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It sounds like he’s basing it on the labour theory of value (JohnD might also be right with “objective theory of value”).

But voluntary exchange isn’t necessarily based on payment according to what each contributes to the final sale of the product.

People are paid for their time & effort on the basis of what they agree to. Now, in the example of the auto, the worker(s) could agree to be paid on-commission, receiving a percentage of the sales (minus expenses) – as many auto salesmen are (at least partially). But these aren’t the contracts they agreed to. Even the union auto-workers don’t always negotiate for contracts like that.

Now, some actually do: it’s called a “profit-sharing agreement,” and this is perfectly acceptable when mutually agreed to. But the post’s author seems to believe it would be better for an outside third-party to intervene and impose such an agreement even where the employees themselves aren’t pursuing it (when it comes to the American auto industry. . .you should tell him it’s perhaps a bad example, dude. Unless he’d also be happy if the workers were forced by outside intervention to accept a “profit-and-loss-sharing agreement” – so the workers have to kick in some dough if they lose money).

But, note, this is why many employees prefer wages: if they wanted the risk of entrepreneurship, they’d become entrepreneurs and expose their income directly to the fluctuations of the market*

*His rejoinder may very well be that their incomes are exposed to risk, in the sense that they could be laid off, or their hours cut. And there is a sense in which this is true. But there is a perception of – and to a significant degree a reality of – less fluctuation in working for a wage than working on commission or for yourself as an entrepreneur – noting that many people who start businesses don’t get a income from that business for years, if ever (many businesses fail).

What he really wants is for the employees to get the reward of risk, without sharing the full downside of it. I mean, run it by him whether he’d be willing to have outside parties intervene to force employees to work for nothing until a business (say, a restaurant) turns a profit. My bet is he’ll dance away from that.

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A subscription here and a copy of Bob Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal might help them.

Re. the History Channel version and the commentators they had on it – the most pathetically lulzy was Senator Rockefeller running down grandpa. But that’s par for the course.

What would have made it interesting is something along the lines of Murray Rothbard’s take on Rockefeller & Morgan. Looked at a certain way, perhaps they *did* cause the Great Depression – just not in the way the History Channel and all the Official Academic Intellegencia wants people to believe.

(But, then, one day I’m going to work up the nerve to ask Tom et al here what they think of Rothbard’s take on the influence of the Morgan & Rockefeller aligned business & banking interests).

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People were bolder back then. They were actually willing to risk their lives on matters of principle – not just in large matters, but in personal ones (this is one reason they dueled).

Today. . .well you might get people to sign petition.

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Welcome, Saul!

Tom posted on this today at his site. Apparently this dispute comes up a lot (do tell!). So opportune time again to agitate for a course on the foundations of ethics/morality and liberty.

I think that the thing that ultimately causes people to believe that rights “come from the state” or, at best, are “socially constructed” is the Social Contract theory/foundation, which ties the origination of a society to the foundation of a government.

But this has always been a faulty premise: 1) some sort of society must pre-exist for people to have the basis of common understandings that would cause them to believe contracts between them would be not just mutually binding, but mutually observed (that’s what distinguishes the group making any given social agreement distinct from that group on yon hill that they don’t include, for one thing) but also 2) it presumes that societies are coterminous with political boundaries (a Ven Diagram would be useful here); but this is not necessarily so. At all. 3) “Rights” that come from the State are no rights at all; any libertarian should easily see that if rights are a creature of the state, then they are subject to modification by that state at any time and for any reason; so they are not rights at all. At least not rights in a philosophical sense – they would then only be “rights” from the point of view of rhetorical/political instrumental utility in polemical squabbles between competing groups under the state; I.E. Sandra Fluck’s “right” to reach into the pockets of other people to compel them to pay for her lifestyle choices, and it’s a “war on her” if you don’t submit without even objecting. But those kind of “rights” are only enforced against competing factions within a polity; they are not enforcable against the state, by definition, unless the state wants to pretend to enforce them in some cases for it’s own purposes (in which case they would do so anyhow, and “rights” remain a fiction).

Now, me, I also think speaking of “rights” such as “the right to this or that” is at best only useful as a convenient shorthand. It really only makes philosophical sense to talk about liberty, and any “right” is just a facet of liberty-as-a-whole. But, again, this post is long enough.

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I watched almost all of it; I skipped the last one.

It isn’t uniformly bad. But it does have the usual slant.

It’s portrayal of the Homestead Strike, both the run-up to the Strike and the “battle for the plant,” was rubbish – tendentious to the point of mendacity, claiming Carnegie & Frick refused to negotiate was an outright falsehood (they had successfully concluded negotiations with all but one union before the strike, and did have an offer on the table for the final union) and their portrayal confrontation between the Strikers and the Pinkertons absolute fantasy. I can only guess that they consulted with the most extreme “labour” “historian” they could find, and printed the legend.

It was after that – that was the bridge too far for me, I decided I wouldn’t watch the next episode. Even PBS did better and I expect almost nothing from them when it comes to portraying labor disputes.

But, hey – at least it isn’t “Ancient Aliens.”

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We should agitate for the next course to be in the foundations of ethics/morality.

It would make a great follow-on to the logic course. ^_^

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That would be pro. If we could do that, it might have a real impact.

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Depending on how much time you have for the paper, Inter-library loan is often useful, or if the University has access to them via electronic format (I usually like to read books in hard copy but you do what you have to when time is short).

If they were older books it would be a snap, Google’s Gutenberg Project is great for older books, and sometimes even has recent books.

For Journal Articles: in addition to the fact that academic journals tend to be bad in their understanding of anything “conservative” (note: this doesn’t mean you won’t find anything useful there; you might have more luck than I do. Plus it actually helps to have a few “bad critics” to beat up on for getting things wrong), they’re “secondary sources.” But there are also online publications where neoconservatives tend to publish – “The National Interest,” “The Public Interest,” “Policy Review,” “The New Criterion,” “The Clairmont Institute,” “Commentary,” and “National Affairs.” If you can get access to their archives (www.unz.org might be helpful for at least some neoconservative publications) you can mine these. Also, AEI publications and some of the publications of the Hoover Institution. (Note with all of the above, not necessarily every article is written from a neoconservative perspective. Plus, you’ll have to find the key ones to read & cite; for example, this relatively recent one).

Also, I should have mentioned this earlier: the most useful tool in the world are the footnotes and bibliographies/cited sources in any of the books and articles you read. Whenever you see an author cite something interesting written by someone else, you can follow that bread-crumb and pick up that source (be it book or article) as well. If you do this, quite often the problem transforms from “how can I find enough sources?” to “I have so many to read, how do I prioritize which ones so I can finish reading them in time to write?”

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Note that even Modern America has one office that is (partly) selected by lot: the office of Juror (of course in high-profile or otherwise significant cases, this random element has been almost entirely negated by sophisticated jury-selection methods employed by lawyers & prosecutors, with the aim of fixing the outcome in advance. But it still technically remains the official method by which jurors are selected).

We have modern computer systems and information databases (that people can’t escape even if they want to), so even though the pool of potential selectees is much larger, it would actually be easy to implement. Whether it would actually help would probably depend largely on the degree to which the staffers remained a permanent civil service.

I think people concentrate far too much on the importance of elected officials and their handful of appointees when it comes to the modern western beamtenstaat. (Plus, elected officials – up to and including the top level – come to office with almost no specialized knowledge. They come to office with, on average, a general law degree – which probably makes them worse, rather than better, legislators – knowledge of how to get elected, and knowledge of constituent service. They rely upon technocratic experts – in their staff, in the agencies, and in the outside interest groups they align with – for specialized knowledge. If there is enough public pressure on them and they think they’ll actually be expected to answer detailed questions about the legislation they favor they then sit on folding chairs in the basement of the capital to learn from their staffers what is in “their bills” – the ones they sponsor and ostensibly wrote. Maybe they’re good note-takers).

My personal guess is that election by lot might have made a difference if it was implemented before the “Civil Service Reforms,” but now it would make about as much impact as dropping a pebble into the sea.

The best quick, relatively short civics guide to modern western government is Foseti On Government Employment and This is Your Government. You can also take a look at The Three Branches of Government. an Austro-Libertarian might throw in The Federal Reserve as a “Fourth Branch,” but it’s technically part of the Bureaucratic Branch.

In order of importance, then, organizational reform would consist of:
1) Get rid of the Civil Service “reforms” – call it “updating for the digital age.” Go to a system where they can and will be broomed in toto (not just the handfull of “Plumb Book” appointees).
2) Did I mention “get rid of the permanent Civil Service?”
3) Repeal the 17th Amendment.
4) Election of Representatives by Lot. (Yes, Hoppe, yes – but at least there is a better chance that people selected by lot won’t be personally ambitious in the same way the self-selected political candidates are, and since it’s almost comically improbable that anyone would be randomly chosen to serve more than one term, they’d all know they’d be living under the laws they passed for the rest of us sooner rather than later).

But if you ever had the popular support necessary to implement any of those, much less all of them, you’d probably be at a stage where you could just implement something even closer to the Libertarian desire.

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Zero Hedge I like, but it’s hit-and-miss; there’s a fair bit of chaff with the wheat. Still, it is where I tend to go first for economic news-of-the-day.

People already mentioned a lot of the “top” ones, but here are some that haven’t been mentioned yet:

http://www.independent.org/
http://cafehayek.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
http://www.stephankinsella.com/
http://foundationsofecon.blogspot.com/
http://blog.yaliberty.org/

Not a blog, but I usually check out Peter Schiff’s Youtube channel a couple times a week to see if there are any new uploads (I also check out Mises Media’s Youtube channel a couple times a week for the same reason).

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Ethics of Liberty is here.
For a New Liberty is here.
The Philosophy of Liberty video is here. (short, but I haven’t watched it).

There is also this by Hoppe.

Does your father believe there is such a thing as “human rights”? If so, where did “human rights” originate? If he says something like “the UN, governments signed a UN agreement to recognize those rights” well then where did governments get that perogative? If he says something like “well, in each member-state there is an underlaying social contract on which such rights are based,” upon what does he think those rights are based? The original agreement of the people who founded the society? Well then they had to have the right to do that. (Note this is a weak argument, but it’s the foundation of social-contract theory. So you will be following the logic of his own argument in pursuing this line of questioning).

Either people have what we call “human rights” intrinsically, or they’re based on a “socially constructed contract” – the later of which begs the question because where then did they get the right to make such an agreement and have it be mutually binding.

If he doesn’t believe in any of that, then share this with him, and further ask him how he treats people and expects to be treated and on what normative grounds? Try to expose “performative contradictions” in his argument.

(I use “human rights” for shorthand. Personally I don’t think it is correct to speak of “rights” – it is correct to speak of liberty. Loose talk of “human rights” leads to such fallacies as “economic rights,” when the only appropriate thing to speak of is “economic liberty,” as a facet of liberty as a whole, for example. But getting into that would be too much detail).

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You’re welcome, glad it was helpful. ^_^

Btw, I should add one more thing: I’m not saying I think Feser is totally off base, nor that Nozick’s work is flawless (not that it’s not without value – but Feser agrees that Nozick makes some good arguments).

Indeed, I think Feser’s starting point – Aristotelian/Thomistic Natural Law* – is sounder than Nozick’s Social Contract/Kantian starting point. I found Feser’s books and articles to be quite good.

But here’s a “hook” that shows just how getting one small detail wrong can cause you to go wrong. Feser grounds his theory of property in the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, where property is justified because it contributes to human flourishing** – it serves the purpose of promoting human life. But from that he concludes that if someone really needs to infringe upon property to survive, they can do so, because it is life that takes the priority. Now, Feser means that they seriously need it to survive (they need to be in extremis – for example, if they are starving in the woods and come upon someone’s summer cabin, currently unoccupied, they would be morally justified to trespass and eat some food, or turn the water faucet on and drink some water, if the alternative is death), not just want it. But this does open doors.

However, another philosopher I discovered by way of Feser – David Odenberg (Feser made a couple posts recommending his books, and he cites Oderberg’s works favorably) operates from the same tradition, and has the same foundation for property. However, Oderberg acknowledges that, while a person would be morally justified in doing that, it still constitutes an infringement upon another, and they are obligated to provide restitution as soon as they are able. If they are able to, but do not provide, restitution, then this justifiable infringement crosses the line into theft. Thus Oderberg allows for reasonable accommodations to exceptional, extreme situations, but maintains the principle of life, but it closes the door to expropriation, redistribution, and other ongoing violations – such as through government policy.

So this small divergence, from the same underlaying premises, can generate big difference when it comes to what sort of policies are justifiable. In my opinion, Oderberg is much closer to correct on this. And, while a pure Rothbardian would probably grumble a tad about Oderberg (such infringements would not be morally justified), ultimately their positions are much closer, because as long as restitution is made, the outcome, from a Rothbardian perspective, is essentially compatible. But I haven’t seen Feser say that restitution is owed if someone needs to take another’s property in order to survive.

*(N.B. I’m not a Catholic, myself – but Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical tradition isn’t just for Catholics; he makes compelling arguments whether one is a Catholic or not).

**(The argument is more extensive than this, so please don’t scoff at it on the basis of this short statement).

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“which has actually helped spawn infrastructure job creation”

Does he have any numbers to back that up? Can he tell you whether they were efficiently allocated, and did not just displace other potential investment?

Bob Murphy’s “propositional question” applies to the last four years. In lots of places on the web, there is a chart comparing the current “recovery” with past recoveries. What would things have to look like for him to accept that these policies have retarded recovery, rather than helped it?

Likewise in lots of places on the web there is the famous unemployment chart, showing what they said unemployment would be without their Keynsean policies, what it would be with them, and what the actual unemployment was. If he objects to this, claiming “well, they didn’t know how bad things were at the time” – point out that this objection fails, because the entire premise of Keynsian-based macro-economics is that they understand the economy well enough to predict what will follow from a given set of policies. If they couldn’t even understand what *already* *happened* well enough, then they certainly can’t claim the technical expertise to manage the economy – which they do all the time.

Here’s a pretty good Murphy Youtube video on the management of the present crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmYtyl8s05w

Here’s a shorter one where he is responding to Robert Reich on “rich people gutted the social safety net for the middle class and the poor, and that produced the crisis”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXm4j2ORYcg
Especially rebuts the bogus claim that “there have been sharp cuts in spending” or even “there have been sharp cuts in social benefit spending” – these claims are false to the point of being. . .dare I say it? Lies.

And here he is on contrasting views of the Great Depression:

Edit, Added: I just noticed the little “edit” button. I also just stumbled uncontrollably across this review of Burton Folsom’s book, by the great Robert Higgs. Interesting paragraph:

“Folsom presents a valuable discussion of the great extent to which taxes were increased during the 1930s, especially excise taxes–on alcoholic beverages, gasoline, cigarettes, radios, movie tickets, and many other goods–that bore relatively heavily on lower-income people. From 1933 through 1936, federal excise taxes exceeded federal individual and corporate income taxes combined, and during the following four years excises always brought in at least 40 percent of federal revenue. After 1935 Social Security payroll taxes diminished poor people’s wages disproportionately.“

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Also, it’s a myth that FDR “focused on the forgotten middle class.” Woods’s lectures on the New Deal illustrate; FDR focused his programs on his own well-being, putting money where it would do him and Democrats political good, not on the abstract well-being of the “middle class” as a whole.

FDR came into office saying a third of the country was ill-fed, then destroyed foodstocks and implemented other policies aimed at keeping prices high.

What gets people to think that he “focused on the well-being of the middle class” is the fact that he did what he could to screw business. . .but it was often one set of businesses that were being screwed, on behalf of the business interests who were FDR’s friends & supporters, and who wrote the regulations by which their competitors were screwed.

Further, there are tons of books and articles that could be recommended that show that using government to “spread the wealth around” does not improve the lot of the worst off, but actually (especially over time), harms them – but, again, entrenches interests who do benefit from the programs (and no, those interests are not “the poor”). One starting point for that would be Tom Woods’s own book, “The Church and the Market,” which examines in some detail whether these programs, ostensibly aimed at helping the “disenfranchized” actually help them. I mean, other than making them feel better because they’re screwing over people who think are doing better than them.

To that end, remind your “facebook friend” of Obama’s great moral exhortation to his supporters, that “voting is the best revenge.” His call to revenge, that’s the “positive, optimistic vision” that Progressives offer. Perpetual revenge-based politics through a perpetual patron-client relationship between the Progressive leadership and their supporters.

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The tale of the slave is an analogy and it works depending upon whether the underlying premises are sound, and it doesn’t work if the underlying premises are unsound.

I invoke it, too, because it highlights the problem of presuming democracy makes any result acceptable – and it’s a synopsis of the evolution of democracy. It’s a reasonable comeback, IMO, to people who suggest “well, when you voted, you agreed to be bound by the results, whatever they were, and we voted to expropriate you and use you for corvee labour, so you have no legitimate grounds on which to complain.” (Note that a lot of anarcho-libertarians – not all of them, but a lot – *do* accept this, and is a reason why they consider voting objectionable, and elections morally objectionable, and they will argue – I saw some of the arguments this cycle – that if you participate in the electoral process, you are signing the contract and have no grounds on which to complain about what is done to you afterwords, whatever that might be. So, they further argue, the only way to maintain your moral independence is not to vote. I emphasize though that this is only *one* argument for non-participation, among several that they have).

So we get back to Feser’s objection: His objection-analogy is based on contract itself. Which fits within Nozick (and Locke’s) “Social Contract”-based theory. But Feser himself is (no longer) really a social contractarian, either (and as he further elaborates, that becomes somewhat clear. But it’d probably be helpful to understand where he’s coming from by reading his books – which are actually very good, though he, IMO, left out a key half of a principle, which I’ll get to at some point). On that subject, we might invoke our gracious host’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqEePlZiqk

And, taking off from that point, we can point out that while Feser says Nozick’s “Tale of the Slave” is “underdescribed,” so too is Feser’s counter-argument: Lets say for the sake of argument that I accept I have moral duties, including positive moral duties, that I did not explicitly choose. Just what are they? And if they are enforcable, by whom and how did they get the authority to enforce them? Note that I agree with Feser that we have enforcable moral duties that we are obligated to obey even if we did not sign a contract (and indeed even anarcho-libertarians agree with Feser – though they boil it down to one primary one: non-agression).

I’d suggest, btw, that one problem in Nozick, and Locke, is the social contractarian starting point, which led almost inexoriably to the Progressive conflation between “society” and “state” – as in “shouldn’t society do such-and-such?” by which they (the Progressive, at all times from their 19th century origins to the present) always mean “shouldn’t the state do such-and-such.” Yes perhaps we in society should do such-and-such but their is a missing logical step to leap from that to “it is done through the power of the state.” (I digress slightly, but IMO importantly).

I think Tom Woods, for example – a believing Catholic, just like Ed Feser – would agree that we have moral duties to each other, including ones beyond non-aggression. But that does not lead directly to the conclusion that these obligations are enforceable by a monopoly-power state. (note: I myself am not convinced of anarcho-capitalism. But I do agree that critics of anarcho-capitalism, or even minimalism – including Feser, a very good philosopher who should know better – skip steps in reaching their conclusions, and then “under-describe” what follows from their own conclusions).

Well, I didn’t get to everything, but this is long enough for a forum post. But the details of these things can get really long as you argue them through. Which is why, even though as a stand-alone the “Tale of the Slave” is incomplete, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to invoke it in a discussion/debate with someone; it was always meant to illustrate an argument, so people can envision and grasp it better, not be entirely complete on its own. And that argument is that just because you’re allowed to drop your pebble into the bin with everyone else, that doesn’t mean your liberty is automatically respected and there is no grounds for you to complain when it is violated. You can, indeed, be a slave-with-a-vote and still be, in effect, a slave.

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