the Harvard MIT Radicals for
Capitalism was--I would guess well below a hundred.
I think one problem here is selective perception--the same effect that
makes people greatly overestimate the population density of the earth.
People judge by what they see--and the people are in the places where
there are people. Similarly, Rand was a large influence on you and your
friends, she created an enthusiastic corps of followers--but it was
never very big.
> But in the academic field that was most
> > relevant to the changes, Rand was unimportant and the Chicago School
> > economists, following out the strategy that she had so ferociously
> > condemned, were the major factor. Simply look at the fact that
> economics, where she had no influence,
> > swung sharply in the right direction, while philosophy, which is what
> > she claimed determined human affairs, didn't.
> Really? One would think then we'd have laissez-faire by now if
> economics was the only issue.
Only if you believe that politics predictably produces good results.
The economics of tariffs was worked out by Ricardo almost two hundred
years ago--from then until now, most competent economists have been free
traders. But with the notable exceptions of England in the 19th century
and Hong Kong in the twentieth, virtually no country moved to free
trade. The reason wasn't altruism--there's nothing altruistic about
shooting yourself in the foot--or philosophy. The reason was
straightforward public choice theory. A tariff benefits a concentrated
interest group at the expense of a dispersed interest group, with the
result that the beneficiaries do a much better job of bribing
politicians to pass it than the victims do of bribing them not to pass
it.
I also question just as a lay observer
> how much has been actually won in academia.
Perhaps you are forgetting where things were when that particular
dispute started.
> I didn't notice a great
> many economists rushing to the defense of Microsoft.
Take a look at the Liebowitz and Margolis book. More relevantly, you
might consider the striking inactivity of the Antitrust division during
the preceding decade or two. That can ultimately be traced, via Bork et.
al., to Aaron Director and the McGee article in one of the first few
issues of the Journal of Law and Economics.
The problem with the Microsoft case, other than Gates' imprudent
underinvestment in Congressman and catastrophically bad job of PR, is
that the software industry has very odd economics, which makes it hard
to apply existing theory, opening up opportunities to revive the
approaches that had been discredited in other contexts. The new theory
to explain why this time antitrust makes sense is called "network
externalities," and Liebowitz and Margolis are its chief critics.
What struck me, listening to an economist largely responsible for the
government's case talking to other academics, was how apologetic he
was--he found it necessary to make it clear that he didn't believe in
antitrust in general, but that this was, for various reasons, a special
case.
Of course, it didn't help that Microsoft is unpopular, for a wide
variety of reasons, with a lot of people in the software industry.
> I don't see a
> great many of them advocating massive cuts in regulations or spending.
Who do you think deregulated the airlines? Whose idea was it to auction
the airwaves? Where did the ideas for Chile's privatization of social
security come from?
> If you claim that free market economists are all over the place, they
> are either very shy or abysmal cowards.
Neither. You will find articles, published in top journals, arguing
(among other things) that the reason schooling is almost universally
provided by governments is that doing so lowers the cost of
indoctrinating the populace (Lott), that money should be privately
produced (Hayek and others), that the sharp increase in the war on drugs
was a result of changes in civil forfeiture laws that permitted local
police to profit by seizing property (Benson), that the government
monopoly of criminal prosecution permits government agents to get away
with murder (me), and lots of other things.
I'm not claiming that all economists are pro-free market, still less
that they are all as pro-market as they should be. For one thing, once
one point of view becomes dominant, intelligent scholars who want to do
something new start looking for gaps or errors in it. Some of us end up
arguing for a position that is more free market than the current norm,
some for one that is less. But even a relatively leftist smart
economist, like Krugman, ends up a lot more free market than the
orthodoxy of 1950.
> Whether they will or not (and I think they will), they'd better. Or
> we're dead.
When the news of the surrender at Yorktown reached the University where
Adam Smith was teaching, one of his students told him that it would be
the ruin of England. Smith's reply:
"Young man, there is a lot of ruin in a nation."
You are seeing everything as much simpler than it is. There are current
trends that run against liberty--environmentalism, for example. There
are trends that run for it--the effects of computer networks,
encryption, shifts in economic opinion, disillusionment with government.
You are reminding me of the poem I wrote when Goldwater was defeated--it
had very much the same tone as your comments.
Before us lie the years, the sheeted dead,
Under our feet the slanting road to hell,
And all we see is darkness there ahead
And all we hear the tolling of a bell
That hung once in a city; all is dark
And though I labor, yet when I am done,
I know that in this world no single spark
Will live to praise me to the rising sun.
A thousand years may see the end of night;
I cannot shrink their span and I will be
But dust and ashes when returning light
Touches with fire peaks beyond the sea.
Yet still I hold my torch high, though I doubt,
One spark it flings but flickers and goes out.
That was a long time ago. It didn't happen, and there is no particular
reason to think it is going to happen.
> > Nonsense. The reason it survives is that existing tenants believe,
> > perhaps correctly, that abolishing rent control would make them worse
> > off, and they are a powerful voting block.
>
> They sure are - as are Social Security and Medicare recipients, etc.
> But I don't see how your economists alone are going to change their
> minds or at least reduce their influence and convince everyone else to
> ignore and out vote them. There is more than economics involved here.
Economics is involved at two levels--as a way of explaining what we
observe in the world, and as a possible way of changing it. Let's start
with the first:
Individual voters are rationally ignorant--they don't spend much time or
effort figuring out how to vote because they believe, correctly, that an
individual vote is unlikely to change the outcome of an election. Hence
they vote based on free information--things they know (not necessarily
true things) without having gone to any trouble to investigate them.
Concentrated interest groups are rationally not ignorant--they believe,
correctly, that they can influence outcomes, and spend resources doing
so, essentially bidding for legislation and other favors on the
political marketplace.
What we get is the result of that bidding, modified by the fact that if
"everyone knows" some law or policy is bad (correctly or incorrectly),
it is politically expensive to support it, so interest groups are
constrained by the need to find some plausible justification for what
they want.
What does this leave as the role of economists in changing the world?
The basic answer is that they change the mix of free information out
there. If "everybody knows" that minimum wage laws help poor people, it
is politically easier for unions to get increases in the minimum wage
law in order to make it harder for low skill workers to compete with
their high skill members. If "everybody knows" that minimum wage laws
unemploy poor people, it is politically harder--you may still get
increaeses, but not as many. Similarly for tariffs, regulation, etc.
In addition, there may be cases where economic theory gives concentrated
groups information about what is in their interest that they didn't
already have. But that is less likely, since such groups are already
likely to be well informed.
What "everybody knows" about economics is influenced by economists in
two ways. The obvious one is by speaking to the general public--"Free to
Choose," Newsweek columns, and the like. The less obvious way is by
influencing the views of other economists--who are much less ignorant,
hence much more interested in what the evidence is, how good the
theoretical arguments are, etc. Those other economists then teach what
they think is true to their students--who become the teachers, writers,
etc. of the next generation.
> > > Her approach was essential for anyone even listening to them. They
> > > hadn't before. Why now?
> >
> > What do you mean "they hadn't before?" The original triumph of
> > laissez-faire happened about sixty years before Rand was born.
>
> And no one listened to them.
You are saying that the 19th century didn't happen? The corn laws
weren't repealed? Classical liberalism wasn't the dominant ideology for
fifty years?
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > Just so I'm clear on this: are you saying that the pro-capitalist
> > economists prior to the Chicago School had not adequately explained
the
> > alleged failures of the free market? Which failures?
>
> The particular "failure" I was referring to was the Great Depression,
> which was widely although mistakenly viewed as evidence of the
inherent
> instability of a laissez-faire economy.
But there had been depressions before which had produced large numbers
of bankruptcies and unemployment. The "Great Depression" was deeper and
longer than it had to be for reasons both you and I know (and which I
believe was well recognized by pro-capitalist economists and
commentators in the 30's). So why would this particular depression have
posed some serious new challenge to the free marketers?
> One of the things that was demonstrated by _A Monetary History_ was
that
> what had happened was not laissez-faire--that the collapse occurred
not
> despite the best the Federal Reserve could do, but in part because
the
> Fed was doing more or less the opposite of what existing theory said
> they should have been doing
But then you're saying that "existing theory" knew this already. But
what I also find particularly striking is that despite the correct view
of the cause of the Great Depression being now out there - and for some
time - all the old mythology continues unabated about it, i.e. that is
was an inherent failure of unregulated capitalism. The "robber barons"
view is also still out there, the exploitation of labor (justifying
labor laws and unions, etc), etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I'm not just saying all this contentiously or for debating points. I am
continually struck by the fact that the "truth" about economics has
been know for a very, very long time - but anti-capitalism (despite
recent improvements) continues unabated.
I still say you are not explaining it.
If they had followed her advice, there
> wouldn't have been a shift in economic opinion for the general public
to
> be receptive to.
Would you entertain the possibility that the shift would have been even
greater if they had?
> > "I suppose we're afraid we would sound as if we agreed with Milton
> Friedman."
Which confirms my view of their cowardice. It doesn't surprise me. You
can well imagine then their fear of Ayn Rand.
>...at least as many of the people have read and
> admired Heinlein as Rand.
Even more have read Stephen King or Jacqueline Suzanne. So what? How
many people have radically changed their philosophic views because of
Heinlein?
> Mencken was an earlier generation
or Mencken?
> > You may have forgotten how big AR was in the 60's, but I haven't.
>
> I remember--and it wasn't very big. The Rand enthusiasts, at least
where
> I was, were heavily outnumbered by the new leftists, and probably
even
> by the hard leftists. If Howard Hood were still posting here we could
> ask him what the total membership of the Harvard MIT Radicals for
> Capitalism was--I would guess well below a hundred.
I don't think you'd ever be able to explain the American Revolution or
virtually any other major cultural shift by your view of "numbers".
Minorities, small minorities, change the world. Even at the peak of
their influence they are probably still dragging the vast majority
kicking and screaming along with them.
>
> I think one problem here is selective perception--..... Rand was a
large influence on you and your
> friends, she created an enthusiastic corps of followers--but it was
> never very big.
Nor will it ever be "very big" - in numbers. I often wonder how many
people were enlightened during the Enlightement and yet a very, very
small number of very committed people shaped an era.
> > Really? One would think then we'd have laissez-faire by now if
> > economics was the only issue.
>
> Only if you believe that politics predictably produces good results.
No, only if you believe that economics is the only issue.
>
> The economics of tariffs was worked out by Ricardo almost two hundred
> years ago--from then until now, most competent economists have been
free
> traders. But with the notable exceptions of England in the 19th
century
> and Hong Kong in the twentieth, virtually no country moved to free
> trade. The reason wasn't altruism--there's nothing altruistic about
> shooting yourself in the foot--or philosophy. The reason was
> straightforward public choice theory. A tariff benefits a
concentrated
> interest group at the expense of a dispersed interest group, with the
> result that the beneficiaries do a much better job of bribing
> politicians to pass it than the victims do of bribing them not to
pass
> it.
No, that won't do, David. People are constantly advocating things not
in their self-interest- if you will, shooting themselves in the foot,
because they think its the right thing to do.
They didn't accept the free trade position - and don't now - because of
what you refuse to acknowledge - that economics is not the only issue
and most certainly is not the fundamental issue. The fact that it's
been known for 200 years proves the point.
> > I didn't notice a great
> > many economists rushing to the defense of Microsoft.
>
> Take a look at the Liebowitz and Margolis book.
one
More relevantly, you
> might consider the striking inactivity of the Antitrust division
during
> the preceding decade or two.
It didn't seem to take much to getting it started up again. Where were
your vaunted economists raising their voices against it?
That can ultimately be traced, via Bork et.
> al., to Aaron Director and the McGee article in one of the first few
> issues of the Journal of Law and Economics.
two
>
> The problem with the Microsoft case, other than Gates' imprudent
> underinvestment in Congressman and catastrophically bad job of PR,
...which has nothing to do with economic theory.
is
> that the software industry has very odd economics, which makes it
hard
> to apply existing theory,
Crap. This is a repetition of your claim that the Great Depression also
presented new challenges which the free market economists couldn't
grapple with. Crap again.
And if they couldn't it is once again because they didn't have a good
philosophical foundation. Precisely Rand's point.
opening up opportunities to revive the
> approaches that had been discredited in other contexts. The new
theory
> to explain why this time antitrust makes sense is called "network
> externalities," and Liebowitz and Margolis are its chief critics.
Repeating one, again.
>
> What struck me, listening to an economist largely responsible for the
> government's case talking to other academics, was how apologetic he
> was--he found it necessary to make it clear that he didn't believe in
> antitrust in general, but that this was, for various reasons, a
special
> case.
Yeah, right, and you believed the S.O.B.?
>
> Of course, it didn't help that Microsoft is unpopular, for a wide
> variety of reasons, with a lot of people in the software industry.
Nothing to do with economic theory.
So far you have given me two instances of economists standing up for
Microsoft. Where's the great advance in academic economics you've been
telling us about?
>
> > I don't see a
> > great many of them advocating massive cuts in regulations or
spending.
>
> Who do you think deregulated the airlines? Whose idea was it to
auction
> the airwaves? Where did the ideas for Chile's privatization of social
> security come from?
Isolated instances. Mind you, again, I'm not saying there hasn't been
some improvement, but I'm just pointing out that economics alone isn't
doing the trick and doesn't seem to be making much headway judging from
the blather I hear constantly from our leading politicians and
commentators.
>
> > If you claim that free market economists are all over the place,
they
> > are either very shy or abysmal cowards.
Since you really didn't answer my question I'll add one more - "or no
one listens to them."
> I'm not claiming that all economists are pro-free market, still less
> that they are all as pro-market as they should be. For one thing,
once
> one point of view becomes dominant, intelligent scholars who want to
do
> something new start looking for gaps or errors in it.
If they are looking for "gaps or errors" in the free market case they
are looking for gap or errors in property rights and voluntary trade.
This is what happens without a philosophical foundation. This is why I
keep telling you economics alone will not succeed and has not
succeeded - whatever small progress it may have made in recent decades.
Some of us end up
> arguing for a position that is more free market than the current
norm,
> some for one that is less. But even a relatively leftist smart
> economist, like Krugman, ends up a lot more free market than the
> orthodoxy of 1950.
For now. Until there is another severe recession, or
worse..which "capitalism can't explain".
>
> You are seeing everything as much simpler than it is. ... You are
reminding me of the poem I wrote when Goldwater was defeated--it
> had very much the same tone as your comments... That was a long time
ago. It didn't happen, and there is no particular
> reason to think it is going to happen.
Only if we make sure it doesn't. You know very well, David, of the Jews
in Germany who held out to the bitter end believing it couldn't happen,
that their beloved Germany couldn't let it happen, that the world
wouldn't let it happen, that Hitler was an aberration.
> Economics is involved at two levels--as a way of explaining what we
> observe in the world, and as a possible way of changing it. ..
> What does this leave as the role of economists in changing the world?
> The basic answer is that they change the mix of free information out
> there. If "everybody knows" that minimum wage laws help poor people,
it
> is politically easier for unions to get increases in the minimum wage
> law in order to make it harder for low skill workers to compete with
> their high skill members. If "everybody knows" that minimum wage laws
> unemploy poor people, it is politically harder--you may still get
> increaeses, but not as many. Similarly for tariffs, regulation, etc.
Why is that everybody doesn't "know" these things by now since it's
been "free" information and known (as true) for a very, very long time?
Once again, if you deny that your economists are shy and cowards, it
only leaves that no one listens to them. Why is that?
David Friedman
> But there had been depressions before which had produced large numbers
> of bankruptcies and unemployment.
The U.S., in its entire history, had had only two depressions anywhere
close to that in scale, and they were both significantly smaller.
> The "Great Depression" was deeper and
> longer than it had to be for reasons both you and I know (and which I
> believe was well recognized by pro-capitalist economists and
> commentators in the 30's). So why would this particular depression have
> posed some serious new challenge to the free marketers?
Your "well recognized" makes it sound as though truth is much easier to
distinguish from error than it is. There were people arguing that
government intervention was making things worse--and other people
arguing it it was preventing an even bigger catastrophe. But the massive
evidence was that the existing system was working very badly--so there
was a large shift in opinion away from the existing system.
> > One of the things that was demonstrated by _A Monetary History_ was
> that
> > what had happened was not laissez-faire--that the collapse occurred
> not
> > despite the best the Federal Reserve could do, but in part because
> the
> > Fed was doing more or less the opposite of what existing theory said
> > they should have been doing
>
> But then you're saying that "existing theory" knew this already.
Existing theory didn't know what the Fed had been doing. It was more or
less taken for granted that they had pursued a loose monetary
policy--and that it had failed because "you can't push on a string." In
fact they had responded to the crisis by tightening.
> But
> what I also find particularly striking is that despite the correct view
> of the cause of the Great Depression being now out there - and for some
> time - all the old mythology continues unabated about it, i.e. that is
> was an inherent failure of unregulated capitalism. The "robber barons"
> view is also still out there, the exploitation of labor (justifying
> labor laws and unions, etc), etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Again, think "free information." Professional academics have an
incentive to hold views that are correct, or at least defensible against
well informed attacks, because otherwise they end up looking bad to
their peers. But the ordinary public doesn't. Holding an incorrect view
about the history of capitalism (unlike an incorrect view about what car
lasts longer) doesn't cost you a penny. So a good story that fits
people's prejudices will survive even if it isn't true. There are lots
of non-political examples out there.
The more the professionals know the story isn't true, the less it will
be believed--but it can still be believed a lot. My favorite example
comes from public discussions of trade policy--most of which, from both
sides of the political spectrum, are couched in terms of a theoretical
analysis that was conclusively refuted in 1817. But it is simpler,
easier to understand, and makes more sense than the correct analysis,so
survives and flourishes. Can you explain the theory of comparative
advantage? Do you believe that trade deficits are evidence that we are
"not competitive?" If you give the right answers, and they are true, you
are ahead of the vast majority of the population.
> I'm not just saying all this contentiously or for debating points. I am
> continually struck by the fact that the "truth" about economics has
> been know for a very, very long time - but anti-capitalism (despite
> recent improvements) continues unabated.
Part of it is that "the truth is known" is way too simple. What really
happens is closer to "good arguments were given for." That doesn't mean
that there weren't, or aren't, any good arguments on the other side.
>
> I still say you are not explaining it.
> If they had followed her advice, there
> > wouldn't have been a shift in economic opinion for the general public
> to
> > be receptive to.
>
> Would you entertain the possibility that the shift would have been even
> greater if they had?
I think it is wildly implausible. To begin with, Mises, who was an able
economist, was much less willing to try to compete with the orthodox
people on their own ground--and ended up having much less influence.
Rand herself and Reissman, who were making the philosophical arguments,
have had essentially zero effect on the beliefs of economists.
> > > "I suppose we're afraid we would sound as if we agreed with Milton
> > Friedman."
>
> Which confirms my view of their cowardice. It doesn't surprise me. You
> can well imagine then their fear of Ayn Rand.
The person I was quoting was on the other side from the Chicago
school--but agreed on the minimum wage point. The Chicago school people
were the ones he was afraid of sounding as if he agreed with--hence the
ones who were not cowards.
>
> >...at least as many of the people have read and
> > admired Heinlein as Rand.
>
> Even more have read Stephen King or Jacqueline Suzanne. So what? How
> many people have radically changed their philosophic views because of
> Heinlein?
He was the immediate influence in making me an anarchist.
> > Mencken was an earlier generation
>
> or Mencken?
Probably quite a lot.
...
> No, that won't do, David. People are constantly advocating things not
> in their self-interest- if you will, shooting themselves in the foot,
> because they think its the right thing to do.
>
> They didn't accept the free trade position - and don't now - because of
> what you refuse to acknowledge - that economics is not the only issue
> and most certainly is not the fundamental issue. The fact that it's
> been known for 200 years proves the point.
Now you have to invent an altruist explanation for the support for
tariffs. But it won't work. If you look at the arguments given, they all
come back to the (false) claim that Americans will be richer if we have
tariffs. If you look at who supports tariffs, you find it is the
interest groups that do benefit from tariffs.
Not much altruism to be found anywhere--just informed self interest on
one side, and uninformed, hence mistaken, self interest on the other.
It's all economics--both in the sense of fitting the economic theory of
politics (public choice theory) and in the vulgar sense of following
from people pursuing their perceived material self interest.
> > The problem with the Microsoft case, other than Gates' imprudent
> > underinvestment in Congressman and catastrophically bad job of PR,
>
> ...which has nothing to do with economic theory.
I'm not arguing that whatever economic theory says is good will happen.
I'm arguing that economic theory explains what happens--including
explaining why economically undesirable things sometimes happen--or at
least explains it better than any alternative approach. Investments in
congressmen--more generally in political influence--do have something to
do with economic theory, just like investments in other things.
And I am also arguing that changes in economic theory in the direction
of freedom are one way of moving the society in that direction--which is
not at all the same thing as claiming that if most economists think
something is good it will happen.
> And if they couldn't it is once again because they didn't have a good
> philosophical foundation. Precisely Rand's point.
If you believe that philosophy is a substitute for actually knowing the
subject you are philosophising about. Some Objectivists think
Objectivist philosophy lets them figure what version of theoretical
physics to believe in. Others think it lets them prove economic truths
without actually knowing any economics. Both groups are wrong.
> > What struck me, listening to an economist largely responsible for the
> > government's case talking to other academics, was how apologetic he
> > was--he found it necessary to make it clear that he didn't believe in
> > antitrust in general, but that this was, for various reasons, a
> special
> > case.
>
> Yeah, right, and you believed the S.O.B.?
At it happens, I did. You, on the other hand, know that since he
disagrees with you about subjects he knows far more about than you do,
he must be a wicked and dishonest person. That is what you were saying,
isn't it?
> Isolated instances. Mind you, again, I'm not saying there hasn't been
> some improvement, but I'm just pointing out that economics alone isn't
> doing the trick and doesn't seem to be making much headway judging from
> the blather I hear constantly from our leading politicians and
> commentators.
It hasn't remade the world yet--this time around--but it is doing better
than anything else.
> If they are looking for "gaps or errors" in the free market case
You are confusing advocacy with science. What they are looking for gaps
and errors in isn't a "case," a propaganda screed in favor of your and
my preferred political system, it is a system of ideas that tries to
makes sense out of certain parts of the world.
> they
> are looking for gap or errors in property rights and voluntary trade.
> This is what happens without a philosophical foundation.
Property rights and voluntary trade are much more complicated and
ambiguous concepts than amateur philosophers suppose.
Let me see if I can sum it up:
Your view is that our position on economics is obviously right, so the
only reason people don't accept it is that they have the wrong
philosophy.
My view is that you have a simplistic view of economics. My economic
opinions are right--my believing that is why I call them my
opinions--but they are very far from obviously right. Reasonable people
can differ quite a lot both about economic theory and about what the
best economic institutions are. At one extreme, most good economists
disagree with my belief that one can push laissez-faire all the way to
anarcho-capitalism with good results. At the other, an occasional smart
and ingenious economist disagrees with my (and most other economists')
belief that the U.S. would be better off with complete free trade.
What changed over the last fifty years was the distribution of
beliefs--as a result (mainly) of the Chicago school economists providing
good arguments for their positions and against the other sides'
positions. "Good arguments" doesn't translate as "conclusive proofs."
> Why is that everybody doesn't "know" these things by now since it's
> been "free" information and known (as true) for a very, very long time?
It isn't free information just because it is true, or even just because
the competent people know it is true. The Pythagorean theorem has been
known to be true for quite a while now, but it still isn't free
information for most of the population--they won't learn it unless they
have a good reason to want the information.
ScheetzBrian
>only reason people don't accept it is that they have the wrong
>philosophy.
I think that inverts the point somewhat, David.
Please note that I am not interceding here to claim that the influence of the
Chicago School has not been a profound and beneficial one. I am also not
interested in trying to claim that Rand's influence has had a more dramatic
immediate effect. I would just like to more precisely point out why
Objectivists would have a problem with it.
To un-invert the statement:
"The fact that the Chicago School theories accepted certain of their opponents'
ethical premises undercuts their ability to be of rigorous and long-lasting
support to peoples' ability to accept the right positions in economics."
By arguing from net social utility [essentially by saying, "Capitalism is good
because it is better at achieving the social goals of egalitarianism than
egalitarianism's own systems are"] you implicitly accept the premise that the
unit of analysis of the good is the group as a whole. Granted, your arguments
from net social utility have been good ones. But even if people accept them,
they accept them only as public policy prescriptions - and there will *always*
be someone who will claim that *their* particular policy will either accomplish
the goal even better or will "augment" the market or tweak it so it can be
"just right". And, as I noted much earlier, the entire system of justification
comes crashing down as soon as there is a macro crisis. Conveniently, during
the time period under discussion, the worst macro crises occurred on the other
team's watch [this helped lend credibility to the Chicago arguments] and, now
that their ideas have moved into ascendancy, we've managed [so far] to avoid
experiencing any fresh ones. What happens when we do? Rand would argue that
we will only be able to really put the roots down on capitalism when we begin
to treat the individual as the unit of analysis of the good - and that starting
from the ground floor in philosophy is the only way we have to ever get to do
that. Only by so doing can we ever advance past the point of endless
rear-guard actions in the public policy arena.
The best thing that can be said about the Chicago School is that they threw a
full-body block at what was, then, the unimpeded growth of collectivist
nonsense masquerading as economic theory. And that's a pretty darn good "best
thing". Even if one of their premises was wrong, and even if their long-term
prospects don't turn out to be as good as they'd like, they bought us some
time. And that counts for a lot.
Julian Morrison
> [...] In order to maintain
> consistency, they have to make the polyannish claim that nobody is ever
> really better off as a result of a rights violation. Hence the
> unwillingness to confront the prudent predator problem.
Sustainable theft is pretty much the basis of all the western governments
"tax" policies. But if they do this, they and everyone else lose out on
*potential* gains they would have had without it.
David Friedman
ScheetzBrian <scheet...@cs.com> wrote:
> >Your view is that our position on economics is obviously right, so the
> >only reason people don't accept it is that they have the wrong
> >philosophy.
>
> I think that inverts the point somewhat, David.
The point you think is correct, or the point about the person I was
arguing with?
> To un-invert the statement:
>
> "The fact that the Chicago School theories accepted certain of their
> opponents'
> ethical premises undercuts their ability to be of rigorous and
> long-lasting
> support to peoples' ability to accept the right positions in economics."
>
> By arguing from net social utility [essentially by saying, "Capitalism is
> good
> because it is better at achieving the social goals of egalitarianism than
> egalitarianism's own systems are"] you implicitly accept the premise that
> the
> unit of analysis of the good is the group as a whole.
You are confusing egalitarianism with utilitarianism. Insofar as your
statement is at least partly correct, it is about the latter, not the
former.
> Granted, your arguments
> from net social utility have been good ones. But even if people accept
> them,
> they accept them only as public policy prescriptions - and there will
> *always*
> be someone who will claim that *their* particular policy will either
> accomplish
> the goal even better or will "augment" the market or tweak it so it can
> be
> "just right".
And, as we observe on this very newsgroup, if you make your arguments in
terms of philosophy there will always be someone who will claim that his
particular variant of the philosophy is better than yours--and justifies
his preferred violation of what you think are human rights.
Or in other words, your argument is:
Winning the economic argument in the only sense it can be won doesn't
guarantee that nobody will every come up with a convincing argument for
doing the wrong thing.
That is correct--it doesn't. Neither does anything else. As I was trying
to explain to the other gentleman I was arguing with, the world really
is a complicated place, and the sort of arguments Objectivists (and
other libertarians, for that matter) like to imagine they have,
arguments that demonstrate with absolute certainty to any reasonable
person that our political views are correct, are in very short supply.
> Rand would argue that
> we will only be able to really put the roots down on capitalism when we
> begin
> to treat the individual as the unit of analysis of the good - and that
> starting
> from the ground floor in philosophy is the only way we have to ever get
> to do
> that. Only by so doing can we ever advance past the point of endless
> rear-guard actions in the public policy arena.
Except that if you take the individual as the unit of analysis of the
good, your analysis stops the first time you have to make a decision
that benefits at least one person and harms at least one person. That is
one of the reasons that Objectivists are so unwilling to consider the
possibility of real conflicts of interest. In order to maintain
consistency, they have to make the polyannish claim that nobody is ever
really better off as a result of a rights violation. Hence the
unwillingness to confront the prudent predator problem.
--
David Friedman
http://www.best.com/~ddfr
David Friedman
<julian....@virgin.net> wrote:
> David Friedman wrote:
>
> > [...] In order to maintain
> > consistency, they have to make the polyannish claim that nobody is ever
> > really better off as a result of a rights violation. Hence the
> > unwillingness to confront the prudent predator problem.
>
> Sustainable theft is pretty much the basis of all the western governments
> "tax" policies. But if they do this, they and everyone else lose out on
> *potential* gains they would have had without it.
But from the standpoint of a particular special interest, abolishing all
of the theft isn't an option--and getting a cut of it for themselves is.
So you need some smoke and mirrors to prove that if they are rational
egoists, they ought to sacrifice their own welfare in order to abide by
the principle of not stealing.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> Except that if you take the individual as the unit of analysis of the
> good, your analysis stops the first time you have to make a decision
> that benefits at least one person and harms at least one person. That
is
> one of the reasons that Objectivists are so unwilling to consider the
> possibility of real conflicts of interest. In order to maintain
> consistency, they have to make the polyannish claim that nobody is
ever
> really better off as a result of a rights violation. Hence the
> unwillingness to confront the prudent predator problem.
What is "the prudent predator problem"?
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> The U.S., in its entire history, had had only two depressions
anywhere
> close to that in scale, and they were both significantly smaller.
And free marketers had (or hadn't) been able to explain them?
> Your "well recognized" makes it sound as though truth is much easier
to
> distinguish from error than it is. ...But the massive
> evidence was that the existing system was working very badly--so
there
> was a large shift in opinion away from the existing system.
But you and I know that economics and the economy had not fundamentally
changed. Something else was different, very different from the prior
century, namely, the ascendancy of Kant-Hegel-Marx-Pragmatism all
pointing to...socialism. All pointing to an antipathy toward capitalism.
There had been a philosophical shift of enormous proportions which in
my view enabled the "large shift in opinion away from the existing
system".
>But the ordinary public doesn't. Holding an incorrect view
> about the history of capitalism (unlike an incorrect view about what
car
> lasts longer) doesn't cost you a penny. So a good story that fits
> people's prejudices will survive even if it isn't true. There are
lots
> of non-political examples out there.
That's true, but there are also a great many views which have been put
to rest (largely), such as we don't burn witches at the stake any
longer. The better people in our culture are united on that and related
issues and they present their reasons unhedged, unqualified, without
pandering to opponents.
Such has not been the case with the advocates of capitalism
unfortunately. And that in my view is why the socialists ran all over
them in this century.
> The more the professionals know the story isn't true, the less it
will
> be believed--but it can still be believed a lot.
Yes, it can so long as the "professionals" don't present the truth
effectively. It gets even worse in this century because the
professionals - disarmed by Kant and his followers - can't even
definitively assert what the truth is.
You being a prime example.
> > Would you entertain the possibility that the shift would have been
even
> > greater if they had?
>
> I think it is wildly implausible. To begin with, Mises, who was an
able
> economist, was much less willing to try to compete with the orthodox
> people on their own ground--and ended up having much less influence.
Yes, but Mises (and Hazlitt) were also philosophically very, very poor.
Mises' "praxeology" was ridiculous and it's no surprise no one took it
seriously.
> Rand herself and Reissman, who were making the philosophical
arguments,
> have had essentially zero effect on the beliefs of economists.
Which I've already conceded and which is not the question on the table.
> > Heinlein?
>
> He was the immediate influence in making me an anarchist.
Hardly a recommendation on any count, either with respect to you or the
broader point we were discussing.
> Now you have to invent an altruist explanation for the support for
> tariffs. But it won't work. If you look at the arguments given, they
all
> come back to the (false) claim that Americans will be richer if we
have
> tariffs. If you look at who supports tariffs, you find it is the
> interest groups that do benefit from tariffs.
True, but they get support from those whose ox is gored by the tariffs
in the name of "helping" America from those damned foreigners. I don't
see the motivation of self-interest here - unless you hold the circular
and meaningless view that everything we do is "really" in our self-
interest somehow.
>
> Not much altruism to be found anywhere--just informed self interest
on
> one side, and uninformed, hence mistaken, self interest on the other.
> It's all economics--both in the sense of fitting the economic theory
of
> politics (public choice theory) and in the vulgar sense of following
> from people pursuing their perceived material self interest.
Why do the young support Social Security and Medicare; why do city
people support farm subsidies; why would anyone listen to the anti-IMF
protestors to "help" the poor in the Third World, etc, etc? There is
not only no "economics" here, there is no self-interest.
>....changes in economic theory in the direction
> of freedom are one way of moving the society in that direction--which
is
> not at all the same thing as claiming that if most economists think
> something is good it will happen.
We've certainly established that without any doubt.
> > And if they couldn't it is once again because they didn't have a
good
> > philosophical foundation. Precisely Rand's point.
>
> If you believe that philosophy is a substitute for actually knowing
the
> subject you are philosophising about. Some Objectivists think
> Objectivist philosophy lets them figure what version of theoretical
> physics to believe in. Others think it lets them prove economic
truths
> without actually knowing any economics. Both groups are wrong.
This is all a non-sequitor and doesn't address the question.
> > Yeah, right, and you believed the S.O.B.?
>
> At it happens, I did. You, on the other hand, know that since he
> disagrees with you about subjects he knows far more about than you
do,
> he must be a wicked and dishonest person. That is what you were
saying,
> isn't it?
Another non-sequitor. A particularly ridiculous one.
> Property rights and voluntary trade are much more complicated and
> ambiguous concepts than amateur philosophers suppose.
So we hear very often from those who wish to take them away.
>
> Let me see if I can sum it up:
>
> Your view is that our position on economics is obviously right,
not "obviously" right. Just right.
so the
> only reason people don't accept it is that they have the wrong
> philosophy.
>
> My view is that you have a simplistic view of economics. My economic
> opinions are right--my believing that is why I call them my
> opinions--but they are very far from obviously right. Reasonable
people
> can differ quite a lot both about economic theory and about what the
> best economic institutions are.
Reasonable people don't any longer differ about burning witches at the
stake. Why are they still differing about burning Bill Gates at the
stake?
Now, I would say that the way Bill Gates - and most of your economists -
are mounting a defense, it's no wonder he is being burned at the stake.
> What changed over the last fifty years was the distribution of
> beliefs--as a result (mainly) of the Chicago school economists
providing
> good arguments for their positions and against the other sides'
> positions. "Good arguments" doesn't translate as "conclusive proofs."
That is precisely why you are ineffective. I couldn't have said it
better myself.
>
> > Why is that everybody doesn't "know" these things by now since it's
> > been "free" information and known (as true) for a very, very long
time?
>
> It isn't free information just because it is true, or even just
because
> the competent people know it is true. The Pythagorean theorem has
been
> known to be true for quite a while now, but it still isn't free
> information for most of the population--they won't learn it unless
they
> have a good reason to want the information.
But you will notice that no one - yet - has risen up to ban the
Pythagorean Theorem - and you know if anyone did they'd be regarded as
a crackpot.
But the anti-capitalists are not regarded as crackpots- which they
should be - because you are still considering them as "reasonable"
people and because even you don't believe you have proven anything to
throw against them.
David, when the day comes and you and your Chicago School can assert
against all comers that your views are not just merely "good arguments"
but that they are sound and conclusive as the Pythagorean Theorem,
that's the day we will win.
Not before.
But that will require a change in philosophy.
Fred Weiss
>
> --
> David Friedman
> http://www.best.com/~ddfr
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Stephen Speicher
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > That is one of the reasons that Objectivists are so unwilling
> > to consider the possibility of real conflicts of interest. In
> > order to maintain consistency, they have to make the
> > polyannish claim that nobody is ever really better off as a
> > result of a rights violation. Hence the unwillingness to
> > confront the prudent predator problem.
>
> What is "the prudent predator problem"?
>
Oy vey! Just remember, when it is all finally over, it was you
who asked for it. :)
Stephen
s...@compbio.caltech.edu
You can always tell a pioneer by the arrows in his back.
Printed using 100% recycled electrons.
--------------------------------------------------------
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-E70968.2...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
> > Except that if you take the individual as the unit of analysis of the
> > good, your analysis stops the first time you have to make a decision
> > that benefits at least one person and harms at least one person. That
> is
> > one of the reasons that Objectivists are so unwilling to consider the
> > possibility of real conflicts of interest. In order to maintain
> > consistency, they have to make the polyannish claim that nobody is
> ever
> > really better off as a result of a rights violation. Hence the
> > unwillingness to confront the prudent predator problem.
>
> What is "the prudent predator problem"?
There speaks someone mercifully spared the last three years or so of
h.p.o.
Objectivists claim to derive oughts from rational egoism. The prudent
predator problem is that a rational egoist would respect other people's
rights only when it was in his interest to do so, and that although that
might lead to his respecting rights most of the time, and pretending to
respect them all of the time, there is no good argument to show that it
would never be in his rational interest to violate other people's rights.
Hence someone who consistently followed the logic of the Objectivist
position would be a prudent predator--prudent because he would only
violate rights when a careful consideration of the long run consequences
showed it to be in his interest.
Responses to the problem range from conceding that it is true, labelling
all instances where predation is in someone's rational interest as
"lifeboat situations," and trying to pretend that such situations are
irrelevant to ethics, to trying to prove that predation is never in
anyone's interest. The most common error in the latter argument is
confusing the statement "it is in my interest to violate rights" with
the statement "it is in my interest for it to be true that it is in
people's interest to violate rights."
Thus some Objectivists argue that the rational man is better off in a
society where everyone respects rights than in one where everyone feels
free to violate them. But even if that is true, he isn't deciding what
everyone else will feel--only what he will do. He should, of course,
take account of any predictable effects of his actions on other people's
behavior--but in some cases those will be very small, and so can be
ignored.
If you are really curious, there are a lot of old posts on this argument
that you can find via Deja News.
pape...@my-deja.com
Nah, let's start fresh.
Assuming we are not talking about actual "lifeboat situations", I can
tell you what the problem is right off the bat. Your "prudent predator"
thinks he can "get away with it".
He can't - either in his own soul or with respect to others.
The fact that some do get away with it is irrelevant. It's like
pointing a loaded pistol at your head with one chamber empty. The fact
that some small number get the lucky empty chamber doesn't make it a
rational way to do things. And even those that get "the lucky empty
chamber" actually they never do really get away with it either. It eats
at them and they suffer for it. They worry about it constantly. There
is a lie in their lives they have to constantly hide. There is a price
to be paid which is never worth the "predation".
And furthermore the rational choice is always better. The occasional
really smart criminal would do much, much better using his smarts in
legitimate pursuits. I mean, sheesh, 22 year olds are becoming
millionaires overnight in our current economy. And the dumb
criminals..it doesn't matter. They always get caught or "whacked". As a
matter of fact so do the vast majority of the smart ones, which is one
of the proofs why it ain't so smart.
Oh, and one more thing, if he could get away with it, if the world were
such that the predators could get away with it, it wouldn't mean
anything to them. The world is not structured such that - as AR put it -
you can "fake reality" and get away with it. And if it were, you
wouldn't enjoy it or benefit from it anyway (Rod Serling could tell you
that and he had a famous episode illustrating the point).
So it is never prudent.
Q.E.D.
Fred Weiss
T L Clarke
> ....I mean, sheesh, 22 year olds are becoming
> millionaires overnight in our current economy.
Talk about your prudent predators!
Set up a company with .com in the name, get some venture capital.
Lose it all, make no profit, sell stock to the public and get rich!
Tom Clarke
pape...@my-deja.com
100...@photon.compbio.caltech.edu>,
> > What is "the prudent predator problem"?
> >
>
> Oy vey! Just remember, when it is all finally over, it was you
> who asked for it. :)
>
> Stephen
Now he tells me. -)
Fred
Kyle Bennett
Don't do, it, I'm begging you....
If you really want to know, go look through Deja News. There are at
least 1000 posts on the subject. Wouldn't surprise me if there were
several thousand. Please read them all before starting that one again.
Thank you
--Kyle Bennett
pape...@my-deja.com
But, look, how bad can it be? The prudent predator CAN'T be right. We
know that going in. If it is right it is nihilism. And if nihilism is
right we may as well close down the Forum cuz we're all wasting our
time.
So it's wrong. The question is on what basis, right? The intrinsic
argument - which amounts to saying, "It is just wrong. Period" - can't
be the right argument. For one thing it's not an argument. It's just an
arbitrary assertion.
The utilitarian argument which amounts to saying, "Hey, if everyone
acted that way, where would be", may be true but it begs the question.
So assuming we leave out burning in hell, what's left?
Rational egoism. That's obviously where the answer lies and it's just a
matter of stating it clearly. Not that everyone will agree of course.
We only need the rational people to agree cuz in the nature of things
you can't convince the irrational of anything anyway. They'll just
bluster and fume and foam at the mouth like Chris Cathcart. Well, what
can you do about it? You hope they take their medication.
Fred Weiss
In article <39073E3F...@dot.co.pima.az.us>,
Kyle Bennett
pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
> Oooops! I really did it this time. That bad, huh?
>
> But, look, how bad can it be?
Oh, it's bad. Did you check deja news? You'll need days just to scroll
through the headers. I'm not kidding. And that's not even counting the
"Prudent Predator Revisited" thread. (The sequel from hell -- worse than
Police Academy 4).
> what's left?
>
> Rational egoism. That's obviously where the answer lies and it's just a
> matter of stating it clearly. Not that everyone will agree of course.
> We only need the rational people to agree cuz in the nature of things
> you can't convince the irrational of anything anyway. They'll just
> bluster and fume and foam at the mouth like Chris Cathcart. Well, what
> can you do about it? You hope they take their medication.
That's the problem. The argument went on until hell froze over -- and
thawed out again -- because both sides basically stipulated to rational
egoism from the start. Rational egoism doesn't answer it, at least not in
any remotely obvious way.
If you really want to get into this, go back to Deja News, it was about 2
years ago. I remember that Chris Wolf and David Friedman, (and of course
I) made particularly good arguments. There were many others as well, who,
I can't remember. These weren't for the most part irrational people.
If after all that, you really have something new to say, by all means post
it here.
Although I believe that would be impossible, because every English word in
every possible combination was posted in those threads.
--Kyle Bennett
Stephen Speicher
> Oooops! I really did it this time. That bad, huh?
>
Yep, that bad.
> But, look, how bad can it be? The prudent predator CAN'T be
> right.
We know that. Now tell them.
>
> Rational egoism. That's obviously where the answer lies and
> it's just a matter of stating it clearly. Not that everyone
> will agree of course.
Right, right, and right.
> We only need the rational people to agree cuz in the nature of
> things you can't convince the irrational of anything anyway.
The issue is so trivial as to be hardly worthy of effort. Yet,
there probably have been thousands of posts here on the
subject--a true tribute to muddleheaded irrationality.
> They'll just bluster and fume and foam at the mouth like Chris
> Cathcart. Well, what can you do about it? You hope they take
> their medication.
>
Ah, you too read the psychiatric report.
Paul Zrimsek
>But, look, how bad can it be? The prudent predator CAN'T be right. We
>know that going in. If it is right it is nihilism. And if nihilism is
>right we may as well close down the Forum cuz we're all wasting our
>time.
Owl, Wrathbone, are you reading this? Another intuitionist has joined
our ranks!
Paul Zrimsek pzri...@earthlink.net
------------------------------------------------------------------
Relativism, in theory: Moral imperatives are mere personal tastes.
Relativism, in practice: My personal tastes are moral imperatives.
Ken Gardner
> What is "the prudent predator problem"?
For asking this question, when the revolution comes you will be punished
SEVERELY for your crimes. :)
Ken
David Friedman
> But, look, how bad can it be? The prudent predator CAN'T be right. We
> know that going in. If it is right it is nihilism. And if nihilism is
> right we may as well close down the Forum cuz we're all wasting our
> time.
You really shouldn't use "nihilism" as if it were a synonym for
"anything but Objectivism." If the prudent predator argument is correct,
there are at least two possibilities, neither of which is nihilism.
1. Rational egoism is correct, and correct action occasionally includes
violating other people's rights. That isn't Objectivism, but neither is
it nihilism.
2. Rational egoism is wrong, or at least incomplete. Some other basis
must be found for judging action.
> So assuming we leave out burning in hell, what's left?
>
> Rational egoism.
Which, of course, is where the argument originates.
> That's obviously where the answer lies and it's just a
> matter of stating it clearly.
You are welcome to try. Think about defining self-interest in a way that
doesn't assume your conclusion.
David Friedman
wrote:
> Although I believe that would be impossible, because every English word in
> every possible combination was posted in those threads.
I believe that a brief application of the mathematics of permutations
will show that that is unlikely.
Besides, I don't remember anyone using "antidisestablishmentarian"
David Friedman
> Nah, let's start fresh.
Are you suffering from the illusion that what you are about to say
consists of brand new ideas, which haven't been repeated several times
over in the course of the discussion?
> Assuming we are not talking about actual "lifeboat situations", I can
> tell you what the problem is right off the bat. Your "prudent predator"
> thinks he can "get away with it".
>
> He can't - either in his own soul or with respect to others.
>
> The fact that some do get away with it is irrelevant. It's like
> pointing a loaded pistol at your head with one chamber empty. The fact
> that some small number get the lucky empty chamber doesn't make it a
> rational way to do things. And even those that get "the lucky empty
> chamber" actually they never do really get away with it either. It eats
> at them and they suffer for it. They worry about it constantly. There
> is a lie in their lives they have to constantly hide. There is a price
> to be paid which is never worth the "predation".
To begin with, most prudent rights violators violate rights in legal
ways, through government. There is no lie to be hidden, no worry about
being caught.
As for the rest, note that the claim you have to defend isn't merely
that most people most of the time don't have opportunities to violate
rights that are very profitable and very safe. The claim you have to
defend is that nobody ever has an opportunity to violate rights that is
very profitable and very safe. Do you really think you can establish
that, or even make it profitable?
Why do you have to establish that claim? Because if you don't, you must
then choose between two unattractive alternatives:
1. Saying that when, however rarely it happens, someone has an
opportunity to violate rights that is both very profitable and very
safe, he ought to do it. By saying that you reject the Objectivist
support for rights.
2. Saying that when ... he ought not to do it, even though it is in his
interest. By saying that you reject the Objectivist support for rational
egoism.
> And furthermore the rational choice is always better.
The rational choice is always better--but you haven't yet shown that
rights violation isn't sometimes the rational choice.
> Oh, and one more thing, if he could get away with it, if the world were
> such that the predators could get away with it, it wouldn't mean
> anything to them. The world is not structured such that - as AR put it -
> you can "fake reality" and get away with it.
The prudent predator isn't "faking reality" for himself--he knows what
reality is like. He may sometimes try to deceive other people--depending
on his particular form of predation. Do you have some proof that fooling
other people can never be in your interest?
David Friedman
> But you and I know that economics and the economy had not fundamentally
> changed. Something else was different, very different from the prior
> century, namely, the ascendancy of Kant-Hegel-Marx-Pragmatism all
> pointing to...socialism.
It certainly was an odd coincidence that that philosophical position
suddenly became ascendant in 1929. Also odd that the U.S. version of
"socialism"--i.e. dirigiste economic policy--was common practice some
centuries before Kant was born.
> All pointing to an antipathy toward capitalism.
Despite the fact that Kant was strongly favorable towards capitalism?
You, of course, know the implications of his philosophy better than he
does.
> > Now you have to invent an altruist explanation for the support for
> > tariffs. But it won't work. If you look at the arguments given, they
> all
> > come back to the (false) claim that Americans will be richer if we
> have
> > tariffs. If you look at who supports tariffs, you find it is the
> > interest groups that do benefit from tariffs.
>
> True, but they get support from those whose ox is gored by the tariffs
> in the name of "helping" America from those damned foreigners. I don't
> see the motivation of self-interest here - unless you hold the circular
> and meaningless view that everything we do is "really" in our self-
> interest somehow.
The altruist position would count the welfare of the foreigners too.
What you are describing wouldn't be altruism but nationalism.
But most of the people they get support from believe that, on net, they
will themselves be better off if America is "protected." Certainly the
arguments made to get their support depend on that claim.
> > If you believe that philosophy is a substitute for actually knowing
> the
> > subject you are philosophising about. Some Objectivists think
> > Objectivist philosophy lets them figure what version of theoretical
> > physics to believe in. Others think it lets them prove economic
> truths
> > without actually knowing any economics. Both groups are wrong.
> This is all a non-sequitor and doesn't address the question.
Sure it does. You are claiming that the correct philosophical beliefs
let you answer economic questions. I'm disputing that claim.
> > > Yeah, right, and you believed the S.O.B.?
> > At it happens, I did. You, on the other hand, know that since he
> > disagrees with you about subjects he knows far more about than you
> do,
> > he must be a wicked and dishonest person. That is what you were
> saying,
> > isn't it?
> Another non-sequitor. A particularly ridiculous one.
I am pointing out what is implicit in your argument--in this case your
use of "S.O.B."
> > Property rights and voluntary trade are much more complicated and
> > ambiguous concepts than amateur philosophers suppose.
>
> So we hear very often from those who wish to take them away.
And from those who wish to defend them--and understand them.Almost
anything can be simple--if you don't understand it.
> > My view is that you have a simplistic view of economics. My economic
> > opinions are right--my believing that is why I call them my
> > opinions--but they are very far from obviously right. Reasonable
> people
> > can differ quite a lot both about economic theory and about what the
> > best economic institutions are.
>
> Reasonable people don't any longer differ about burning witches at the
> stake. Why are they still differing about burning Bill Gates at the
> stake?
Because the relevant arguments are very much less clear and convincing.
> Now, I would say that the way Bill Gates - and most of your economists -
> are mounting a defense, it's no wonder he is being burned at the stake.
>
> > What changed over the last fifty years was the distribution of
> > beliefs--as a result (mainly) of the Chicago school economists
> providing
> > good arguments for their positions and against the other sides'
> > positions. "Good arguments" doesn't translate as "conclusive proofs."
>
> That is precisely why you are ineffective. I couldn't have said it
> better myself.
So we agree. And we are back to my point--your argument against
economics comes from your oversimplified view of the world. You think
that conclusive proofs are available to bring freedom, and since
economics doesn't provide them, we have to go elsewhere.
> > > Why is that everybody doesn't "know" these things by now since it's
> > > been "free" information and known (as true) for a very, very long
> time?
> >
> > It isn't free information just because it is true, or even just
> because
> > the competent people know it is true. The Pythagorean theorem has
> been
> > known to be true for quite a while now, but it still isn't free
> > information for most of the population--they won't learn it unless
> they
>
> > have a good reason to want the information.
> But you will notice that no one - yet - has risen up to ban the
> Pythagorean Theorem - and you know if anyone did they'd be regarded as
> a crackpot.
Nobody has a strong self-interest in persuading people that the theorem
is false. Whole industries have a strong self-interest in persuading
people that the correct view of foreign trade is false.
The theory of comparative advantage is no more "philosophical" than the
Pythagorean theorem. So what is your explanation for it's not being
widely believed in and understood? Do you understand it?
> David, when the day comes and you and your Chicago School can assert
> against all comers that your views are not just merely "good arguments"
> but that they are sound and conclusive as the Pythagorean Theorem,
> that's the day we will win.
>
> Not before.
>
> But that will require a change in philosophy.
Not at all. All it will be require is that I am willing to lie. But I'm
not. Or, alternatively, I could become sufficiently senile to believe it
was true.
Again you demonstrate my point. Turning it around... if it were true
that Rand provided conclusive arguments for freedom, arguments so good
that once all intelligent people had been exposed to them they would all
support freedom, then indeed philosophy would be superior to economics
for the purpose. But it isn't true--not even close.
Are you in the least worried by the fact that almost no academic
philosophers have been convinced by Rand? I'm not a big fan of academic
philosophers, but quite a lot of them are smart people and they spend a
lot more time reading and thinking about these things than you do. Isn't
it at all odd, if Rand has conclusive arguments that any rational person
has to agree with, that almost none of them do?
Anthony Argyriou
>In article <390754CE...@dot.co.pima.az.us>, kyl...@earthlink.net
>wrote:
>
>> Although I believe that would be impossible, because every English word in
>> every possible combination was posted in those threads.
>
>I believe that a brief application of the mathematics of permutations
>will show that that is unlikely.
>
>Besides, I don't remember anyone using "antidisestablishmentarian"
Wouldn't antidisestablishmentarianism be favoring the continuation of one
particular form of prudent predation?
Anthony Argyriou
Unix _is_ user-friendly. It's just selective about its friends.
David Friedman
Argyriou <ant...@alphageo.com> wrote:
> On 27 Apr 2000 05:09:38 GMT, David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
> >In article <390754CE...@dot.co.pima.az.us>, kyl...@earthlink.net
> >wrote:
> >
> >> Although I believe that would be impossible, because every English
> >> word in
> >> every possible combination was posted in those threads.
> >
> >I believe that a brief application of the mathematics of permutations
> >will show that that is unlikely.
> >
> >Besides, I don't remember anyone using "antidisestablishmentarian"
>
> Wouldn't antidisestablishmentarianism be favoring the continuation of one
> particular form of prudent predation?
Yes. Hence it would be relevant to the thread. But wasn't used.
So not only have we not used every English word, we haven't even used
every relevant English word.
Or at least, we hadn't as of your previous post.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
> > Nah, let's start fresh.
>
> Are you suffering from the illusion that what you are about to say
> consists of brand new ideas, which haven't been repeated several
times
> over in the course of the discussion?
It's one of my character flaws.
>
> To begin with, most prudent rights violators violate rights in legal
> ways, through government. There is no lie to be hidden, no worry
about
> being caught.
Except the self knowledge that they have obtained the unearned. Also
whatever gov't giveth it can taketh away - often in ways worse than the
giving.
One example that comes to mind is all the farmers who've been lured to
stay in farming because of gov't subsidies over the years. Even with
the subsidies many of them are barely making a go of it. They'd have
been better off pursuing other careers a long time ago.
Not to say that in certain circumstances it was necessarily wrong to
have accepted the subsidies on the premise that whatever you can get
back from the gov't which has stolen from you in the past (and will
continue to do so in the future) is legitimate.
Some of these situations could get complicated in that respect. But
moral judgement is contextual,you know, and you have to keep the full
context in mind.
>
> As for the rest, note that the claim you have to defend isn't merely
> that most people most of the time don't have opportunities to violate
> rights that are very profitable and very safe. The claim you have to
> defend is that nobody ever has an opportunity to violate rights that
is
> very profitable and very safe. Do you really think you can establish
> that, or even make it profitable?
Piece a cake.
>
> Why do you have to establish that claim? Because if you don't, you
must
> then choose between two unattractive alternatives:
>
> 1. Saying that when, however rarely it happens, someone has an
> opportunity to violate rights that is both very profitable and very
> safe, he ought to do it. By saying that you reject the Objectivist
> support for rights.
Which of course I would never dream of doing which means that it is
never really "safe".
>
> 2. Saying that when ... he ought not to do it, even though it is in
his
> interest. By saying that you reject the Objectivist support for
rational
> egoism.
It is never in his interest so rational egoism is safe.
>
> > And furthermore the rational choice is always better.
Always, almost by definition (except we are not rationalists so it
would have to be shown.)
>
> The rational choice is always better--but you haven't yet shown that
> rights violation isn't sometimes the rational choice.
It would never be the rational choice - except in "lifeboat situations"
(let's leave those out).
> The prudent predator isn't "faking reality" for himself--he knows
what
> reality is like.
Not really.
>He may sometimes try to deceive other people--depending
> on his particular form of predation. Do you have some proof that
fooling
> other people can never be in your interest?
Hardly. Fooling other people per se is not necessarily either wrong or
a violation of rights. I think you mean fooling other people with
nefarious objectives in mind, e.g. to commit fraud against honest and
decent people. That would be very easy to prove, don't you think?
I think you should know by now that rational egoism doesn't consist
of "what I can get away with".
Fred Weiss
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> In article <8e73hu$9b8$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > But you and I know that economics and the economy had not
fundamentally
> > changed. Something else was different, very different from the prior
> > century, namely, the ascendancy of Kant-Hegel-Marx-Pragmatism all
> > pointing to...socialism.
>
> It certainly was an odd coincidence that that philosophical position
> suddenly became ascendant in 1929.
Not suddenly.
Also odd that the U.S. version of
> "socialism"--i.e. dirigiste economic policy--was common practice some
> centuries before Kant was born.
What does that have to do with anything?
>
> > All pointing to an antipathy toward capitalism.
>
> Despite the fact that Kant was strongly favorable towards capitalism?
> You, of course, know the implications of his philosophy better than
he
> does.
Kant's political views were completely incidental - and totally
unrelated - to his more fundamental epistemological and ethical views
(which were totally in conflict with any rational defense of
capitalism). In politics he was just mouthing the prevailing
Enlightenment views. I suppose he didn't want to be perceived as the
complete monster that he was. His political views to the best of my
knowledge also had little or no influence - perhaps because they were
neither original or bore any relationship to his more fundamental views.
> The altruist position would count the welfare of the foreigners too.
> What you are describing wouldn't be altruism but nationalism.
In any event it has little or nothing to do with self-interest which I
thought was your original premise.
>
> But most of the people they get support from believe that, on net,
they
> will themselves be better off if America is "protected." Certainly
the
> arguments made to get their support depend on that claim.
True, but then they are putting the purported interests of the country
ahead of their own. Sometimes of course that can be legitimately self-
interested when the country is being genuinely threatened, which is
hardly the case here. And when they get all worked up about supposed
labor exploitation in third world countries what interest of theirs is
at stake?
> > This is all a non-sequitor and doesn't address the question.
>
> Sure it does. You are claiming that the correct philosophical beliefs
> let you answer economic questions. I'm disputing that claim.
Only by pretty obviously equivocating.
> > Another non-sequitor. A particularly ridiculous one.
>
> I am pointing out what is implicit in your argument--in this case
your
> use of "S.O.B."
I'll stand by it, but the mere fact that he disagrees with me about
something is not what makes him dishonest. What makes him dishonest is
the claim that Microsoft is a "special case". This is a guy incapable
of thinking in principles, completely driven by concrete bound
pragmatism.
>
> > > Property rights and voluntary trade are much more complicated and
> > > ambiguous concepts than amateur philosophers suppose.
> >
> > So we hear very often from those who wish to take them away.
>
> And from those who wish to defend them--and understand them.Almost
> anything can be simple--if you don't understand it.
Or want to overcomplicate it - as "professional" philosophers sometimes
do.
> > Reasonable people don't any longer differ about burning witches at
the
> > stake. Why are they still differing about burning Bill Gates at the
> > stake?
>
> Because the relevant arguments are very much less clear and
convincing.
Whose to blame for that? The similarities are perfectly clear and
convincing to me. Maybe you are overcomplicating things again - and
maybe to get back to our original dispute this is why despite the
success of the Chicago School, it has not gone as far as might have
been possible.
> So we agree. And we are back to my point--your argument against
> economics comes from your oversimplified view of the world. You think
> that conclusive proofs are available to bring freedom, and since
> economics doesn't provide them, we have to go elsewhere.
Not exactly. Economics can provide conclusive proofs. But it also needs
to "go elsewhere" for a full defense of freedom, namely, philosophy.
That it hasn't done and that's why your economists have only had
limited success and, I believe, why their success is precarious.
> > But you will notice that no one - yet - has risen up to ban the
> > Pythagorean Theorem - and you know if anyone did they'd be regarded
as
> > a crackpot.
>
> Nobody has a strong self-interest in persuading people that the
theorem
> is false. Whole industries have a strong self-interest in persuading
> people that the correct view of foreign trade is false.
>
> The theory of comparative advantage is no more "philosophical" than
the
> Pythagorean theorem. So what is your explanation for it's not being
> widely believed in and understood? Do you understand it?
It hasn't been presented as a "Pythagorean Theorem",i.e. indisputable
(and crackpot to oppose). It might be in someone's "interest" to eat
babies for breakfast, but the whole country would rise up in horror at
the suggestion. They should do the same at the merest suggestion that
we should "protect" our industries with tariffs. Isn't that your
reaction (that it's lunatic)? It's certainly mine.
Look, I grant you I've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about
economics. But on the other hand as you have pointed out at every
opportunity I am not a professional economist. So how hard can it be?
>
> > David, when the day comes and you and your Chicago School can assert
> > against all comers that your views are not just merely "good
arguments"
> > but that they are sound and conclusive as the Pythagorean Theorem,
> > that's the day we will win.
> >
> > Not before.
> >
> > But that will require a change in philosophy.
>
> Not at all. All it will be require is that I am willing to lie. But
I'm
> not. Or, alternatively, I could become sufficiently senile to believe
it
> was true.
>
> Again you demonstrate my point. Turning it around... if it were true
> that Rand provided conclusive arguments for freedom, arguments so
good
> that once all intelligent people had been exposed to them they would
all
> support freedom, then indeed philosophy would be superior to
economics
> for the purpose. But it isn't true--not even close.
I wouldn't quite put it that way. Philosophy is more fundamental and
necessary. It's not a question of being "superior" to economics. And
economics is also necessary otherwise all the philosophy pertaining to
it would just be "floating abstractions" and arbitrary assertions.
I don't find it coincedental that the philosophy of freedom is fully
consistent with the economics of freedom. There is no clash whatever.
> Are you in the least worried by the fact that almost no academic
> philosophers have been convinced by Rand? I'm not a big fan of
academic
> philosophers, but quite a lot of them are smart people and they spend
a
> lot more time reading and thinking about these things than you do.
Isn't
> it at all odd, if Rand has conclusive arguments that any rational
person
> has to agree with, that almost none of them do?
Not at all odd - even on your premises. Look at them as a dying and
decaying American industry using outmoded methods and producing a lousy
product, trying to protect itself from a bright, new, creative foreign
invasion. They've got all the "tariff walls" piled high and thick to
keep it out.
I'm probably even less of a fan of academicians that you are. It's
nothing new that they are mostly second-handers terrified of rocking
the establishment boat in their fields. The first thing on their minds
when they wake up in the morning is, "Oh my god, what will my peers
think of me today."
Look, why do even people who have nothing particularly at stake run
from Objectivism? It often makes them an outcast among their friends
and family. Look at what we put up with here even among those who are
supposedly closest to our views. (I think Kellyism is primarily
motivated by such cowardice and libertarianism even moreseo - they're
safer in that regard.)
Anyway I hope you are not saying that merely because the academic
philosophy establishment rejects Objectivism that that in itself means
Objectivism is wrong. If 40million Frenchman can be wrong, so can 5,000
philosophers, and probably moreso.
Fred Weiss
pape...@my-deja.com
I'm probably in big trouble comes the revolution no matter what. -)
Fred
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-827BEF.2...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <8e73hu$9b8$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > > But you and I know that economics and the economy had not
> fundamentally
> > > changed. Something else was different, very different from the prior
> > > century, namely, the ascendancy of Kant-Hegel-Marx-Pragmatism all
> > > pointing to...socialism.
> >
> > It certainly was an odd coincidence that that philosophical position
> > suddenly became ascendant in 1929.
>
> Not suddenly.
Sorry if I was being too subtle. We have two putative causes for the
change in opinion that led to the New Deal:
1. The Great Depression
2. Kant
I was pointing out that the timing provided considerably more support
for the former than for the latter explanation.
> Also odd that the U.S. version of
> > "socialism"--i.e. dirigiste economic policy--was common practice some
> > centuries before Kant was born.
>
> What does that have to do with anything?
Effects usually come after their causes, not before. Here we have people
making what you and I regard as a mistake. You say the reason they made
that mistake was a particular set of ideas, originating in the 19th
century. I point out that other people were making very much the same
mistake hundreds of years earlier. Ockham's razor then suggests that
your explanation is superfluous.
> > > All pointing to an antipathy toward capitalism.
> >
> > Despite the fact that Kant was strongly favorable towards capitalism?
> > You, of course, know the implications of his philosophy better than
> > he does.
>
> Kant's political views were completely incidental - and totally
> unrelated - to his more fundamental epistemological and ethical views
> (which were totally in conflict with any rational defense of
> capitalism).
I realize that that is your assertion. It apparently hasn't occurred to
you that it is an implausible one--and depends, as I say, on your
assumption that you know the implications of his philosophy better than
he does (or alternatively, as you demonstrate below, on your assumption
that for some reason he lied about his political beliefs--for which you
have no evidence at all). How do you know it? Not, I suspect, from
reading Kant, but because Rand told you that was the implication of his
philosophy.
> In politics he was just mouthing the prevailing
> Enlightenment views. I suppose he didn't want to be perceived as the
> complete monster that he was.
Read that sentence and see if you believe it. If he thought his views
made him a monster, why would he have held them--let alone written many
hundreds of pages explaining and defending them? You are living in a
fantasy.
> > The altruist position would count the welfare of the foreigners too.
> > What you are describing wouldn't be altruism but nationalism.
>
> In any event it has little or nothing to do with self-interest which I
> thought was your original premise.
But it has something to do with your belief that everything has simple
answers. "Nihilism." "Altruism." Has it occurred to you that one of the
attractions of Objectivism is that it lets you feel like an expert on
almost everything without doing the hard intellectual work needed to
actually be an expert on everything?
> > I am pointing out what is implicit in your argument--in this case
> your
> > use of "S.O.B."
>
> I'll stand by it, but the mere fact that he disagrees with me about
> something is not what makes him dishonest. What makes him dishonest is
> the claim that Microsoft is a "special case". This is a guy incapable
> of thinking in principles, completely driven by concrete bound
> pragmatism.
Do you think you could reproduce his argument? If not, how do you know
it comes from being unable to think in principles, or from concrete
bound pragmatism? Do you really think that is the only reason some
people disagree with your conclusions?
What you are doing is treating disagreement as if it were automatically
dishonest. Implicit in that is the idea that your views are not only
correct, they are so obviously correct that no intelligent person could
disagree with them. We have immense evidence to the contrary--as you
have surely noticed, most of the intelligent people in the world
disagree with your views--even most of the ones who have read Rand.
Objectivists are supposed to base their views on the objective facts of
reality--of which that is one.
> > Because the relevant arguments are very much less clear and
> convincing.
>
> Whose to blame for that? The similarities are perfectly clear and
> convincing to me.
Hence it must be true?
A good test of whether you understand a position well enough to be
confident it is wrong is whether you could defend it as well as the
people who believe in it. Do you think you could pass that test in this
case? Do you actually know what the arguments are for even conventional
antitrust action, let alone this particular action?
> > The theory of comparative advantage is no more "philosophical" than
> the
> > Pythagorean theorem. So what is your explanation for it's not being
> > widely believed in and understood? Do you understand it?
>
> It hasn't been presented as a "Pythagorean Theorem",i.e. indisputable
> (and crackpot to oppose).
Sure it has. Economists have been presenting it that way for almost two
hundred years now. In _Hidden Order_, I described the survival of belief
in the theory of absolute advantage and related ideas as the equivalent,
in economics, of people still believing in Ptolemaic astronomy, and
suggested that the usual newspaper stories about "competitiveness" and
the "unfavorable balance of trade" and such were the equivalent of the
New York Times worrying about the Apollo mission running into the
crystal sphere at the orbit of the moon.
> It might be in someone's "interest" to eat
> babies for breakfast, but the whole country would rise up in horror at
> the suggestion. They should do the same at the merest suggestion that
> we should "protect" our industries with tariffs. Isn't that your
> reaction (that it's lunatic)? It's certainly mine.
No. Not only is it not lunatic, it is quite a plausible error, provided
that you don't think through the logic of the situation
carefully--something that (so far as I know) no human being had done
before Ricardo.
> Look, I grant you I've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about
> economics. But on the other hand as you have pointed out at every
> opportunity I am not a professional economist. So how hard can it be?
I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence yet that you understand the
theory of comparative advantage, although it is possible that you do.
All I know is that you agree with the conclusions--which is a very
different thing.
> I wouldn't quite put it that way. Philosophy is more fundamental and
> necessary. It's not a question of being "superior" to economics. And
> economics is also necessary otherwise all the philosophy pertaining to
> it would just be "floating abstractions" and arbitrary assertions.
Philosophy is necessary in one sense and not in another. Let me explain:
Suppose I provide an argument, or even a proof, that capitalism makes
people happy and socialism makes them miserable. A socialist could reply:
"That is all very well, but I think misery is good and happiness is bad,
so that is one more reason for being in favor of socialism."
To refute that, we would need a philosophical argument to show that
happiness was good and misery bad.
But we don't actually need that argument, because neither socialists nor
any significant number of other people are saying that happiness is bad
and misery is good. If you listen to what socialists--more generally,
people who disagree with us about what sort of laws and institutions we
should have--are saying, you discover that very close to 100% of them
imply in their arguments that they are in favor of human happiness (and
health, and ...) and against misery. And the small minority who don't
seem to believe that, most obviously a few hard core environmentalists
who don't much care about humans, still find it necessary to argue that
their peferred policies are good for humans as well as for trees if they
want to persuade any noticeable number of listeners.
As long as the outcomes that almost everyone actually wants are achieved
better by capitalism than by socialism--and they are--we don't need
philosophical arguments about what people ought to want in order to
persuade them that capitalism is better. Economic arguments about what
the consequences of the two systems are will suffice.
> > Are you in the least worried by the fact that almost no academic
> > philosophers have been convinced by Rand? I'm not a big fan of
> academic
> > philosophers, but quite a lot of them are smart people and they spend
> a
> > lot more time reading and thinking about these things than you do.
> Isn't
> > it at all odd, if Rand has conclusive arguments that any rational
> person
> > has to agree with, that almost none of them do?
> Not at all odd - even on your premises. Look at them as a dying and
> decaying American industry using outmoded methods and producing a lousy
> product, trying to protect itself from a bright, new, creative foreign
> invasion. They've got all the "tariff walls" piled high and thick to
> keep it out.
Except that that is pure fantasy--for two reasons.
1. Any individual philosopher is free to convert to Objectivism. And
since academic philosophers like winning arguments, if the arguments for
Objectivism were overwhelmingly better than for the alternatives, lots
of them would. That, after all, is what eventually happened in
economics--academic views changed, because the old views turned out to
be harder to defend than the new ones.
2. If you actually payed attention to what academic philosophers write,
you would notice that they make very little effort to "keep out"
objectivism--for the good reason that they don't regard it as a serious
competitor, any more than they regard Christian fundamentalism as a
serious competitor.
> I'm probably even less of a fan of academicians that you are. It's
> nothing new that they are mostly second-handers terrified of rocking
> the establishment boat in their fields.
I am always struck by the Objectivist use of "second hander." In my
experience, only a tiny fraction of Objectivists are defending ideas to
which they themselves have made any contribution at all. The rest are
simply arguing for ideas that they got from Rand. Doesn't that make them
second handers? Doesn't it make them more "second handers" than leading
academic philosophers, who are defending ideas at least some of which
are their own?
> Look, why do even people who have nothing particularly at stake run
> from Objectivism? It often makes them an outcast among their friends
> and family. Look at what we put up with here even among those who are
> supposedly closest to our views. (I think Kellyism is primarily
> motivated by such cowardice and libertarianism even moreseo - they're
> safer in that regard.)
Which position is more likely to make you seen as an outcast in most
social circles--including most academic ones--Objectivism, which most
people have never heard of, or anarcho-capitalism? Have you just
provided an explanation for why Objectivists are so hostile to the
anarcho-capitalist position--they're all cowards?
"Look at what we put up with here even ... ." I don't think you have
been on this forum long, but if you had you might have noticed that the
orthodox Objectivists are considerably ruder to the reform Objectivists,
and to libertarians, and even more to anarchists, than any of those
groups are to the orthodox Objectivists. I haven't been calling you,
Rand, or Peikoff a nihilist--but Betsy, on no evidence but his being
willing to make fun of Rand, claims that Rothbard was. Or perhaps you
wouldn't have noticed it--because insults directed a people you disagree
with are obviously justified, hence not perceived as insults.
So if your argument were true, it would be an explanation of why people
would be Objectivists instead of objectivists or non-objectivist
libertarians--"look at what we put up with here even ... "
> Anyway I hope you are not saying that merely because the academic
> philosophy establishment rejects Objectivism that that in itself means
> Objectivism is wrong.
Certainly not. The academic economic establishment rejects
anarcho-capitalism too--although it is probably more open to it than
most other academic establishments.
I am saying that the rejection by the academic philosophy establishment
is strong evidence, not that Objectivism is wrong, but that it isn't
obviously right--that if it is right, its rightness depends on arguments
sufficiently difficult so that even intelligent people who want to get
the right answer can miss them. Yet most Objectivists believe it is
right for reasons simple enough that they, with very little knowledge of
philosophy, can know them with certainty, and that anyone who doesn't
accept them, given a reasonable opportunity to do so, must be dishonest.
Consider as evidence your "SOB" quote above.
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-4E9AF1.2...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > To begin with, most prudent rights violators violate rights in legal
> > ways, through government. There is no lie to be hidden, no worry
> > about being caught.
>
> Except the self knowledge that they have obtained the unearned.
But a rational egoist doesn't automatically feel badly about obtaining
the "unearned." He only feels badly about it if obtaining the unearned
is irrational--which is what you are supposed to be demonstrating, so
you can't assume it.
If the prudent predator argument is right, then you ought to feel badly
about not stealing things when you have a really good opportunity to do
so safely--because doing so isn't rationally pursuing your own interest,
which is what you should be doing.
> Also
> whatever gov't giveth it can taketh away - often in ways worse than the
> giving.
But I don't get to decide, all by myself, whether or not we have a
rights respecting government. My efforts to use government to steal some
money from you have a very small effect on how rights respecting the
government is, hence only a very small effect on the chance that it will
steal from me. I could respect rights and still have egovernment steal
from me, or I could fail to respect rights, do a good job of coalition
building and political maneuvering, and not have government steal from
me.
> One example that comes to mind is all the farmers who've been lured to
> stay in farming because of gov't subsidies over the years. Even with
> the subsidies many of them are barely making a go of it. They'd have
> been better off pursuing other careers a long time ago.
Then your complaint is not that they were irrational to support
subsidies--even with the subsidies, they were still free to leave
agriculture if they wanted to. Your complaint is that they were
irrational in their choice of careers.
I should add that I suspect your facts are wrong--that you are being
taken in by the propaganda of the farm lobby, which wants to portray
farmers as victims so as to get them more goodies. But I could be wrong.
> > The rational choice is always better--but you haven't yet shown that
> > rights violation isn't sometimes the rational choice.
>
> It would never be the rational choice - except in "lifeboat situations"
> (let's leave those out).
I hope you notice that you are basing all of this--hence your whole
ethical position--on pure assertion, not argument.
> > The prudent predator isn't "faking reality" for himself--he knows
> what
> > reality is like.
>
> Not really.
Again, if this is an argument, it is a circular one. Presumably you mean
that the nature of reality is such that he cannot benefit by predation,
so he is faking reality by thinking that he can. But that is the
conclusion you are supposed to be proving it, so you can't assume it as
one step of the proof.
So far, you are the one faking reality--because you are confidently
claiming that predation is never prudent and have offered neither
evidence nor arguments for that conclusion. At most, you have shown
reasons why it is sometimes imprudent.
Tim Starr
043CC6.085...@nntp1.ba.best.com>:
That doesn't quite follow. Consider this analogy:
"You say the reason for the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century is
Marxism & the Fascist reaction to it, but totalitarianism was common practice
centuries before in the age of divine-right monarchies which ruled with the
support of the Catholic Church."
In that analogy, the fact that there were previous totalitarian regimes does
not preclude the possibility that Marxism caused the rise of 20th-century
totalitarianism.
I still don't agree that Kantianism had that much of a direct effect on the
rise of statism in the USA, but that's mostly because I can't see the
connection between Kant & Hegel that well.
--
Tim Starr
Stephen Speicher
> In article <8e73hu$9b8$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > But that will require a change in philosophy.
>
> Again you demonstrate my point. Turning it around... if it were true
> that Rand provided conclusive arguments for freedom, arguments so good
> that once all intelligent people had been exposed to them they would all
> support freedom, then indeed philosophy would be superior to economics
> for the purpose. But it isn't true--not even close.
>
As this passage indicates--and as I have often said--David
Friedman is a concrete-bound pragmatist, one who has no grasp of
the meaning of ideas.
David Friedman
<tims...@deja.com> wrote:
> That doesn't quite follow. Consider this analogy:
>
> "You say the reason for the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century
> is
> Marxism & the Fascist reaction to it, but totalitarianism was common
> practice
> centuries before in the age of divine-right monarchies which ruled with
> the
> support of the Catholic Church."
>
> In that analogy, the fact that there were previous totalitarian regimes
> does
> not preclude the possibility that Marxism caused the rise of 20th-century
> totalitarianism.
I don't think the divine right monarchies were totalitarian, although
Sparta may well have been.
The problem is with what you mean by "caused." At one level, one could
say that Hitler "caused" Nazism. At a somewhat deeper level, one could
say that a set of circumstances following from Germany's defeat in WWI
caused it. Or particular ideologies.
But I think the Objectivist claim is a good deal stronger than "what
happened to set off this particular episode of tyranny was that Hegel
provided a plausible excuse for it."
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> Sorry if I was being too subtle. We have two putative causes for the
> change in opinion that led to the New Deal:
>
> 1. The Great Depression
>
> 2. Kant
>
> I was pointing out that the timing provided considerably more support
> for the former than for the latter explanation.
Well, obviously you would pick that one because it's right in front of
your face which is about as far as your thinking seems to go. I'll vote
for the latter, although the reasons are apparently too subtle for you.
The "timing" is irrelevant to the choices people made to deal with it -
which are traceable back to Kant. They used poison instead of a cure.
The poison came from Kant - filtered through a number of followers of
course.
>You say the reason they made
> that mistake was a particular set of ideas, originating in the 19th
> century. I point out that other people were making very much the same
> mistake hundreds of years earlier. Ockham's razor then suggests that
> your explanation is superfluous.
Oh, I see, but what you don't see is that those guys were pikers
compared to Kant. Give the man his due. He was uniquely monstrous - and
influential.
> > Kant's political views were completely incidental - and totally
> > unrelated - to his more fundamental epistemological and ethical
views
> > (which were totally in conflict with any rational defense of
> > capitalism).
>
> I realize that that is your assertion. It apparently hasn't occurred
to
> you that it is an implausible one--and depends, as I say, on your
> assumption that you know the implications of his philosophy better
than
> he does (or alternatively, as you demonstrate below, on your
assumption
> that for some reason he lied about his political beliefs--for which
you
> have no evidence at all). How do you know it? Not, I suspect, from
> reading Kant, but because Rand told you that was the implication of
his
> philosophy.
err..David...what is very clear here is that you're the one who has
never read Kant or maybe you are unaware what this guy argued for. If
you think it is implausible that his politics bears no relationship to
his epistemology and ethics then clearly you know nothing of Kant. For
one thing are you aware that this guy was an advocate of total - I mean
total - self-sacrifice? The guy wanted to eradicate all and every shred
of self-interest from morality.
This guy sent millions of people to the gas chambers and gulags and you
consider it implausible that he merely mouthed Enlightenment politics??
> > In politics he was just mouthing the prevailing
> > Enlightenment views. I suppose he didn't want to be perceived as the
> > complete monster that he was.
>
> Read that sentence and see if you believe it. If he thought his views
> made him a monster, why would he have held them--let alone written
many
> hundreds of pages explaining and defending them? You are living in a
> fantasy.
No, in Kant's case there is no way he couldn't have known what he was
doing anymore than there was no way Hitler didn't know what he was
doing. People can and have chosen evil. There is such a thing as evil
people and there is even such a thing as highly intelligent evil people.
If you think otherwise, it is you who are living in the fantasy not me.
> But it has something to do with your belief that everything has
simple
> answers. "Nihilism." "Altruism." Has it occurred to you that one of
the
> attractions of Objectivism is that it lets you feel like an expert on
> almost everything without doing the hard intellectual work needed to
> actually be an expert on everything?
Is it starting to occur to you that you are losing this argument so you
are resorting to ad hominem?
> Do you think you could reproduce his argument? If not, how do you
know
> it comes from being unable to think in principles, or from concrete
> bound pragmatism? Do you really think that is the only reason some
> people disagree with your conclusions?
You continue to hear "only reason" when I am clearly not saying that.
Why is that?
>
> What you are doing is treating disagreement as if it were
automatically
> dishonest.
Once again.
>Implicit in that is the idea that your views are not only
> correct, they are so obviously correct that no intelligent person
>could
> disagree with them.
And yet again.
>We have immense evidence to the contrary--as you
> have surely noticed, most of the intelligent people in the world
> disagree with your views--even most of the ones who have read Rand.
> Objectivists are supposed to base their views on the objective facts
of
> reality--of which that is one.
And as if that weren't enough, you do it again.
And of course all of this replaces the issue which sparked it, which
you are ignoring, namely this character whom you regarded as reasonable
in seeing Microsoft as a "special case".
What this guy was saying was, "Yes, I generally agree we shouldn't burn
witches, but this one time, I dunno, there's grounds for pulling out
the ol' stakes and getting the matches ready."
> > > Because the relevant arguments are very much less clear and
> > convincing.
> >
> > Whose to blame for that? The similarities are perfectly clear and
> > convincing to me.
>
> Hence it must be true?
I just said that the similarities are perfectly clear and convincing to
me. They're not to you? Businessmen are today's witches.
Are you asking me if it's true. Yes, it's true.
Look the fact that you and your Chicago School hasn't convinced anyone
of that is your problem. You're the one who was crowing about their
accomplishments. So it's no surprise you're prepared to make excuses
for a guy who sees Microsoft as a "special case".
> A good test of whether you understand a position well enough to be
> confident it is wrong is whether you could defend it as well as the
> people who believe in it. Do you think you could pass that test in
this
> case? Do you actually know what the arguments are for even
conventional
> antitrust action, let alone this particular action?
We'll consider this the point at which your patronizing went over the
line. If you want to discuss anti-trust we'll discuss anti-trust. Don't
test me.
> > It hasn't been presented as a "Pythagorean Theorem",i.e.
indisputable
> > (and crackpot to oppose).
>
> Sure it has. Economists have been presenting it that way for almost
two
> hundred years now. In _Hidden Order_, I described the survival of
belief
> in the theory of absolute advantage and related ideas as the
equivalent,
> in economics, of people still believing in Ptolemaic astronomy, and
> suggested that the usual newspaper stories about "competitiveness"
and
> the "unfavorable balance of trade" and such were the equivalent of
the
> New York Times worrying about the Apollo mission running into the
> crystal sphere at the orbit of the moon.
Good for you. Now when your colleagues are ready to do the same - and
loudly and on principle and without any hedging and without reference
to "special cases" maybe we'll get somewhere.
> > It might be in someone's "interest" to eat
> > babies for breakfast, but the whole country would rise up in horror
at
> > the suggestion. They should do the same at the merest suggestion
that
> > we should "protect" our industries with tariffs. Isn't that your
> > reaction (that it's lunatic)? It's certainly mine.
>
> No. Not only is it not lunatic, it is quite a plausible error,
provided
> that you don't think through the logic of the situation
> carefully--something that (so far as I know) no human being had done
> before Ricardo.
Which was over 150 years, so we are back to the same dilemma: why it
hasn't penetrated the culture?
But they haven't sufficed which means that one of your premises is
wrong and actually incredibly naive and uninsightful into human nature.
Did you ever hear this one as a characterization of a great many people:
Which would you prefer - to be comfortable but to have all your
neighbors significantly more successful than you or to be poor but
where all your neighbors were poor, too.
What you leave out of your argument is the presence of envy which
drives a great many people and which socialism feeds on - much moreso
than anyone's desire for genuine happiness. There are also a great many
people who want others to take care of them, who want a guaranteed
existence. Socialism feeds on that too.
In the former communist countries there are a great many people -
fortunately a minority - who want to go back to communism.
Economics in and of itself doesn't deal with that and that is why no
matter how convincing your specifically and exclusively economic
arguments are there are a great many people who will turn a deaf ear to
them.
You're assuming that today's academic philosophers are honest and that
they are actually interested in the truth. I don't.
>
> 2. If you actually payed attention to what academic philosophers
write,
> you would notice that they make very little effort to "keep out"
> objectivism--for the good reason that they don't regard it as a
serious
> competitor, any more than they regard Christian fundamentalism as a
> serious competitor.
Yet. They will. As for keeping out Objectivism, you bet they do in
their hiring practices. But I also wonder how much of a serious
competitor they actually view us, particularly in relation to the minds
of many of their best students - something they can't have failed to
notice over the last few decades.
True, at the moment they are well protected by their thick tenured
walls and guild rules and it won't be easy breaking in. But we will.
It's started.
> I am always struck by the Objectivist use of "second hander." In my
> experience, only a tiny fraction of Objectivists are defending ideas
to
> which they themselves have made any contribution at all. The rest are
> simply arguing for ideas that they got from Rand. Doesn't that make
them
> second handers? Doesn't it make them more "second handers" than
leading
> academic philosophers, who are defending ideas at least some of which
> are their own?
And if we applied this idea to economics what would it amount to.
Consider a businessman who held mixed and conventional views on
economics who then discovers Bastiat and Mises and Hazlitt and others.
He's startled and intrigued to see some of his seemingly settled ideas
radically challenged. Rather then dismiss them because they are
unconventional or his friends would disapprove or he might have some
difficulty at the local Democrat Club where he is a member, he digs in
further, asking questions, checking out what he is learning by looking
at first hand evidence, thinking a great deal about these new ideas.
Finally after some time and considerable thought he is convinced.
Now what is necessary, must he come up with some new laws in economics
for you not to regard him as a second hander because he got his ideas
from other men? He in fact in the method he used is first handed all
the way.
Very few people have the capacity or professional interest to be
original thinkers in academic fields, whether in economics or
philosophy or any other. They may do original work in other fields of
their choosing - or they may do no original work but just do competent
work, but always doing what they see honestly in their own minds as the
best way to do something. Such men are first handers.
What you are describing is pseudo-independence. It is the spectacle of
second rate minds - many of them on this Forum - who concoct their own
trivial disagreements or devote enormous energy to seeking out errors
to assure themselves that they are "independent". The independent mind
doesn't per se seek to be independent and it doesn't pursue
disagreement or seek out errors for its own sake. It seeks the truth.
It seeks the best way to do things. Out of that process may come
something original and new.
> Which position is more likely to make you seen as an outcast in most
> social circles--including most academic ones--Objectivism, which most
> people have never heard of, or anarcho-capitalism? Have you just
> provided an explanation for why Objectivists are so hostile to the
> anarcho-capitalist position--they're all cowards?
Oh, I don't think being an anarcho-capitalist in todays context is at
all radical and is at all likely to generate the kind of hostility
experienced by Objectivists. Besides which, no one could possibly take
you seriously and what they don't take seriously they don't fear.
> I am saying that the rejection by the academic philosophy
establishment
> is strong evidence, not that Objectivism is wrong, but that it isn't
> obviously right--that if it is right, its rightness depends on
arguments
> sufficiently difficult so that even intelligent people who want to
get
> the right answer can miss them.
True.
Yet most Objectivists believe it is
> right for reasons simple enough that they, with very little knowledge
of
> philosophy, can know them with certainty, and that anyone who doesn't
> accept them, given a reasonable opportunity to do so, must be
dishonest.
I don't believe that "most" Objectivists would hold such a view.
> Consider as evidence your "SOB" quote above.
That wasn't an example of what you've been saying. This was an example
of someone saying that while he's generally against lynching negoes,
this negro needs lynching. If you consider that an example of someone
actually against lynching negroes, you go on thinking it. But don't
expect me to tell you he's anything but an SOB and maybe worse than the
ones who don't hide their position.
Fred
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-043CC6.0...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> err..David...what is very clear here is that you're the one who has
> never read Kant or maybe you are unaware what this guy argued for. If
> you think it is implausible that his politics bears no relationship to
> his epistemology and ethics then clearly you know nothing of Kant. For
> one thing are you aware that this guy was an advocate of total - I mean
> total - self-sacrifice? The guy wanted to eradicate all and every shred
> of self-interest from morality.
Actually I have read Kant, but long enough ago so that I don't consider
myself competent to argue either side of that case. But I have also
watched threads on the subject here, involving people who were familiar
with his ideas, from which it looked to me as though the Objectivist
interpretation of Kant which you are repeating is a wildly inaccurate
account of what he actually said.
> This guy sent millions of people to the gas chambers and gulags and you
> consider it implausible that he merely mouthed Enlightenment politics??
He didn't send anyone to the gas chambers. Your claim is that his ideas
resulted in other people doing so--but since you haven't justified that
claim, I don't see why I should take your conclusion as evidence.
> > But it has something to do with your belief that everything has
> simple
> > answers. "Nihilism." "Altruism." Has it occurred to you that one of
> the
> > attractions of Objectivism is that it lets you feel like an expert on
> > almost everything without doing the hard intellectual work needed to
> > actually be an expert on everything?
> Is it starting to occur to you that you are losing this argument so you
> are resorting to ad hominem?
No.
I am trying, probably unsuccessfully, to get you to think about the
possibility that your view of the world is seriously in error in a
particular way. In order for it to be an ad hominem, I would have to say
that we knew your conclusions were wrong because we knew you had a
simplistic view of the world. But what I am actually doing is showing
that your conclusions depend on a simplistic (and mistaken) view, and
deducing that you hold one.
> > Do you think you could reproduce his argument? If not, how do you
> know
> > it comes from being unable to think in principles, or from concrete
> > bound pragmatism? Do you really think that is the only reason some
> > people disagree with your conclusions?
>
> You continue to hear "only reason" when I am clearly not saying that.
> Why is that?
Because it is necessary to your conclusion. Of course, you could add one
more reason--because they are evil. But in that case they would agree
with your (factual) conclusions and disagree only with the actions you
thought followed from them.
> And of course all of this replaces the issue which sparked it, which
> you are ignoring, namely this character whom you regarded as reasonable
> in seeing Microsoft as a "special case".
>
> What this guy was saying was, "Yes, I generally agree we shouldn't burn
> witches, but this one time, I dunno, there's grounds for pulling out
> the ol' stakes and getting the matches ready."
In order for you to justify that statement, you have to already know
that what he is proposing is equivalent to burning witches. But to know
that, you have to understand his arguments for doing it--and so far as I
can tell, you have no idea what those arguments are.
Otherwise you might be in the same position as someone who argues
against an inocculation on the grounds that we already know it is wrong
to attack innocent children with sharp objects.
> > A good test of whether you understand a position well enough to be
> > confident it is wrong is whether you could defend it as well as the
> > people who believe in it. Do you think you could pass that test in
> this
> > case? Do you actually know what the arguments are for even
> conventional
> > antitrust action, let alone this particular action?
>
> We'll consider this the point at which your patronizing went over the
> line. If you want to discuss anti-trust we'll discuss anti-trust. Don't
> test me.
I'm not testing you. I am asking you a question--which you haven't
answered. Do you think you can reproduce his arguments?
> Good for you. Now when your colleagues are ready to do the same - and
> loudly and on principle and without any hedging and without reference
> to "special cases" maybe we'll get somewhere.
You are confusing the explanation of comparative advantage with the
argument against tariffs. I can't give the argument against tariffs
without qualification because it isn't true, and I have moral objections
to lying to people.
> Which was over 150 years, so we are back to the same dilemma: why it
> hasn't penetrated the culture?
Lots of things haven't--very few people understand relativity, or
quantum mechanics, or Maxwell's equations, or many other things--because
understanding those things is not very useful to those people.
Since you are accusing me of being patronizing ... . I have no reason
to believe that you understand comparative advantage. All I know is that
you agree with the conclusion. The general tone of your argument
suggests that if you were providing an economic defense of free markets,
it would be a very simplified one that any competent economist could
tear to bits. That explains why you object to other people "qualifying"
their arguments--because you don't realize what qualifications are
necessary in order not to say things that aren't true.
... (my explanation of why proving the positive half of the argument
suffices, without a need for changing people's philosophy)...
> But they haven't sufficed which means that one of your premises is
> wrong and actually incredibly naive and uninsightful into human nature.
Not at all. As I thought I had made clear, I think the positive half of
the argument is much harder than you do. Further, I believe that people
go to the trouble of understanding hard ideas only when they have a good
reason to do so. Hence it is not surprising that many people do not
understand the consequences of the alternative institutions.
> Did you ever hear this one as a characterization of a great many people:
> Which would you prefer - to be comfortable but to have all your
> neighbors significantly more successful than you or to be poor but
> where all your neighbors were poor, too.
We have some empirical evidence on that question. People migrate to the
U.S. in great numbers and despite great difficulty, and have been doing
so for a long time. Most of them know that their relative position will
be worse in the U.S., where they will be poor and other people not poor,
than at home, where almost everyone was poor. Yet they still come. That
suggests that (at least) very large numbers of people prefer to be
absolutely much better off even at the cost of being relatively somewhat
worse off.
If you were right, we would observe far more reverse migration--there
are lots of places where Americans can be relatively rich at the cost of
being absolutely poor.
> In the former communist countries there are a great many people -
> fortunately a minority - who want to go back to communism.
But they have not yet had the chance to experience a functioning
capitalist system, so are in a poor position to judge accurately between
them.
> You're assuming that today's academic philosophers are honest and that
> they are actually interested in the truth. I don't.
I assume that many of them are. The fact that you have to assume that
almost none of them are in order to maintain your position strikes me as
evidence against that position.
> > Which position is more likely to make you seen as an outcast in most
> > social circles--including most academic ones--Objectivism, which most
> > people have never heard of, or anarcho-capitalism? Have you just
> > provided an explanation for why Objectivists are so hostile to the
> > anarcho-capitalist position--they're all cowards?
>
> Oh, I don't think being an anarcho-capitalist in todays context is at
> all radical and is at all likely to generate the kind of hostility
> experienced by Objectivists.
You have a bizarre view of the current intellectual context.
> Besides which, no one could possibly take
> you seriously and what they don't take seriously they don't fear.
How many scholarly journals have published your articles? Which leading
figures in your field disagree with you but say complementary things
about your books? Which foreign countries do you get invited to travel
to and give lectures? How many Nobel prize winners have written reviews
of your books, arguing with your radical notions? Introductions for
them?
Or, to be fair, since you are not (I presume) a professional academic,
ask the same question with regard to Objectivists who are.
So far as I can tell, while my views do not indeed command the assent of
very many of my colleagues, they are taken a good deal more seriously by
economists than Objectivist views are by philosphers. You can, for
instance, find Judge Posner's view of my latest book on Amazon.com.
> > Consider as evidence your "SOB" quote above.
>
> That wasn't an example of what you've been saying. This was an example
> of someone saying that while he's generally against lynching negoes,
> this negro needs lynching. If you consider that an example of someone
> actually against lynching negroes, you go on thinking it. But don't
> expect me to tell you he's anything but an SOB and maybe worse than the
> ones who don't hide their position.
But you can only convert his statement into that form if you assume that
he, of course, agrees with you that antitrust action against Microsoft
is the equivalent of lynching negroes or burning witches. But he doesn't
agree about that. So you need the assumption that your views are so
obviously true that he must really agree with them, even if he says he
doesn't.
David Schwartz
Anthony Argyriou wrote:
> That depends. If one agency has bribed the judge to generally favor that
> agency in "marginal" cases, then it remains in the agency's interest to use
> that judge until the dishonesty is detected.
Not if you consider how great the cost would be when the dishonesty is
detected. In any event, this problem is at least as serious as it would
be if the judges were employed by the government, since there would only
be a single system.
DS
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
>But I have also
> watched threads on the subject here, involving people who were
familiar
> with his ideas, from which it looked to me as though the Objectivist
> interpretation of Kant which you are repeating is a wildly inaccurate
> account of what he actually said.
I am truly speechless. And you call Objectivists second-handers!!!
Admittedly wading through Kant is a chore beyond belief and shouldn't
be undertaken unless you have a gun to your head or the hope of a
passing grade in your future. However, you can find good, brief
summaries of Kant's views in any decent history of philosophy such as
Jones or Windelband.
>
> > This guy sent millions of people to the gas chambers and gulags and
you
> > consider it implausible that he merely mouthed Enlightenment
politics??
>
> He didn't send anyone to the gas chambers. Your claim is that his
ideas
> resulted in other people doing so--but since you haven't justified
that
> claim, I don't see why I should take your conclusion as evidence.
I assume you have no trouble seeing the link with Marx. Where did Marx
get his basic philosophy from? From Hegel. Where did Hegel get his
from? From Kant.
Read Peikoff's, Ominous Parallels.
(I don't generally like the "read this" as an argument in Forums cuz
it's usually a cop-out, but in this case after all it is a Forum on
Objectivism and there's a certain responsibility of the participants to
be familiar with at least the basic corpus and issues being discussed.
So I'd have to say that you haven't been reading your assignments and
we'll have to give you a failing grade unless you shape up.
If this were a forum on anarchism and I was spouting off the way you
do, I think you'd expect me to have some familiarity with the basic
writings, right?)
> > Is it starting to occur to you that you are losing this argument so
you
> > are resorting to ad hominem?
>
> No.
>
> I am trying, probably unsuccessfully, to get you to think about the
> possibility that your view of the world is seriously in error in a
> particular way. In order for it to be an ad hominem, I would have to
say
> that we knew your conclusions were wrong because we knew you had a
> simplistic view of the world. But what I am actually doing is showing
> that your conclusions depend on a simplistic (and mistaken) view, and
> deducing that you hold one.
Oh, ok, then you're begging the question.
> > And of course all of this replaces the issue which sparked it, which
> > you are ignoring, namely this character whom you regarded as
reasonable
> > in seeing Microsoft as a "special case".
> >
> > What this guy was saying was, "Yes, I generally agree we shouldn't
burn
> > witches, but this one time, I dunno, there's grounds for pulling out
> > the ol' stakes and getting the matches ready."
>
> In order for you to justify that statement, you have to already know
> that what he is proposing is equivalent to burning witches.
Do you think...you...not this other character...that the Microsoft anti-
trust is anything but a witch burning? Actually the way it's going it
looks like it may end up as a dismemberment.
>But to know
> that, you have to understand his arguments for doing it--and so far
as I
> can tell, you have no idea what those arguments are.
What arguments are there for burning witches? (Btw I've heard the
arguments for why Microsoft is supposedly a "special case". They're
crap. I assume you agree. Unless, my god, you agree with this guy and
support the anti-trust suit. Do you?)
> > We'll consider this the point at which your patronizing went over
the
> > line. If you want to discuss anti-trust we'll discuss anti-trust.
Don't
> > test me.
>
> I'm not testing you. I am asking you a question--which you haven't
> answered. Do you think you can reproduce his arguments?
I think I've heard them all. Which particular one he has doesn't really
matter to the point at issue. I'm against witch burning. I'm against
anti-trust on any grounds. As much as you love qualifications, no
qualifications are necessary here. Do you think there are or should or
can be?
> Since you are accusing me of being patronizing ... . I have no
reason
> to believe that you understand comparative advantage. All I know is
that
> you agree with the conclusion. The general tone of your argument
> suggests that if you were providing an economic defense of free
markets,
> it would be a very simplified one that any competent economist could
> tear to bits.
Possibly, I'm not a professional economist. What's your point, if you
have a point, other than to wave your credentials in our faces once
again?
>That explains why you object to other people "qualifying"
> their arguments--because you don't realize what qualifications are
> necessary in order not to say things that aren't true.
This is you overgeneralizing again and attributing things to me I never
said. I have no objection to people qualifying their arguments - and I
do that myself - if there are legitimate reasons to do it.
> We have some empirical evidence on that question. People migrate to
the
> U.S. in great numbers and despite great difficulty, and have been
doing
> so for a long time. Most of them know that their relative position
will
> be worse in the U.S., where they will be poor and other people not
poor,
> than at home, where almost everyone was poor. Yet they still come.
That
> suggests that (at least) very large numbers of people prefer to be
> absolutely much better off even at the cost of being relatively
somewhat
> worse off.
>
> If you were right, we would observe far more reverse migration--there
> are lots of places where Americans can be relatively rich at the cost
of
> being absolutely poor.
All of which is true and utterly beside the point. I wasn't
characterizing all people. You were claiming that people could be
convinced by economic arguments alone and I said that many couldn't be.
For these people, the fact that everyone would be better off under
capitalism is unimportant to them if some are better off than others.
> > You're assuming that today's academic philosophers are honest and
that
> > they are actually interested in the truth. I don't.
>
> I assume that many of them are. The fact that you have to assume that
> almost none of them are in order to maintain your position strikes me
as
> evidence against that position.
Well, you are assuming wrong and all you have to do is look at what
they are spouting these days. Even you might be nauseated.
Well, maybe not. But that wouldn't change the facts of the case.
> > Besides which, no one could possibly take
> > you seriously and what they don't take seriously they don't fear.
>
> How many scholarly journals have published your articles? Which
leading
> figures in your field disagree with you but say complementary things
> about your books? Which foreign countries do you get invited to
travel
> to and give lectures? How many Nobel prize winners have written
reviews
> of your books, arguing with your radical notions? Introductions for
> them?
>
> Or, to be fair, since you are not (I presume) a professional
academic,
> ask the same question with regard to Objectivists who are.
>
> So far as I can tell, while my views do not indeed command the assent
of
> very many of my colleagues, they are taken a good deal more seriously
by
> economists than Objectivist views are by philosphers. You can, for
> instance, find Judge Posner's view of my latest book on Amazon.com.
We're flattered that you grace us with your presence, David.
> But you can only convert his statement into that form if you assume
that
> he, of course, agrees with you that antitrust action against
Microsoft
> is the equivalent of lynching negroes or burning witches. But he
doesn't
> agree about that. So you need the assumption that your views are so
> obviously true that he must really agree with them, even if he says
he
> doesn't.
Not many people will admit that anti-trust is the equivalent of burning
witches, which doesn't mean it isn't the equivalent.
For all your journal articles and Nobel Prize winning pals, you can't
think in principles, David. That's why all that stuff doesn't impress
me.
Fred Weiss
Stephen Speicher
> In article <ddfr-4FF7DE.1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> > The general tone of your argument suggests that if you were
> > providing an economic defense of free markets, it would be a
> > very simplified one that any competent economist could tear
> > to bits.
>
> Possibly, I'm not a professional economist. What's your point,
> if you have a point, other than to wave your credentials in our
> faces once again?
>
Credentials???? You've got to be kidding!
Friedman has a PhD in _physics_, and he works as a professor of
law at Santa Clara University. His only 'credentials' in the
field is that his father was an economist.
Friedman once made a post on his 'credentialed' subject
--physics-- and failed to respond to my critique of his
embarassing post. As with much of what he says, Friedman simply
does not know what he is talking about.
Now, personally, I have very little concern about credentials,
but still, don't be fooled by Friedman's bluster and puffery.
pape...@my-deja.com
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
I posted a response to this last night and it seems to have gotten lost
in the ether. Right now I don't have the time or patience to repost.
Maybe I'll pick it up later or we can resume it some other time.
For now, I'll give you a very generalized response. The prudent
predator argument is answered by The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
by Keating vs. Roark and by Dagny vs. James Taggart.
The argument also shows a startling uninsightful and incorrect view of
human psychology. It is not possible to make exceptions to basic
principles without corrupting your mind (Roark vs. Keating being my
answer to this). You can't be on a premise of being honest this week
and a liar next week. You end up a liar, period. It's the same
principle of bad money driving out good.
I think any rational psychologist would agree with me, but whether they
do or not, the facts are the same. As a matter of personal experience,
I have found that people who live their lives in accordance with
unbreached principle are happier and better people. If there were more
of them in the world, it would be an immeasurably better place.
One other thing: the people who come up with arguments like the prudent
predator (as apart from students trying to learn) are like your guy who
came up with Microsoft being an exception to anti-trust. It is not a
search for rational exceptions or qualifications. It indicates a
fundamental opposition to rationality in principle and of opposition to
principles in general.
Fred
Phil Oliver
has more value in answering the "issue" of the "prudent predator"
than thousands of off-target, concrete bound, scatterbrained posts.
Phil Oliver
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> For now, I'll give you a very generalized response. The prudent
> predator argument is answered by The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
> by Keating vs. Roark and by Dagny vs. James Taggart.
My generalized reply is that it would be better if you had an argument to
refer to, rather than a work of fiction, however interesting it might be.
> The argument also shows a startling uninsightful and incorrect view of
> human psychology. It is not possible to make exceptions to basic
> principles without corrupting your mind (Roark vs. Keating being my
> answer to this).
The prudent predator does not make an exception to his basic principle -
he acts in his own interest.
> You can't be on a premise of being honest this week
> and a liar next week. You end up a liar, period. It's the same
> principle of bad money driving out good.
Metaphor is no better than the fiction you have already referenced.
> I think any rational psychologist would agree with me, but whether they
BTW, part of the argument here is over what "rational" means.
> do or not, the facts are the same. As a matter of personal experience,
> I have found that people who live their lives in accordance with
> unbreached principle are happier and better people. If there were more
> of them in the world, it would be an immeasurably better place.
So your argument is that a person should not be a prudent predator
because doing so will make him unhappy (or less happy than he could be),
not because it would violate the rights of others. Aside from this being
a strangely unsatisfying argument for rights, a person could claim that,
as a matter of person experience, he is happier as a predator. So you
are welcome to respect rights according to your judgment, and he is free
to disregard them according his. What sort of rights are these?
__
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
pape...@my-deja.com
gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> In article <8ebp3c$e7l$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, pape...@my-deja.com
writes...
> ...
> > For now, I'll give you a very generalized response. The prudent
> > predator argument is answered by The Fountainhead and Atlas
Shrugged,
> > by Keating vs. Roark and by Dagny vs. James Taggart.
>
> My generalized reply is that it would be better if you had an
argument to
> refer to, rather than a work of fiction, however interesting it might
be.
The argument is in the works of fiction via actual examples. Keating
and Taggart represent examples of the prudent predator. Roark and Dagny
represent rational egoists. What are we talking about here except the
proper way for people to live? Who represents the proper way to live:
Roark, the rational egoist, or Keating,the prudent predator?
One of the key elements in the plot of The Fountainhead is the numerous
occasions when Roark faces the prudent predator situation - if not in
actually violating anyone's rights, then in betraying his long range
principles and values for short term gain (which is the same issue in
principle).
> > The argument also shows a startling uninsightful and incorrect view
of
> > human psychology. It is not possible to make exceptions to basic
> > principles without corrupting your mind (Roark vs. Keating being my
> > answer to this).
>
> The prudent predator does not make an exception to his basic
principle -
> he acts in his own interest.
You're begging the question.
> > You can't be on a premise of being honest this week
> > and a liar next week. You end up a liar, period. It's the same
> > principle of bad money driving out good.
>
> Metaphor is no better than the fiction you have already referenced.
Except that it's true.
> > I think any rational psychologist would agree with me, but whether
they
>
> BTW, part of the argument here is over what "rational" means.
Does it include in your view thinking long term rather than merely what
you think you might "get away with" today?
> So your argument is that a person should not be a prudent predator
> because doing so will make him unhappy (or less happy than he could
be),
> not because it would violate the rights of others.
No, my argument is that violating the rights of others will have
negative consequences which would certainly include making you unhappy.
It could also get you into jail, physically injured, even killed. There
is no way to violate the rights of others with impunity unless you are
lucky and a rational man doesn't count on luck. It actually wouldn't
even enter his mind because his long term policy is to produce and
never to seek the unearned - on principle. He never makes exceptions.
Aside from this being
> a strangely unsatisfying argument for rights, a person could claim
that,
> as a matter of person experience, he is happier as a predator.
It's impossible and he's wrong. It flies in the face of reality.
So you
> are welcome to respect rights according to your judgment, and he is
free
> to disregard them according his. What sort of rights are these?
None. The derivation of rights comes for what is necessary for a proper
human life. If the prudent predator argument is correct, rights go out
the window. There is in fact no conflict here. The rational egoist
would have no interest in being a predator, "prudent" or otherwise.
Fred Weiss
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> The argument is in the works of fiction via actual examples. Keating
> and Taggart represent examples of the prudent predator. Roark and Dagny
There is a clear contradiction here between "actual" and "represent".
The author was too clever to represent an error in her philosophical
argument in her fiction.
...
> One of the key elements in the plot of The Fountainhead is the numerous
> occasions when Roark faces the prudent predator situation - if not in
> actually violating anyone's rights, then in betraying his long range
> principles and values for short term gain (which is the same issue in
> principle).
It is simply a mistake to claim that the prudent predator must have a
short-range view. He can make a mistake, of course, about what is in his
long-term interest, but so can a non-predator.
...
> > The prudent predator does not make an exception to his basic
> principle -
> > he acts in his own interest.
>
> You're begging the question.
I am simply telling you what his principle is. You are implicitly
asserting that principles must have a certain character - which
presumably rules out the prudent predator's "principle". Now is the time
for you to make your argument.
...
> > BTW, part of the argument here is over what "rational" means.
>
> Does it include in your view thinking long term rather than merely what
> you think you might "get away with" today?
Of course.
> > So your argument is that a person should not be a prudent predator
> > because doing so will make him unhappy (or less happy than he could
> be),
> > not because it would violate the rights of others.
>
> No, my argument is that violating the rights of others will have
> negative consequences which would certainly include making you unhappy.
But what is the /reason/ that rights ought not be violated? The
implication of your argument is that it is the violator's unhappiness
that is the reason.
> It could also get you into jail, physically injured, even killed. There
> is no way to violate the rights of others with impunity unless you are
> lucky and a rational man doesn't count on luck.
The rights of billions of people are violated every day. Some of those
who have done the violating have already died, after living happy,
contented lives; others have every expectation of doing so. Many
examples have been given here in the past Prudent Predator threads, e.g.,
slave owners in the Old South.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
pape...@my-deja.com
gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> In article <8efoh9$m8h$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, pape...@my-deja.com
writes...
> ...
> > The argument is in the works of fiction via actual examples. Keating
> > and Taggart represent examples of the prudent predator. Roark and
Dagny
>
> There is a clear contradiction here between "actual"
and "represent".
> The author was too clever to represent an error in her philosophical
> argument in her fiction.
I'm not interested in playing word games. If you are, our discussion
will end very quickly.
That you dismissed The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with a scornful
wave of the hand is revealing as to which side of the argument you are
on because those two books precisely address this very issue. They are
an argument for the issue at hand. If you had read and understood those
two books, it wouldn't cross your mind to be arguing for the absurdity
of the alleged happiness and contentment of dictators and criminals
> > One of the key elements in the plot of The Fountainhead is the
numerous
> > occasions when Roark faces the prudent predator situation - if not
in
> > actually violating anyone's rights, then in betraying his long range
> > principles and values for short term gain (which is the same issue
in
> > principle).
>
> It is simply a mistake to claim that the prudent predator must have a
> short-range view. He can make a mistake, of course, about what is in
his
> long-term interest, but so can a non-predator.
But the prudent predator is inherently a mistake on the long term view.
It collapses on a long term view. If it doesn't work on the basis
of "what can I get away with today (and, allegedly, only today)", it
sure as hell doesn't work when that's your long term policy.
> > > The prudent predator does not make an exception to his basic
> > principle -
> > > he acts in his own interest.
> >
> > You're begging the question.
>
> I am simply telling you what his principle is. You are implicitly
> asserting that principles must have a certain character - which
> presumably rules out the prudent predator's "principle". Now is the
time
> for you to make your argument.
There is no "principle" involved in prudent predation. It is by it's
very nature anti-principle. It would be like someone being on the
premise of it being rational to be anti-rational. The prudent predator
wants to have his alleged principles while eating them, too. Sorry it's
a stolen concept. Like "property is theft".
> > > BTW, part of the argument here is over what "rational" means.
> >
> > Does it include in your view thinking long term rather than merely
what
> > you think you might "get away with" today?
>
> Of course.
Then prudent predation is dead in the water. It can never be in
anyone's long term interest.
(I am assuming we are discussing the context of at least a relatively
rational and free society. How one manages to survive in an irrational
culture is another matter entirely.)
>
> > > So your argument is that a person should not be a prudent predator
> > > because doing so will make him unhappy (or less happy than he
could
> > be),
> > > not because it would violate the rights of others.
> >
> > No, my argument is that violating the rights of others will have
> > negative consequences which would certainly include making you
unhappy.
>
> But what is the /reason/ that rights ought not be violated? The
> implication of your argument is that it is the violator's unhappiness
> that is the reason.
It's part of it.
>
> > It could also get you into jail, physically injured, even killed.
There
> > is no way to violate the rights of others with impunity unless you
are
> > lucky and a rational man doesn't count on luck.
>
> The rights of billions of people are violated every day. Some of
those
> who have done the violating have already died, after living happy,
> contented lives; others have every expectation of doing so.
If you are referring to dictators and such, your view of such people is
badly mistaken. There is no such thing as a happy, contented killer. In
fact the very fact that they kill is an indication of their inner dread
and misery, in fact it is an expression of their self-loathing. Why do
they need and seek power over men? They do not believe that they can
deal with them as equals, they fear them and doubt themselves.
Happy and contented?
Furthermore, should a man ever obtain such power, his immediate step
should be to attempt to establish a free society, along the lines of
Hazlitt's "Time Will Run Back".
Many
> examples have been given here in the past Prudent Predator threads,
e.g.,
> slave owners in the Old South.
I'm not going to get into an endless series of e.g's. That you are
arguing for this position - which is fundamentally a rejection of
principle - is an indication that you are incapable of thinking in
principle.
Seeking power over other men is not rational. That encompasses all the
dictators, all the brutes, all the criminals, etc,etc.
All the e.g's you can come up with.
What is in man's interest, both individually and culturally, is
production and trade in a free society, not predation, not once, not
twice, not part of a policy, not short term, and certainly not long
term. Inherent in production and trade in a free society is honesty and
integrity - not just for today or for this week or only when you think
you would otherwise be caught - but as a principle of life over the
course of your whole life, such that when a supposed opportunity
presents itself to "get away with something" you reject it out of hand
as inconsistent with the principles of your life and the kind of
society that promotes and protects such a life.
The kind of contemptable scum that think otherwise pursue such a course
because they are incapable of pursuing rational values. But in its
nature it is not based on happiness or contentment or its pursuit, it
is based on fear and hatred of the good and of the rational. Their true
goal is destruction, all their protestations to the contrary
nothwithstanding.
Stephen Speicher
> In article <MPG.13754535db...@mail.nji.com>,
> gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> Many
> > examples have been given here in the past Prudent Predator threads,
> e.g.,
> > slave owners in the Old South.
>
> I'm not going to get into an endless series of e.g's. That you are
> arguing for this position - which is fundamentally a rejection of
> principle - is an indication that you are incapable of thinking in
> principle.
>
I'm impressed, Fred. It took me three posts to reach this
conclusion about Sollars, and you did it in two!
Congratulations.
John Fast
David Friedman <dd...@best.com> wrote:
> Or perhaps you would prefer Leo Rosten's story. He was a writer (_Joys
> of Yiddish_, _The Education of Hyman Kaplan_, etc.) who had been a
> friend of some of the Chicago people in Grad School at Chicago, and
knew
> their views. At one point, he asked one of the (not Chicago--I think
> MIT) economists what economists thought about minimum wage laws, and
got
> the right answer--that they tend to create unemployment of low skilled
> workers by pricing them out of the market. He asked the economist if
> that view was widely held in the profession, and was told it was. He
> then pointed out that it wasn't what everyone else thought economists
> believed, and asked why they didn't make some kind of public
statement.
> Answer (according to Leo):
>
> "I suppose we're afraid we would sound as if we agreed with Milton
> Friedman."
That could mean:
"We're afraid to sound like we agree with Milton Friedman, because
we'll be unpopular with the public/politicians"; or
"We're afraid to admit Milton Friedman is right on this issue,
because people will mistakenly think he's right about other things"; or
"We're afraid to explain we agree with Milton Friedman about
minimum wage laws causing unemployment and hurting unskilled workers,
because we support minimum wage laws anyway."
I understand that the vast majority of economists oppose minimum-wage
laws. OTOH, there are plenty of economists who are Democrats, like
Kuttner, Thurow, and Blinder. My question is whether the economists
who are Democrats oppose minimum-wage laws (like Blinder), or whether
they think minimum-wage laws don't cause unemployment (which is
apparently Kuttner's position), or whether they support them even
though they realize they cause unemployment.
--
John Fast
<cal...@gate.net>
"Raise consciousness, not taxes."
pape...@my-deja.com
100...@photon.compbio.caltech.edu>,
Stephen Speicher <s...@compbio.caltech.edu> wrote:
> I'm impressed, Fred. It took me three posts to reach this
> conclusion about Sollars, and you did it in two!
>
> Congratulations.
If you figure Sollars is David Friedman's soulmate, I had a previous
warm-up. -)
They are both anti-conceptual mind destroyers. They are like a roaming
pack of wolves, taking pleasure in looking for weaker Objectivists to
tear to shreds.
Can you imagine these two guys at the Constitutional Convention,
arguing say over the free speech protections. "Don't we want to qualify
it in this way or that way or how about that 12th century community in
Greenland I read about which tried it this way and do we really want to
make it a blanket protection which sounds suspiciously like dogmatic
absolutism, etc,etc, ad nauseum." By the time they were done, there
either would not have been a Constitution or it would have been 5x as
long and half as effective - except for the fact that the Founding
Fathers would have wiped the floor with them and thrown them out the
door.
Fred
mham4...@aol.com
pape...@my-deja.com wrote:
> Can you imagine these two guys at the Constitutional Convention,
> arguing say over the free speech protections. "Don't we want to
qualify
> it in this way or that way or how about that 12th century community in
> Greenland I read about which tried it this way and do we really want
to
> make it a blanket protection which sounds suspiciously like dogmatic
> absolutism, etc,etc, ad nauseum." By the time they were done, there
> either would not have been a Constitution or it would have been 5x as
> long and half as effective - except for the fact that the Founding
> Fathers would have wiped the floor with them and thrown them out the
> door.
I think you may be confusing policy with theory. Certainly we can come
up with examples, exceptions as you say, in which free speech might not
lead to pleasing results. But as a matter of policy, it is obviously
(obvious to us, anyway) not a good idea to let governments decide when
free speech is good and when it is bad.
Similarly, I think that David Friedman would agree that, while we can
find theoretical, or even real world cases, where monopolies are bad
and persist, or where non-zero tariffs might be efficient, giving the
government power to do something about this would be a mistake. It
would be dishonest to say that there is no theoretical justification
for saying tariffs can be good. It would not be dishonest to say that
it is a bad idea to allow government to choose when to have tariffs and
when not to.
Of course, one might also say that I'm simply beating one type of
theory--trade theory, in the case of tariffs--with another theory, that
of Public Choice Economics. I'm okay with that.
I don't think the writers of the Constitution thought that freedom
would always and everywhere lead to perfection; they simply knew that
the practical alternative was very unpleasant.
After all, if David Friedman really thought that government should do
something about Microsoft, or have tariffs, or whatever government
intervention you suggest, he wouldn't be much of an anarcho-capitalist,
would he?
Mike Hammock
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> I'm not interested in playing word games. If you are, our discussion
> will end very quickly.
You described a work of fiction as containing "actual examples". Just
admit your hyperbole and move on.
> That you dismissed The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with a scornful
> wave of the hand is revealing as to which side of the argument you are
> on because those two books precisely address this very issue.
I do not dismiss these works in general, scornfully or otherwise, but I
do dismiss them as providing any real evidence for your position. An
author can write fiction that says anything she likes.
BTW, you are simply recapitulating the same mistakes from the old
threads. I am not on the "side" of the prudent predator; I reject
prudent predation. The question is "Why does a student of Objectivism
reject it?" Just to be completely clear, we all know that students of
Objectivism /do/ reject it. What they have yet to provide is a reason
based upon Rand's rational egoism.
...
> But the prudent predator is inherently a mistake on the long term view.
> It collapses on a long term view.
And your argument for this conclusion is?
...
> I am simply telling you what his principle is. You are implicitly
> > asserting that principles must have a certain character - which
> > presumably rules out the prudent predator's "principle". Now is the
> time
> > for you to make your argument.
>
> There is no "principle" involved in prudent predation. It is by it's
> very nature anti-principle. It would be like someone being on the
> premise of it being rational to be anti-rational.
Why? The principle of the prudent predator is "I will always act in my
rational self-interest". As I said last time:
You are implicitly
asserting that principles must have a certain character - which
presumably rules out the prudent predator's "principle".
...
> > > Does it include in your view thinking long term rather than merely
> what
> > > you think you might "get away with" today?
> >
> > Of course.
>
> Then prudent predation is dead in the water. It can never be in
> anyone's long term interest.
Mere assertion is not an argument. Look, I have read The Fountainhead
and Atlas Shrugged. If you have no argument to give beyond what is
contained there, then just say so, and we can close this out.
> (I am assuming we are discussing the context of at least a relatively
> rational and free society. How one manages to survive in an irrational
> culture is another matter entirely.)
Now this is interesting in two ways. First, don't people have rights
even in irrational cultures? And, second, are you implying that in an
irrational culture prudent predation can be in a person's rational
interest?
...
> > But what is the /reason/ that rights ought not be violated? The
> > implication of your argument is that it is the violator's unhappiness
> > that is the reason.
>
> It's part of it.
And the other part is?
...
> If you are referring to dictators and such, your view of such people is
> badly mistaken. There is no such thing as a happy, contented killer.
So you believe that every slave owner in the Old South felt miserable?
Just a remarkable claim needs some evidence beyond to novels.
But even if they were all miserable, your claim seems to be that they
only ought to have respected the rights of others in order to be happy
and contented themselves.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
Gordon G. Sollars
100...@photon.compbio.caltech.edu>, Stephen Speicher writes......
> > I'm not going to get into an endless series of e.g's. That you are
> > arguing for this position - which is fundamentally a rejection of
> > principle - is an indication that you are incapable of thinking in
> > principle.
> >
>
> conclusion about Sollars, and you did it in two!
The "context doctrine" is sufficient in itself to seal students of
Objectivism off from reality; you really don't need to add any strange
notions of "principle" to the mix.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com