[porphyrogenitus]

I read his Byzantine Civilization years ago and it was excellent.

By the time one gets to the fall period, everything is quite depressing. The only sort-of-edifying thing is they seem to have at had a decent man in charge at the end, and so their last stand had some dignity.

I hadn’t known Runciman was head of the Friends of Mt. Athos.

[porphyrogenitus]

It might be in the part that didn’t play for me, then. As I mentioned I couldn’t get the last 5 min or so to run; I just tried again now and same problem, both the audio & visual versions, both the online and download versions.

[porphyrogenitus]

Amazingly, even the consensus of mainstream academics who study foreign aid has turned against it (mainstream academic game-theoreticians are still sometimes/often for it as a means of, in effect, buying off other governments/conflict avoidance, and they remain ideologically sympathetic with the concept of foreign aid and can’t wean themselves of that, but the growing consensus is that developmental aid is at best useless in fulfilling it’s task and at worst actively harmful).

Even the OECD has grudgingly conceded this; OECD, 2008, “Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” but the best work on this subject has probably been done by Peter Bauer, who was “prematurely right” in reaching this conclusion (and thus hated for a long time). He’s more known for his academic articles on the subject, a couple of which I’ve read (but can’t recall off the top of my head now), but if you want a book-length treatment “From Subsistence to Exchange” by him might be good, which is recent, or “Dissent on Development,” which unfortunately is over 40 years old.

Tom Woods has a chapter on this in his book “The Church and the Market” which is where I found out about Peter Bauer and is a gold-mine for other sources, too, such as Alan Waters, former chief economist for USAID, who wrote “ Foreign aid is inherently bad. It retards the process of economic growth and the accumulation of wealth (the only means of escape from poverty and degradation it weakens the coordinating effect of the market process; it pulls entrepreneurship and intellectual capital into non-productive and administrative activities; it creates a moral ethical tone which denies the hard task of wealth creation. Foreign aid makes it possible for African societies to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. . .They have encouraged the establishment in Africa of such institutions as state monopolies and economic development planning boards which would not have been permitted at home Food aid permits price controls which Perhaps the greatest condemnation of foreign aid is that it has engendered and now justifies the bloated bureaucracies of Africa.”

And Woods cites Melvyn Kraus’s “Development Without Aid,” where Kraus writes “It comes as a surprise to a layman, but not at all to the experts that food aid arriving in Bangladesh and many other places isn’t used to feed the poor. Governments typically sell the food on local markets and use the proceeds however they choose. Here, the government chooses to sell the food in cut-rate ration shops to members of the middle class.”

(Woods – and others – note that this kind of thing distorts the domestic markets at the expense of local farmers, who are thus discouraged from producing what is needed because the influx of foreign aid is swamping the natural response that would result on a free market).

Even leftists like Amartya Sen have conceded that what is most important in development isn’t a function of aid, but internal liberty such as a free press (his nobel prize was based on his findings in this area, the most noteworthy aspect of which is that there has not been a famine in a country with a free press – a feature that has nothing to do with what foreigners give or do not give). (I wouldn’t recommend Sen as a general source of wisdom on this, though; he’s a social justice guy and he thinks incentives have no moral basis, and he remains in favor of wealth transfers on social justice grounds; probably the furthest he would go is wanting them to be “more effective” and “reformed” to “find out what works,” which is also what my guess the response will be from this “idealistic group” that is “preparing to lobby the government” that you speak of).

Microloans, which were to be the “big new thing” now, and which aim at redirecting aid from government-to-government to the micro level, are even being called into question by some of their advocates now that it has become “the next big thing.” (Lesson: beware of Progressive “Next Big Things,” though I can’t point you to a specific book or article.

Anyhow if you can find a copy of “The Church and the Market” its chapter on economic development & foreign aid is good-in-itself and a goldmine of footnotes citing “mainstream” development/aid specialists on how ineffective and perverse foreign aid, especially government foreign aid, is.

You might recommend to this group that instead of spending their time lobbying government to spend other people’s money on this project, making themselves feel better at other people’s expense, they themselves devote their own money (and spend the time they would otherwise spend lobbying) on some useful project. I say that not because it would be effective, but personal (as opposed to government) aid is generally least damaging, *can* be positive (on the margins), but also mainly because it would puncture their balloons. Likewise point out that most government “foreign aid” ends up being recycled back to big domestic businesses (foreign governments are usually mandated to spend the money, or at least the lion’s share of it, buying goods from the donor’s domestic enterprises), and “they don’t want to help put money in the pockets of big business in America, do they?”

But I admit these recommendations would mainly be trolling. Still, you could do it for the lulz! Especially since they’re almost certainly, 99.9% probability, going to go ahead with their lobbying effort regardless of what proofs you present them as to how bad foreign development aid is (but progressivism is nothing if not REASON and SCIENCE! Praise their respect for empiricism). So you may as well get some lulz trolling them.

[porphyrogenitus]

Each lecture page sometimes includes “recommended readings,” some (sometimes many, depending on the course in question) do not have them for that class; sometimes they’re linked in the powerpoint, but sometimes not.

Each lecture in each course covers enough that their could be/probably should be “recommended readings” links added for each, something relatively easy to do on a webpage “retrospectively.”

Still, on the “adding value,” for $100, in many cases $70, I think we get a lot of value for our coin (especially given that we get to pay in near-worthless Bernak$; – just wait till Tom starts charging us in gold-equivalents! Oh, wait; I shouldn’t give him any ideas. . .).

[porphyrogenitus]

This guy’s work is pretty good; he studied Islam as an “outsider” by first becoming an “insider” of sorts, and then reading all the major works that Islamic scholars (of all stripes, not just the Salafists) base their reasoning on. He critiques Islam (which is distinct from critiquing Moslems-as-people).

Also, to touch on one of my own hobbyhorses: I recommend books like Zoe Oldenbourg’s The Crusades, one of the better pre-PCera histories, one that doesn’t whitewash things but also does not present the Islamic world as an innocent victim of aggression (the usual tack taken now, at least by general academics), and any book by Steven Runciman on either the Crusades or Byzantium. Indeed reading almost any good history of Byzantium will quickly and thoroughly disabuse one of the notion that Islam is “a religion of peace” that wanted/wants only friendly relations with “people of the book,” and the idea that the West (formerly known as “Christendom”) only has problems with the people of the Middle East now because of “backlash” against what “we did to them” (an inane simplification one often hears even from otherwise sound libertarian types; plausible because there is certainly an element of that, but one that treats “The Other” as mere automatons who only respond to whatever stimuli we input into them. Other people are actors too, and can be quite aggressive for reasons of their own).

[porphyrogenitus]

“While its heavily documented and historically accurate its quite an odd reading suggestion.”

The Rothbardian solution would have been one that wasn’t used there; – rather than essentially cartelizing the New Orleans Slaughterhouses (IIRC closing all but 2 politically-selected ones), torts to keep them from dumpling their slime onto other people’s property (including waterways); then Rothbard would say, under his system, “we” wouldn’t be infecting “ourselves,” because the slaughterhouses could go about their business without depositing the viscera in this way, and the ones that could not afford to conduct their businesses properly would have been the ones that closed while the others would have remained open.

“In regards to the other subject..the professor responded…the words “dead white men””

An ad hominem used to dismiss ideas he does not like based on their origins but without addressing the ideas themselves. If you’re able to be cheeky enough, point that out, and then point out that virtually all the ideas/methods of constitutional interpretation he does like (I’m assuming he’s some sort of progressive, Left Progressive or Liberal Progressive) originated with “dead white men” also, so invoking this purile phrase is rather inapt.

[porphyrogenitus]

“The underlying problem, of course, is the extension of the suffrage, which drastically reduced the educational level of the electorate. I cannot imagine any way of counteracting that development.”

Strict separation of education and state (something John Stewart Mill proposed but which his left-oriented successors conveniently forgot) would help here, but probably only on the margins.

“I have proposed an Article V Convention to amend the Constitution as a means of restoring the federal principle.”

Your idea is a good idea but why not just repeal the 17th Amendment? Is it a matter of strategic considerations (now that people have gotten used to electing Senators and considering theirs stand-up guys and everyone elses useless timeserving windbags, they won’t want to give up direct election of these Life Senators, so the best available strategy to restore some sort of Federalism is to add this feature)?

Aside from the Court decision aspect though I think one major problem is Federal money; as long as so much money goes to the Federal Government and then is cycled back to the States, the latter are in effect paid off to toe the line (Progressives actually *love* machine politics – at a wholesale, national level; that’s the only reason they hated the local political machines – like any firm of the era, they wanted to stamp out their smaller competitors).

[porphyrogenitus]

I’m an idiot who confused it with Caroline Products; which does bring up the question of why that case isn’t mentioned.

Sorry for being a confused idiot.

[porphyrogenitus]

M. Rothbard would probably want to mention the Flexner Report – among the first national intrusions into health care, which led to the empowerment of the AMA (mostly at the State level) to, in essence, license medical schools, and they immediately closed about half (and sharply limited the number of new ones they later authorized), in order to decrease the supply of new doctors and thus, in time, drive up prices.

The Flexner Report also led to the situation where the AMA was empowered by the government as a trade association to decide what procedures had to be done by Doctors and what could be left to Nurses and the like, and naturally they made decisions so as to force more procedures to require a Doctor, again driving up costs.

Then later of course one gets the whole tax-deduction-for-businesses-during-a-time-of-price-controls things, which further distorts the health care market, leading to subsequent government interventions, which follow essentially the pattern outlined by Mises in his critique of interventionism (probably – and this is just a SWAG – among the 10 books Dr. Gutzman would want people to have read).

The Flexner Report/AMA situation, btw, is a good counter-argument to the people you sometimes run across who think that we’d all be better off if we reoriented our economy along the lines of a modernized version of the medieval guild system.

[porphyrogenitus]

“The Supreme Court is a representative institution in that it attempts to do what is right for the nation as a whole.” is a common view fed to students but which few of the mouthpieces of this position really in their hearts believe, as soon as you bring up decisions they don’t like.

Ironically I’m taking a graduate-level political science con-law course this semester (the beginning of Uni is one reason I haven’t been as active in these forums as during winter break), taught by the same sort of nice-but-typical-academic progressor, and it is evident that there is a sort of doublethink; on the one hand, in some lectures, the outlook like the above of the Court as the great deliberative body that expands our rights and basically has plenary power to do so and the constitution means whatever they say, and then in other lectures, on other topics and other periods, expressing skepticism towards the court, “look at their reasoning, wasn’t it poor,” attitude, &tc. I’ve used my Q&A/discussion time to highlight that in the cases where he is suggesting they’re wonderful and in the cases they’re suggesting they are wrongheaded, they are behaving in exactly the same way, (illustrating through this, without directly saying, that he he/the textbook authors are doing the same thing he/the textbook authors/&tc cautioned us *not* to do at the beginning of the course: react as laymen, praising decisions whose outcomes we ideologically like and deploring decisions we ideologically dislike).

“The Supreme Court is a representative institution in that it attempts to do what is right for the nation as a whole.” is also presenting the Court-as-plenary-policy-maker rather than court as interpreter of law/interpreter of the constitution. It takes as a “given” the Progressive revolution that started a hundred years ago, that certain public officials/technical experts should be empowered “to do what [they think] is right,” which was based on believing that there is a certain class of people (public officials & intellectuals) who float above personal self-interest and have none of their own (i.e. governmental bodies/governmental agencies have no interests they pursue, they just pursue the general welfare), that they are – at least if guided by progressivism – are able to take a long overview, both in time and space – of society and discern what is best for everyone, and that if the Constitution-as-written acts as an obstacle to their doing so, they should simply ignore its limits and reinterpret it in favor of their expansive use of power (not that this represents government acting in its own interests – accumulation of power – or encroachment upon our lives, mind; they’re just doing it because it’s whats best for us, obviously, and if we fail to see that it just proves the point that we’re too benighted and need such wise overseers to make these decisions for us, and this is also why we can’t be bothered to use the cumbersome amendment process to make these constitutional alterations; left to that alone, these necessary changes simply would not happen because the people are too short-sighted to see the wisdom of the changes, but in time – under our enlightened-progressive guidance – most of them will come around later).

Any close examination of, say, anti-trust rulings, will highlight that this is bunk. Which is possibly why, even over 6 decades after John McGee’s empirical examination of the Standard Oil antitrust case, and much research into that by specialists in the field (including DiLorenzo & Armentano), none – not even the work of “mainstream” academics in that field – has penetrated the general (progressive) scholarly community, who still lecture as if all one needed to know was Tarbell and anti-trust has been designed (mainly by the courts) to protect the general public rather than simply used as a whip by one set of interests against their rivals. (And these modern academics prize themselves on how “empirical” they are).

[porphyrogenitus]

mmafan – I’m in the same boat as you, though I recognize the problems with any state, including a limited, minarchist state (I pretty much agree with everything Tom Woods says in this video). However I haven’t been persuaded by, for example, Bob Murphy’s arguments to the effect that a stateless society could defend itself from predatory states (some time I’ll post my reasons for disagreeing), among other reasons.

As for economists who agree with your (mmafan) position, Mises himself was one, as was Hayek (I recommend most of Hayek’s writings, which first attracted me to all this years ago, even while accepting that yes, there are problems with it, especially from the Rothbardian-Hoppean PoV). Most non-Austro-libertarians support a minarchist state (Austrian economics does not logically compel statelessness, but if one follows its arguments the way, say, Rothbard did, then one can legitimately conclude that a stateless society would be the best society*); Milton Friedman for example was a sort of minarchist. Ayn Rand and nearly all Objectivists are minarchists. Robert Nozick, who was not an economist but whose thinking was heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (for all that most Rothbardians don’t think much of Nozick’s ASU), was a minarchist.

I’m a minarchist but I align myself with the Austro-Libertarians because 1) I think Austrian Economics is much better than other economic theories and 2) I would prefer to live in a world where Austro-Libertarian anarcho-capitalism was possible. That is, I want them to be correct. I just do not think they are quite correct. But in the meantime, I’d much rather work towards their goals than those of other movements I could think of.

*I myself agree with Jefferson that a government is a necessary evil; not for economic reasons, or many of the reasons usually given. But I do also agree with Randall Holcombe’s argument here, though I would be remiss in not noting Walter Block’s article attempting to rebut Holcombe).

[porphyrogenitus]

The first prerogative of any political community worthy of the name – and this would include a stateless anarcho-capitalistic community – is to distinguish between who is a member and who is not, and to establish standards for non-members to join (and those standards are not and cannot be “any warm body with a pulse” – unless you’re a progressive, that is, whose movement thrives on the basis of low-information throngs pulling levers on your behalf; see below).

“Open-borders” libertarianism is common but IMO insipidly moronic because it is self-defeating for this very reason; in almost every case it involves immigration of populations who will not support libertarian policies, anarchistic or otherwise. They usually think “we can at least work with the statists on this area of common ground,” but they have things exactly backwards and have, as I mentioned in another thread, taken themselves out behind the barn and shot themselves in the back of the head by supporting this failed project (failed from the PoV of advancing the libertarian/freedom cause). Only the progressive statists (both in America and Europe) have properly understood the political-ideological impact.

Libertarians and anarchists should *first* make a free/libertarian society, and then welcome those who want to share in that (and only those who want to share in that). Inviting as many indigent people into the existing welfare-state societies, who come because they are attracted to those existing welfare-state societies, for whatever reason, and then expecting those people to support dismantling them is. . .moronic. Predictably self-immolating.

*(This definitely includes a stateless anarcho-capitalist community; lets say an excentric billionare who happened to live in it wanted to change it to a stated society – perhaps because he wanted to be in charge. He pays a bunch of people to come into that anarchistic society, who he plans to be his minions for organizing that society into a state under his control, by any means necessary. IMO it would not be morally objectionable for the members of that community, if they learned of his aims, to prevent those people from entering it’s area, without waiting for him to initiate force first. Now, people say this can be done because private roads et al but IMO the members of the community could resist such a plan, even if the owner of the roads said to himself “I’m a businessman, if his guys pay the same toll to use my roads as anyone else does, I’m not interested in their political ideology.”)

[porphyrogenitus]

(starting a separate post for clarity).

Where was I? Oh, yes: one of the problems is the common phrase “original intent,” which allows people to say “we cannot know intent.” Which is true, under some definitions of “intent” (was, for example, Hamilton sincere in some of the arguments he made before the Constitution was ratified? Or was his real intent something closer to the arguments he made about what Federal powers were after it was ratified?)

The real standard is original meaning – the meaning of the terms and phrases, as understood at the time, and as inscribed in the written records/documents at the time of ratification. These are not nearly as “unclear” or “vague” as Progressives like to say (the reason they argue that is precisely so that they can substitute their own instead, at their discretion, and with a “standard” that changes with as demanded by their instrumental utility).

original meaning is the only way to interpret the constitution; the other, bogus, standard renders it a dead letter (aka “living document” – “living’ simply means “meaningless and dead by any serious measure.”)

Of course, it actually is. Your actual Constitution is Footnote 4. But reminding them of the discrepancy is useful; it may tug at their conscience (if they have one) or persuade the average open-minded person that the current USG is not worthy of their respect or support, as it is an illegitimate usurpation.

[porphyrogenitus]

One of the problems is the common phrase “original intent,” which allows people like your progressive friend to say “we cannot know intent.” (OtoH, his standard – “evaluate cost and benefits” has its own problems – costs to whom and measured by what standard, and benefits to whom and measured by what standard? – Essentially it’s an argument for unlimited government, unlimited discretion in the hands of judges; de-legitimizing the very constitution from which these judges/officials ostensibly get their authority. Without the constitution, they’re just a bunch of tyrants whose authority is backed only by naked might. Which, at least to many people here, would at least be revealingly candid).

I don’t think your friend would hold the same standard for speech/expression (“lets evaluate the costs and benefits – by some arbitrary standard – and forbid speech where the cost is determined to potentially outweigh the benefits) (potential is the only way to measure such things prospectively).

Note also that in the long history of government evaluations of what the costs are and what the benefits are of any measure or policy, their record of accuracy is. . .poor.

(ending this post because I meandered).

[porphyrogenitus]

“Perfection not being an option” is one thing but as I demonstrated Rothbard’s principle offers no protection whatsoever for children against child abuse, which is hardly “a minor detail we can safely ignore.”

In my reply I also granted that current child protective laws and services are wretched. It’s not a refutation to repeat that. Until AnarchoLibertarians treat this with the significant attention it deserves (and as I said I give credit to Stephan Kinsella for at least thinking fairly deeply and candidly on it, though ultimately I thought his solution was unsatisfactory), their position is and should be unconvincing.

Which is the same with your #2: one might use that same #2 to argue that there should be no protective services or courts in an AnarchoCapitalist society whatsoever because “that is hardly the only way to solve a problem.” We do not do that with respect to other people (besides children), because we recognize that in a sufficient number of cases these “other way[s] to solve a problem” will prove insufficient, so protective agencies and courts are and ought to remain the ultimate recourse for redress.

This applies likewise to the “reputation is a sufficient guard against abuse” argument – most (though not all) parental child abuse takes place in private. But even when it doesn’t – child abuse is considered especially heinous in today’s society. Even today’s criminals look at child abusers with scorn. Child abusers are one of the few classes of criminals who are registered and their identities publicly recorded in a systematic way (something that would not happen in the version of an AnCap society you describe, since they would not be tried. I suppose people could create vigilante lists of suspected child abusers, with all the pitfalls that would have). Abuse continues.

I’m sorry, the handwave won’t do here; at least not with me. Especially since – and I wanted to be charitable, but some of the things Rothbard himself wrote on this, while frank, and followed as logical conclusions from his premises, was odious. I respect his candor (especially since he seems to have been a very decent man; I never met him, obviously, but he seems to have been), and so far those who have continued to develop his work have not found a good way to fix this consistent with the logic of his theory. We all know that in practice no theory will be implemented perfectly but when the theory contains a huge gaping hole (if anything, adults, who have greater resources and recourses than children, could better do without courts than children could), it’s proper to point out that the theory is fundamentally flawed and unimplementable as-is.

So, sorry; this is a case where it simply won’t do to contrast the existing situation with what one imagines it might be in an AnarchoCapitalist society, until AnCap theory itself can provide protection to children consistent with its own internal principles as strong as it provides to every other individual whose liberty it recognizes ought to be respected, with ultimate recourse to legal sanction if necessary.

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