[miljacic]

I’d ask – when exactly can a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ escape from being perceived by at least someone? If one particular ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not perceived by anybody (in his/hers heart/mind) then… does it even exist on earth? Where would it exist, in some metaphysical depository beyond humanity? And if they do, can we even talk about them? Is this a metaphysics discussion board?

I’d think that until a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ is perceived by at least one living person, it is completely irrelevant for consideration. And it doesn’t have to be objective, it could be subjective too…. I can imagine a lonely man feeling something to be ‘right’ without anyone else sharing. This is historically what a hero figure does anyhow. But then he needs to get others to share that feeling/perception.

My point is, I guess, that inasmuch as rights and wrongs are something beyond perception (even some very limited, symbolic, perception) they are irrelevant for human discussion. They can be subject of prayer and eastern meditation, maybe. Rights and wrongs lose nothing by being called ‘only perceptions’ because perceptions are the very foundation of human action, and that’s what we are talking about here.

Sure, there may exist metaphysical origins totally beyond any human perception but what can we say about such abstract, transcendent, unobservable entities? Let’s wait until at least someone starts perceiving them, then do something about it.

So, in a way, ‘is there right or wrong or there are only perceptions?’ sounds to me as this: ‘is there life on earth or there are only material objects we call bodies?’ Yes, both is true, there is life on earth and there are bodies, and they are pretty much inseparable because life never comes without a vehicle called ‘the body’. So also, a right or a wrong never comes without a vehicle called ‘perception’.

[miljacic]

With all due respect I’d discourage our faculty members to look into this at all. It seems to be a nonsensical mess. Each of us happen to meet from time to time a person like this where one can’t even be sure the person is fully sane.

He uses words and terms very vaguely and puts the burden on the reader to, I guess metaphysically, understand his assumptions and definitions, instead of explaining anything, plus bogs down everything under a ton of irrelevant chatter. From such a mess anything can follow.

[miljacic]

In this lecture on great depression Mr Woods suggests that long-term loans are disproportionately sensitive to manipulations of the interest rate. Since I never took such a loan, I don’t really understand why is this so, strictly mathematically speaking… for example, why the very first month payment all goes to paying the interest and very little to the principal.

My basic question is, for anyone who knows: what is the typical mathematical setup of a long-term loan, how much goes for paying interest as time progresses, and why. Thanks!

[miljacic]

So what would happen, really, if farmers couldn’t live on making food anymore? So, farmers would stop making it and food would disappear from the system.. yet magically prices would still be the same? Would people be crawling around starving and begging for a snack yet not be willing to pay some more for it? Obviously that elasticity is not a constant.. if things change it changes too.

Analogy from Physics: a rubber ball is soft and bouncy seemingly all the time, round the clock, every day, all summer long. But change conditions, let’s say, freeze it up. It will get brittle, won’t bounce but break to pieces.

Anyway, even inanimate objects, like the rubber ball, can respond dramatically to new conditions, not to speak of human beings and something as important as food.

[miljacic]

This last link was excellent, and I browsed Peter Klein’s name on mises.org, and this presentation of his helped a lot:
http://library.mises.org/books/Peter%20G%20Klein/Economics%20of%20F%20A%20Hayek.pdf

in particular, the last slide of the presentation entitled “Hayek on Mises”.

To me it seems striking that Hayek writes about this in 1981, 60 years after Mises’s Socialism, and only then saying only that it “now seems to him”… that Mises was factually wrong. So it took him quite a while to settle on a particular interpretation of Mises’s words. That tells me how subtle the differences between the two of them were. I’d think that whoever is trying to dehomogenize them has a seriously complex problem at hand, and so the critical audience should not accept anything but a very high quality analysis.

[miljacic]

Mr. Herbener, thank you for the help, this article was much more clear and direct.

However, I must add that the article was also very surprising to me. Either am I profoundly misreading Hayek, or the author.

Allow me to comment on a point or two. I’m putting the “…..” around quoted parts, and then add my own reading of Hayek.

1. “Hayek’s solution is not private property, but the decentralization of the use of knowledge.”

Yes, but he didn’t mean to actually avoid private property in the real world… quite contrary, private property is THE essential spontaneously emerged mechanism to enforce coordinated use of dispersed information. Remove private property and the wide social order would break down since there isn’t anything else known that could replace it. So (I think) Hayek is saying that private property is so far the only functional instrumentation of wide social order, but also that it does not need to be the most fundamental theoretical concept… underneath this concept, the coordination of dispersed information is even more fundamental. Private property is one possible instrumentation, maybe the only one possible, maybe not – nothing else has historically emerged.

2. “First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why they do not face the very same problems as socialism.”

This is, for me, a very strange misunderstanding. Hayek was, seemingly, emphasizing that there are two separate orders of coordinating information. One is happening in the visible, perceptible world around each individual, the world of more-or-less directly interacting people, so yes, families, clubs, insides of individual firms. I’d add clans, tribes, groups of friends etc. These do not critically require private property to coordinate information, because more-or-less direct human interaction is enough. Then there is another order of coordinating information that is happening in the vast social order where direct informational exchange is not enough by large… so entities like private property become a must. This clear separation of the two orders of coordinating information is what Hayek is emphasizing all along. Has Mr. Hoppe missed this very important point? For analogy, individual atoms and molecules have completely different properties when assembled into solids and liquids – the famous “more is different”.

I could go on and on further down this article, as criticisable interpretations and conclusions seem to abound, but this seems enough for now. Either I am completely lost with this article, or the author, Mr. Hoppe is very, very wrong.

So, at the moment, I don’t understand if Hayek branch is differing from Mises branch on some very concrete point.. apart from simply “digging deeper” to find some deeper theoretical goodies and a wider vista. It seems to me that these are two self-consistent historical lines of reasoning that move on separately, each in its own groove, but not really disagreeing whenever they overlap.

Anyway, thank you, now it’s back to Mr. Salerno’s paper from above, second trial.

[miljacic]

Jeff Herbener wrote:
“Joe Salerno has a seminal article on the difference between the two branches as illustrated by the relationship between Mises and Hayek on the issue of economic calculation in a system of central planning.
http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae6_2_5.pdf ”

Mr. Herbener (or anyone else interested), could I ask for a tiny help here… I tried to read this article, since I’m interested in understanding differences between the trio Mises-Rothb-Hayek, but somehow I couldn’t get much from this text… maybe it’s the written style or something else, but I found it mostly non-readable/understandable and kinda watered down relative to the writing styles of any of the three masters (who I have less trouble reading)… lot of words and assumptions and comparisons but little condensed essence. So… can anyone condense at least some of the points of this article (so that I can lean on that and try to read once again)? Please restate in a simple way one big difference between these two branches (among, I guess, several differences)? Can description of these various differences be simplified by stating their basic, deep, mental attitudes or points of view? Thank you very much.

[miljacic]

Mr. McClanahan, thanks for the prompt answer!

It’s fascinating how in history some patterns like that are stable throughout centuries when you’d think as soon as one generation is gone, the next one or the one after will forget the old scores and start interacting in a more productive way.

Do you have some idea why would these Cavaliers and Puritans be fussing with each other in the first place? Was it more abstract, like religious or philosophical issues, or a more concrete clash of interest?

For example, were then Puritans against King Charles in that war? Or something alike? Thanks.

[miljacic]

Thanks Bharat, I see… that’s more or less what I (not fully consciously) had in mind. In which Rothbard book can I find the quote? Thanks.

Another way, I think, one can use some logic here could go like this: assume that the tax has only the incidental part, and no indirect effects. Then there would be incentive for the business owner and the politician to invent the tax – only the worker will be hurt, and owner not at all. Then the owner and the politician could split the money they took from the worker! And so.. all the way down until the worker is exploited to the edge of his very physical existence and, lo and behold – Marxism was right!! Capitalism is unstable and exploits workers! But, no, the indirect effects immediately enter and stop this vicious cycle because workers pain diffuses onto the owner.

So it seems that these “indirect effects” are essentially important, and should not be neglected to mention. When I heard Mr. Woods (and M. Friedman in a youtube clip also) saying that the worker bears 100% the burden, a red lamp went on: wait! something’s fishy here!

Anyway, thanks for clarifying this via Rothbard.

[miljacic]

Mr. Woods, you said that when the government tries to split a new tax between the worker and the business owner 50-50%, the burden actually falls 100% on the worker because the owner just sees it all as the aggregate expense of having the worker. But, is it really so in the long run? I mean, that tax is still the burden on the whole business enterprise, which then has to suffer in some way. For example, the now less payed worker will not care to work as much as before, or may even threaten to quit so a new (worse) worker must be hired. So, in some way, maybe not 50-50% but in some way, the owner is hurt too… maybe the split is eventually 70-30% or so.. right? The way I see it – here is this contract between the owner and the worker. A new expense (tax) enters the picture. It’s highly unlikely that one party will agree to bear the full burden while everything else remaining exactly the same. Right? Thank you.

[miljacic]

Mr. Herbener, such seems to be the case if we look at the “total future generations of the whole planet Earth”. But I’m a bit lost… what if we look at different countries? If USA bondholders are Chinese people, and taxpayers Americans, then in the future the tax money will be raised from within USA and given to somewhere outside (China). Can it not be said then that: the present burden of debt is upon “present Chinese generations”, while future burden is upon “future American generations”? Wouldn’t then, in both the present and the future, some generations bear the burden? Thank you.

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