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Unlearning posted:The NAP is pretty easy to take down. Quite clearly, property rights involve 'initiating violence' against somebody. Libertarians only get round this by stretching the word 'violence' until it's lost all meaning. Asking a libertarian to define "ownership" and "property" can be pretty hilarious. A lot of them take it as a priori that objects or land are things which can be owned. If you start asking them what it means to "own" something or where "ownership" comes from they have a real hard time defending it. It's kind of low hanging fruit, though. Most of them have never thought about it for more than 2 seconds so it catches them off guard. I'm sure there's some weird tautological catch-phrase they have to boot strap ownership of land in their system. My one MRA libertarian friend used to pick fights with me over libertarian bullshit, and then eventually going down this path of argumentation caused him to snap and say, "gently caress you, do you think you're morally superior to me or something?" He hasn't talked to me since. We didn't really have a lot in common except for some random life events. He thought Murray Rothbard was a worthwhile citation in our arguments. It's almost not even worth it to get into the details of the effects of any policy they might talk about because it's essentially letting them frame the debate. All of the libertarian argumentation that leads to uncomfortable conclusions in their opinion is like, "Welp, I don't like child prostitution, but it's just so logical  " Libertarian theology is only logical if you take their a priori assumptions as true. All their nonsense falls like a house of cards when you start attacking any of the myriad initial assumptions they're basing everything on.
ErIog fucked around with this message at 13:46 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 13:40
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CCrew posted:It seems like the major complaint here is the lack if counterpoint to any of the critiques we give to libertarianism. Is there a reason nobody has suggested trying to find some means of debating directly with libertarians? Is there a forum rule or precedent against buying accounts for people to argue with? I'd be willing to throw $10 in if somebody found a worthwhile subject, maybe an r/libertarian mod or something? Otherwise, it's not like SA has never "invaded" other forums, again unless there's a rule I don't know. This isn't really necessary. A lot of us here used to be libertarians, and this forum itself was fairly libertarian for some time. A lot of them moved over to other kinds of political philosophies or got run out of the forum for not being able to answer the kinds of critiques we've been talking about in this thread. I really don't think there's a need to relitigate it from the beginning with new blood because that's a very predictable conversation you can play Libertarian bingo with. This thread being a place to discuss new wrinkles in various flavors of libertarianism and the libertarian movement in general seems interesting to me, though. Their arguments are pretty facile, and not really that difficult to understand. A lot of us being former libertarians can articulate them for you probably better than they can. My critique of "ownership" being taken a priori is a good example of something a lot of run of the mill libertarians aren't politically aware enough to have even begun to think about.
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May 27, 2014 00:41
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Yeah, it's best to avoid rands "works", it's like staring into the abyss. I disagree somewhat with this. Rand can't write worth poo poo, but her stuff is pretty much self-parodying. It's hard not to laugh at a lot of it. Just imagine it's a screenplay for a 50's sitcom complete with a laugh track. For this reason, I think a read through of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead has serious entertainment value.
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Jun 2, 2014 07:42
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Pththya-lyi posted:She believed that you could reason everything out from first principles, so you don't need to verify things empirically. This is also the position of the Austrian school of economics, and also a strong theme in the work of the Chicago school that came after it. You can always tell the "serious" economists from the internet mises.org nutbars because the "serious" economists will all describe themselves as being part of the Chicago school of economic thought. The Chicago school was co-opted soon after its inception, and turned into a policy paper mill for regressive pro business policies. You can read about a lot of that at NSFWCorp and if you do a little bit of digging into The Federalist Society. The Chicago school, although it uses empirical data sometimes, basically only accepts empirical data that fits their preconceived notions. They basically spread FUD about the empirical data of other work until it can be called, in their view, meaningless. Then step 2 for them is to substitute their own axioms that lead to the conclusion that makes them all warm and fuzzy. It's quite bizarre, and frequently sounds more like intellectual laziness than actual scholarship. The best example of this that I ever heard was on the Econtalk podcast a few years ago where the host tried to argue that inequality in the US hasn't actually worsened: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/burkhauser_on_t.html I've always thought about making an EconTalk thread debunking each episode as it comes out, but I'm just too lazy to put in the effort. Suffice to say, though, that if you want to understand the world of regressive economics there is no better place. I have learned a lot about basic Adam Smith and Hayekian economics from the show, but I've become more and more cynical as my understanding of economics has increased. ErIog fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 12:29
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anonumos posted:It hardly matters if it's government fiat money or rich-man's golden sponsorship, there were wars in both systems. It's still the same dictatorship of wealth. This seems to fit with my basic understanding of history. It's either use of force in order to draft an army via conscription, political will to convince people that they're fighting in their own interest, or using currency to pay people in order to go to battle as kind of a last resort. Most wars have kind of been a mixture of all three at different points, but currency hasn't usually been a huge stumbling block for decisions to go to war. How much spending power currency or other benefits have in terms of paying for war has fluctuated over time. Soldiers being paid for their service was not an automatic thing, and only started to be done begrudgingly after modern armies had lots of headaches with deserters. The army would only provide soldiers necessities such as tainted rations while at war, and the money raised by the government to fight the war mostly went into the hands of the already-rich war profiteers. This was a pretty bad system. During the Spanish-American war more men died from food poisoning on the front lines than were actually killed by the enemy. In the modern day where we pay soldiers somewhat commensurate with their service and we don't have conscription that dollar doesn't go as far as when soldiers were basically slaves. Money wasn't usually as big of a concern as it is today. ErIog fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 02:06
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SedanChair posted:Well the Laffer curve is just pseudoscience. It's the frictional coefficient of whale semen on a frictionless plane of the economics world. It is certainly making a statement that's probably true in some fashion, but completely useless. The lack of rigor in the Laffer curve is astounding. It's 2 points on a graph, and then a line between them that may as well spell  in cursive. That would be just as rigorous as the actual Laffer curve.Proper branches of economics would have required him to support the points on his curve with actual data, but Supply Side Economics is not a proper branch of economics.
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Sep 29, 2014 02:36
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eNeMeE posted:Which is why my favourite explanation of the Laffer curve is that it's a joke that got out of hand. It is a bit dangerous to laugh it off, though. I can't find the article I read about it, but it might have NSFWCorp that broke down the history of how Supply-Side came to be. It involved holding free lunches/dinners(oh the irony!) to try to spot economics students that could be supported and give voice to their cause of "less taxes" and "no regulation." The short version is that the reason we had Reagonomics was because of George P. Schultz. Everyone talks about Milton Friedman, but Friedman would have been yet another of a small, but vocal, group of anti-Keynesian nutters roaming the halls in Chicago. Schultz was part of the group that developed supply-side economics as a branch of economics along with Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. He later left to go to Bechtel Group, and when Bechtel decided they wanted their man in the White House, he and Caspar Weinburger left to go work on Reagan's campaign. Schultz introduced Friedman to Reagan, and it was love at first sight. From what I gather, mainstream economists at the time were a bit mystified by what happened with Reaganomics. The beauty of every piece of what happened is that nobody ever was paid to lie. They just cherry-picked the people who had demonstrated an ideology compatible with their business interests. Laffer producing his dumb curve without any scholarly merit to it, and then having it cited because it supported lowering taxes was all par for the course. The Laffer curve is only the most blatant example of it, and the entirety of supply-side economics was like that. Up until the Laffer curve it was mostly really bad scholarship about Chile, and that's why Herman Cain couldn't stop mentioning Chile during the 2012 GOP primaries. It was all an awkward attempt at a Reagan callback to a population that didn't remember any of the horrible underpinnings to supply-side economics. If anybody can find the article I'm talking about that details which society of economists was handing out free food I would be really appreciative. ErIog fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Sep 29, 2014 |
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Sep 29, 2014 04:59
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jrodefeld posted:Austrians also use empiricism and observation, but not to refute the logical and necessary implications of human action. So if someone presents us with some study that purports to explain how raising the minimum wage has no adverse effect on employment, immediately we can deduce that there is something amiss with such a study, since it contradicts a basic axiom of economics. The disemployment effects of a marginal minimum wage hike might be small and hard to capture in a given empirical study, but it exists nonetheless and MUST exist. Outlawing jobs below an arbitrary wage rate must necessarily artificially limit the scope of potential economic transaction that humans can engage in. You mean you throw poo poo away and spread FUD when the empirical data doesn't fit your ideology. This is the big difference, by the way, between the Chicago schoolers and the Austrians. The Austrians seemed to understand that they were working within the space of theoretical economics. Chicago school added the ability to cite empirical work when it fits the Austrian conclusions, but then wax philosophically about the limits of human knowledge when it came to any empirical work that contradicted the Austrian gospel. Read what you wrote. You admitted that you throw away empirical work when it doesn't fit your predetermined conclusion. That's pretty intellectually dishonest. You can theorycraft all you want about the limits of empiricism, but unless you can point out actual flaws in actual studies then you're just full of garbage. This is the thing that pisses me off about you, Russ Roberts, Friedman, et al. You cite empiricism when it suits you, and then suddenly economics becomes an entirely social science/philosphical pursuit when things don't go your way. It is the world's most obtuse rationalization for throwing away data, and you've managed to actually convince people it has rigor. Oh wait, you actually haven't. Chicago-schoolers only get funded because they say things that rich people agree with. Rich people give no fucks about the rigor or the justifications. They know a guy is defending lowering their tax rate, exploiting their workers, and colluding with competitors.. and that's what they're happy with. ErIog fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 13:09
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