Looking at the world as it is, whatever ideas that have got us here, they need the critical examination.
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It tends to be difficult for democracy worshipers to keep in mind that half of the public has an IQ below average and even looking at those above average, at what level can we say that someone is smart?
It seems to me that most voters are unwitting agents of their tribal instincts and they are played by people that are often high functioning sociopaths and psychopaths, and so the function of political government has become that of managing/exploiting tribalist passions as various actors endeavor to maintain or gain political power/influence.
Does the question of why political leaders are wrong have to be binary? Why can’t some be wrong because they heed voters and others be wrong because they ignore them?
Agreed, it isn’t really a mutually exclusive set. Politicians both follow and lead, as their capacity to manipulate and ignore is limited and so to some extent have to give the people what they want. Where it is between 5% of what they want or 95% is kind of the question.
Mises is correct to observe that people make far worse decisions with other people's property than with their own. Caplan is (perhaps unintentionally) insisting on a definition of "democracy" that includes no constitution or human rights, and it is very, very correct of Mises to consider that to be horrible.
Fantastic. Never heard of this paper before; thanks for posting this.
Can you expand on the "reason I read Human Action and Socialism cover-to-cover in high school. The Kantian philosophy is bizarre at best"? Seems like you're hinting at something interesting but I don't know what.
Went from here to Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist and found your objection to Mises' economic calculation argument to be funny in a way. Not that I quibble (wtf do I know anyway,) but there's a bitter irony in the way that, however impossible economic calculation under socialism may be, the *political* pressure to actually manufacture incorrect data trumps in nearly every case.
Almost everyone seems to believe that there is actually some relationship between why people vote, and what the voting process is meant to symbolize. People have long learnt that those whom they vote for do not represent them. They vote anyway because "that is what good citizens do". The establishment needs people to vote to create the illusion of legitimacy knowing full well they have their own agenda far removed from what people actually want. Law, the power to create law, and the process of interpretation of law have become totally subservient to the political dictates of the incumbent, who themselves are the front for those who actually call the shots. Democracy, freedom, representation etc have post their meaning. True law cannot be subject to the whims and fancies of politicians who have politicized everything, to such an extent that they no longer carry on the charade of being bound by law (which they are not since they simply change the law if it is an obstruction to their plans, or simply ignore it totally), they simply issue executive statements. The purpose of law is to provide a secure framework which binds the judiciary, when adjudicating disputes. Decisions should be the outcome of application of these principles. The judge should be irrelevant. Any judge, suitably trained, should provide a similar verdict. Outcomes should not be determined by whether they were appointed by Obama or Trump. Laws created to impose obligations on others are invalid in their entirety. No one consented to having their lives controlled by others trough the law making process. This power was seized and abused without consent. The law has become the shackles on the modern slave man. What we see happening is abuse of the judicial process. We no longer have safety and security under law. Safety is only possible if the law is established and everyone is equally bound by it. What we have today is rampant abuse and selective application or non application of the law as those in power see fit. That fits the definition of a lawless society. Its been called a rule based order. But it is clear that it functions under only one rule, might is right.
Well no, it is Caplan and his fellow neoclassicals and not the Austrian school economists like Mises and Rothbard who display a certain degree of craziness in their willful misunderstandings of the foundations of economics and of the correct methodology for generating universal generalizations about purposeful human action.
For example, it is self-evidently true that whenever someone chooses A over B and acts on that choice, one is necessarily putting A on a higher point on their utility scale than B. To the extent one can't make up their mind and remains indifferent between A and B, action is paralyzed. Neither A nor B are attained until one gets off the fence and develops a preference for one over the other.
It is exceedingly silly for anyone to deny such an obvious aspect of how action necessarily implies differential valuations and rules out the existence indifference in utility scales, but Caplan has been insisting on indifference since I first confronted him with Rothbard's argument on that issue over thirty years ago. It is the very first point he raises in the paper he linked to above. The basic reason why neoclassicals cling so tenaciously to such a ridiculous conceptualization of utility is that an assumption of indifference is logically necessary to convert cardinal utility rankings into ordinal quantities that can be represented as a continuous function in mathematical equations.
Instead of being guided by uncontroversial conceptualizations of purposefulness (which self-evidently must apply to all human beings, since we necessarily engage in purposeful action by the very act of choosing to engage in discourse about economics), neoclassicals are manufacturing an arbitrary assumption just so they can satisfy their mathematical fetishes. This reflects a deeper epistemological failure of neoclassicals to come to grips with the methodological differences that are inherent in attempting to make universal generalizations about introspective experiences and inferences about the mental states of others versus universal generalizations derived from sensory experiences.
The fundamental issues with all of the social sciences is the absence of experimental controls (essential to any valid logical induction) and the absence of direct observations of the most important variables of interest, namely the ideas inside the brains of human beings. Social scientists need to get over their physics envy and embrace methods that actually work in their fields, instead of the positivist pseudo-empiricism that attempts to imitate the methods of the natural sciences but in fact leads nowhere.
Long before even Mises came along, the distinctive feature of the Austrian school was its recognition that economic generalizations have to be derived from a logic of purposefulness, not from attempts to do quantitative experiments on human societies. Kantian influence, btw, has nothing to do with the origins of the Austrian school's methodological orientation, which dates back to Mises's predecessor Carl Menger. One has to read more than just _Human Action_ and _Socialism_ to get a clear understanding of Mises's take on Austrian methodology, let alone understand how other, less-Kantian Austrians deal with it.
Looking at the world as it is, whatever ideas that have got us here, they need the critical examination.
-
It tends to be difficult for democracy worshipers to keep in mind that half of the public has an IQ below average and even looking at those above average, at what level can we say that someone is smart?
It seems to me that most voters are unwitting agents of their tribal instincts and they are played by people that are often high functioning sociopaths and psychopaths, and so the function of political government has become that of managing/exploiting tribalist passions as various actors endeavor to maintain or gain political power/influence.
Would love to see you do a final verdict on the Medicaid back and forth
Does the question of why political leaders are wrong have to be binary? Why can’t some be wrong because they heed voters and others be wrong because they ignore them?
Agreed, it isn’t really a mutually exclusive set. Politicians both follow and lead, as their capacity to manipulate and ignore is limited and so to some extent have to give the people what they want. Where it is between 5% of what they want or 95% is kind of the question.
Mises is correct to observe that people make far worse decisions with other people's property than with their own. Caplan is (perhaps unintentionally) insisting on a definition of "democracy" that includes no constitution or human rights, and it is very, very correct of Mises to consider that to be horrible.
https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/weve-got-other-peoples-money-to-burn
Fantastic. Never heard of this paper before; thanks for posting this.
Can you expand on the "reason I read Human Action and Socialism cover-to-cover in high school. The Kantian philosophy is bizarre at best"? Seems like you're hinting at something interesting but I don't know what.
Went from here to Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist and found your objection to Mises' economic calculation argument to be funny in a way. Not that I quibble (wtf do I know anyway,) but there's a bitter irony in the way that, however impossible economic calculation under socialism may be, the *political* pressure to actually manufacture incorrect data trumps in nearly every case.
Almost everyone seems to believe that there is actually some relationship between why people vote, and what the voting process is meant to symbolize. People have long learnt that those whom they vote for do not represent them. They vote anyway because "that is what good citizens do". The establishment needs people to vote to create the illusion of legitimacy knowing full well they have their own agenda far removed from what people actually want. Law, the power to create law, and the process of interpretation of law have become totally subservient to the political dictates of the incumbent, who themselves are the front for those who actually call the shots. Democracy, freedom, representation etc have post their meaning. True law cannot be subject to the whims and fancies of politicians who have politicized everything, to such an extent that they no longer carry on the charade of being bound by law (which they are not since they simply change the law if it is an obstruction to their plans, or simply ignore it totally), they simply issue executive statements. The purpose of law is to provide a secure framework which binds the judiciary, when adjudicating disputes. Decisions should be the outcome of application of these principles. The judge should be irrelevant. Any judge, suitably trained, should provide a similar verdict. Outcomes should not be determined by whether they were appointed by Obama or Trump. Laws created to impose obligations on others are invalid in their entirety. No one consented to having their lives controlled by others trough the law making process. This power was seized and abused without consent. The law has become the shackles on the modern slave man. What we see happening is abuse of the judicial process. We no longer have safety and security under law. Safety is only possible if the law is established and everyone is equally bound by it. What we have today is rampant abuse and selective application or non application of the law as those in power see fit. That fits the definition of a lawless society. Its been called a rule based order. But it is clear that it functions under only one rule, might is right.
Beyond that, is Mises economic theory valuable to a modern economist, even if his a priori methodology is unfortunate?
Well no, it is Caplan and his fellow neoclassicals and not the Austrian school economists like Mises and Rothbard who display a certain degree of craziness in their willful misunderstandings of the foundations of economics and of the correct methodology for generating universal generalizations about purposeful human action.
For example, it is self-evidently true that whenever someone chooses A over B and acts on that choice, one is necessarily putting A on a higher point on their utility scale than B. To the extent one can't make up their mind and remains indifferent between A and B, action is paralyzed. Neither A nor B are attained until one gets off the fence and develops a preference for one over the other.
It is exceedingly silly for anyone to deny such an obvious aspect of how action necessarily implies differential valuations and rules out the existence indifference in utility scales, but Caplan has been insisting on indifference since I first confronted him with Rothbard's argument on that issue over thirty years ago. It is the very first point he raises in the paper he linked to above. The basic reason why neoclassicals cling so tenaciously to such a ridiculous conceptualization of utility is that an assumption of indifference is logically necessary to convert cardinal utility rankings into ordinal quantities that can be represented as a continuous function in mathematical equations.
Instead of being guided by uncontroversial conceptualizations of purposefulness (which self-evidently must apply to all human beings, since we necessarily engage in purposeful action by the very act of choosing to engage in discourse about economics), neoclassicals are manufacturing an arbitrary assumption just so they can satisfy their mathematical fetishes. This reflects a deeper epistemological failure of neoclassicals to come to grips with the methodological differences that are inherent in attempting to make universal generalizations about introspective experiences and inferences about the mental states of others versus universal generalizations derived from sensory experiences.
The fundamental issues with all of the social sciences is the absence of experimental controls (essential to any valid logical induction) and the absence of direct observations of the most important variables of interest, namely the ideas inside the brains of human beings. Social scientists need to get over their physics envy and embrace methods that actually work in their fields, instead of the positivist pseudo-empiricism that attempts to imitate the methods of the natural sciences but in fact leads nowhere.
Long before even Mises came along, the distinctive feature of the Austrian school was its recognition that economic generalizations have to be derived from a logic of purposefulness, not from attempts to do quantitative experiments on human societies. Kantian influence, btw, has nothing to do with the origins of the Austrian school's methodological orientation, which dates back to Mises's predecessor Carl Menger. One has to read more than just _Human Action_ and _Socialism_ to get a clear understanding of Mises's take on Austrian methodology, let alone understand how other, less-Kantian Austrians deal with it.
I think that Alexander Tytler beat Mises to the punch.