[porphyrogenitus]

As this guy wrote, sardonically:

“But as we all know by now, there is nothing in the Bill of Rights that can’t be circumvented, either by appeals to the Commerce Clause or by calling something a tax — even when it wasn’t introduced as one and had magically to be transformed into one by a powerful judicial wizard.”

He (and SmartMuffin) forgot to mention the 14th Amendment. They throw that out there a lot, too; equal protection clause + “incorporation” doctrine/jurisprudence in practical terms means that the federal government can do whatever it feels it needs to limit states & individuals (basically it amounted to inverting the original limits; now the Federal Government has unlimited power to limit any institution and individual under its jurisdiction).

Also, don’t forget that your real constitution is Footnote Four, which gives the Federal Government “plenary” (literally) power over the economy – which in practice is practically everything, because as Austrians know, economic means just are the means to pursue any goal/end you might have.

(See Also: West Coast Hotel & Wickard v Filburn).

As another man wrote:

“These precedents establish the Fourth Republic as a universal and absolute government, subject only to a few isolated limitations, which in practice do not matter at all. For example, no European country has any clear equivalent of our First Amendment, either in its original meaning or in its Footnote Four restatement. If dissidents are being lined up and shot in stadiums in Europe, I have somehow remained ignorant of it. ‘Constitutional law’ in the Fourth Republic is a very real and very substantial body of law, but its connection to the original charter of the Second Republic is entirely nominal.

No, the US government is the 800-pound gorilla. It sits wherever it wants. But ‘it’ is not one entity. It is, again, a network of competing power centers.”

(P.S. this also applies to foreign governments – such as, say, Iran. Which is why – and I’m sorry to say this, but it needs to be said – I always lulz whenever a libertarian says something that suggests they see the government of Iran as a rational unitary actor. The USG isn’t, so why should foreign governments be? Is ours somehow unique in its absurdity? Have you looked at the EU lately – another relatively “civilized” superstructure, but hardly a “rational unitary actor in world affairs.” Meanwhile, Iran has a political structure that would make the government of my namesake look absolutely simple and coherent. Sorry; I don’t mean to dump on “libertarians” since for all practical purposes I am one. But that doesn’t mean we’re above criticism. End of digression; back to the USG, which certainly does bear close analysis.)

[porphyrogenitus]

Major banks currently have significant excess reserves where, traditionally, they have practically 0 as you can see. (See also this, which charts both excess reserves and the increase in the monetary base – they practically mirror each other).

Given the nature of fractional reserve banking, if/when the banks decide to put these excess reserves into the economy, well, watch out.

The question then becomes: why have they held onto excess reserves? What is the purpose of having so much excess reserves?

[porphyrogenitus]

This is from “A Rulebook for Arguments” by Anthony Weston

Oh ho ho! I’m reminded of this great bit. :p

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Here’s something that will really make your “only the government should be armed, because the only people we can trust with deadly force are politicians” friends freak out: DIY Armed Drones!

[porphyrogenitus]

Well, first I’ll support what Professor Jewell says, but then go beyond it slightly, cutting through to the core. First, empiricism does not establish itself. It has to be established by a foundation that it, itself, cannot provide (a number of a priori premises).

Secondly, as even (especially) empiricists in epistemology admit, consistently applied empiricism never fully establishes anything as “true.” All they really get from empiricism alone are a series of cases (looking for a theory – or a fire). Now, if you have a theory through which to interpret empirical evidence, empirical data can – again as even (especially) empirical epistemologists accept – never conclusively establish or prove the theory. This is why they tend instead to go in for “fallsification.” Theories can be falsified empirically, but not “proven true.”

Therefore, yes, a consistent empiricist would never be able to say “there is not and never has been revelation.”

Now, I’ll also recommend this argument put forth by someone who is, himself, an atheist:

“The coolest thing about Universalism is that it has the perfect opposition. If a Christian who believes his or her faith is justified by universal reason is a Universalist, a Christian who believes his or her faith is justified by divine revelation – in other words, a “Christian” as the word is commonly used today – might be called a Revelationist.

Suppose you have two faiths. Both claim to be absolutely and undebatably true. Faith A tells you it is an ineluctable consequence of reason. Faith B tells you it is the literal word of God. Which is more likely to be accurate?

The answer is that you have no information at all. Perhaps faith B is the literal word of God, but you have no way to distinguish it from something that someone just made up. Perhaps faith A can be derived from pure reason, but you have no way to know if the derivation is accurate unless you work through it yourself. In which case, why do you need faith A?

In fact, of the two, faith A is almost certainly more powerful and dangerous. As anyone who’s majored in Marxist-Leninist Studies knows, it’s very easy to construct an edifice of pseudo-reason so vast and daunting that working through it is quite impractical. And this edifice is much more free to contradict common sense – in fact, it has an incentive to do so, because nonsensical results are especially subtle and hard to follow.

Whereas when the word of God contradicts common sense, the idea that it might not actually be the word of God isn’t too hard to come by. In other words, if faith A contains any fallacies, they are effectively camouflaged.”

Me again: A lot of so-called rational empiricists take a lot on faith themselves; they certainly don’t work through everything themselves, gathering data independently. Rather they accept from some authority this or that; they read in some book by, say, a crank like Dawkins or Dennett and pick up on some of their rhetorical flourishes and “gotcha” questions, satires, and logical fallacies/argument-from-ignorance masquerading as reason, and the like (this is much more popular among the New Atheist set, I notice, than actual reasoned argumentation). New Athiests also tend to take it on faith that scientists (physicists or what have you) have demonstrated things they haven’t really even understood properly, much less demonstrated. Und so weter. After all, believing some guy who tells you he proved the universe created itself from nothing is no more scientific than someone claiming he saw a guy turn water into wine or feed five thousand from a few loaves and fishes.

In closing, I remember a funny illustrative passage in one of the Hitchhiker’s books, on what it would truly mean to be a consistent empiricist; each day is a new day and whenever one wants to, say, use a pencil, one must experiment with it from scratch.

(Btw, none of this is to imply that looking at empirical reality has no relevance. Rather, only that empiricism by itself is incomplete and, by itself, incoherent).

[porphyrogenitus]

A lot of times particular participants in a discussion, especially an internet discussion, aren’t going to be willing to change their mind, be convinced by evidence/argument, or debate. Possibly because once they get into such a discussion, it becomes a matter of not wanting to be seen as “wrong.”

It’s often a matter of finding the right approach, to illustrate the point you’re trying to make with an example that appeals to them or that, given their own goals, they cannot refuse to accept. But I wonder if you’ve ever experienced this: sometimes in a discussion, especially a discussion with friends, you can get them to finally agree that you have a point, understand, and the discussion seems to end with them accepting that your position is correct. But then the next day, it’s as if it never happened. They’re right back to parroting the same, canned, statist arguments they picked up in a column somewhere.

So wat you’ve got to keep in mind is some wise words from Strother Martin. Wise words indeed.

I think a big part of it ends up being 1) even (especially!) the “brave” “dissenters” who see themselves as “speaking truth to power” really don’t want to go against fashionable opinion. And despite wanting to see themselves as, and be seen as, transgressive rebel outsiders, there’s no disguising what views are fashionable. . .
2) a desire, however hidden, to be part of the movement with power over others. Now, what power over others does Austrian Economics or Libertarianism offer? Virtually none. Note that this #2 is usually not overtly admitted to be a quest for power over others. Because its adherents – sincerely – believe they good motives. The best of motives. They want to “change the world,” “transform society,” “make the world a better place,” “make a difference,” and the like. They see as the “optimistic view of human nature,” for example, is that it is socially determined and can be changed. Now, reframed, this “optimistic” view means “manipulated by those in power” who nudge and goad us along. This “optimistic” view they think means that “we” can, through using political institutions the right way, fix things – push the right buttons to fix the economy, say. They don’t want to believe that the best course is to let people make their own choices (and their own mistakes); they want to believe they can “help others” (which means “take some decisions from them and make them ‘democratically,’ which just means through civil service institutions managed by technical experts who know better, and thus will organize communities for the community members, because the community can’t organize itself!)

Belief in, say, spontaneous order, means giving up on all that as an illusion; as the dog in aesop’s fable who goes after the bone in the lake. This they tend to see as “giving up.”

Now, in the larger sense, it is true that Austrian Economics, and Libertarianism, is the real radicalism; and will really produce benevolent social transformations. Will really liberate people. All the goals they claim to have. And it will take the kind of mobilization and participation/activism they want to be a part of. But it’s very difficult to get people to see that. So they end up *wanting* to believe that, at minimum, Keynsianism is true, for example (of not Marxism or other forms of interventionism).

People can be persuaded. But it takes not just the right approach, but it takes a willingness on their part, an openness to persuasion. Sometimes the best approach isn’t direct, but rather to ask them questions, why they believe this or that, pursuing a line of questioning. Sometimes also it means planting little seeds of doubt in their mind, or illustrating how what they advocate actually hurts real people, seeds that may take years to grow. It also may take disprooving the canards they’re often fed; – showing them that while Krugman (or whomever) claims that “libertarians only care about themselves, while good people care about others as well,” it is not true: libertarians believe in human wellbeing, but just believe a gun in the ribs is not the best way to achieve that.

In any case, no easy task much of the time, and persuasion has to be on all levels.

[porphyrogenitus]

And…more again on Left-Anarchism and unlimited ‘participatory democracy,’ Chomsky-style; from a post quoting a sympathetic source:

“The GA [General Aseembly] became the main venue for this torture, and sitting through it was like watching someone sandpaper an open wound. Everyone said “Fuck the GA” as a joke, but as time wore on, the laughter was getting too long and too hoarse; a joke with blood in it. The metaphorical pain became less metaphorical with each eviction, with the gnawing feeling that something was coming.

Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.

By the time I returned to NY from visiting the camp in DC, exhausted with the pain of six evictions, the NYC GA was a place where women were threatened with beatings, and street kids with calls to the police. All the reasonable people had gotten the fuck out. It had become a gladiator pit no one enjoyed watching. Even Weev, the famous internet troll, didn’t last through the nastiness of the GA I took him to. He left while I wasn’t looking, without saying goodbye. We never spoke about it. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t have to ask why. It was the tiny, brutal, and bitter politics of failed people.”

Now, of course, Chomsky claims that Lenin never tried factory democracy. And to some extent this is true. But the period of the Russian Revolution did try it – “Soviets” – Worker’s councils – sprouted up in Russia all throughout 1917. They mostly produced just this outcome, as quickly as Occupy did, and either suppressed themselves (collapsed in just this fashion, though often with more internecine violence) or were yoked to the Lenin Regime then self-liquidated in the wake of the October Revolution.

[porphyrogenitus]

I haven’t looked into it, but my guess is that the “profit” is an accounting gymmick that only counts a portion of what AIG really received.

BUT – lets stipulate that, in this instance it really is a “profit.”

What does that prove? Not much, really; – it’s a “statistical outlier” when it comes to government “investments.”

Look, they (“they”) could point to the TVA being a “successful investment of government funds” – how they did that was 1) not count all the subsidies 2) not count the way they stacked the regulatory deck in favor of TVA and against its market competitors and 3) shennanigans.

Now, when it comes to even, say, the executives of Solyndra or LightSquared, *they* turned a profit, even while the firm failed (and they shoveled money into various campaign chests, so it was a success all around!)

But at the foundation of this example is that it only looks at part of the picture; in voluntary exchanges on the free market, we know that all participants in an exchange come out ahead, by their own lights. We also know that the most efficient firms tend (tend) to succeed and the less efficient are weeded out.

But in cases such as this, where a firm is given billions of dollars coercively taken from others, well the fact that the firm advantaged by such subsidies is able to pay back it’s patrons says nothing about the overall social/market gains or losses; a firm that otherwise would have failed or restructured to be more efficient was propped up, at the expense of. . .what? The “what” is invisible. But that “what” may be better firms that would have taken the place of the current market leaders, the ones with a favorable relationship to government (and who now look to government as their “Consumer-is-Sovereign,” because that government is their most important “customer,” bar none. The rest of us? We can go hang).

But lets go back to that “statistical outlier” thing; the fact that some firms are able to use their special relationship with government and funds wrested from people invollentarily in order to rake in the dough at the expense of existing and potential rivals will be used by state officials & their courtiers to say “see? this works! Lets do more of it!” – all the billions upon billions that will never be paid back, all the uncounted failures that are slipped down the memory hole, to the contrary notwithstanding.

The amazing thing, rather, isn’t that AIG was able to give back to its patrons in government. I mean, I would hope that if I had a pipeline to billions upon billions of dollars and an effectively unlimited line of credit to the guys with the money machine, I’d be able to crush market rivals who didn’t have that sweet advantage, and return some of the swag to my patrons. Oh, no – the amazing thing isn’t that this “works” sometimes for the insiders. The amazing thing is how often it fails.

(One guess is: when it “fails” – the Solyndras that outright declare bankruptcy, – it was never meant to “succeed” in the first place. Otherwise, there would have just been another line to free money. Rather, as with any grift, even these “succeed” in the way they were meant to – the grifters just move on to the next racket, and leave the suckers holding the bag. Just ask John Corzine how that works out; millions of dollars, millions of dollars! but for the suckers who trusted him with their money? The bag.)

This is a racket where the club members are winners – but that doesn’t mean the economy as a whole, or the “general public” comes out ahead. And, yes, sometimes they will have “demonstration projects” where the books are finagled so that it looks like the government (which are not all the payers) “came out ahead,” but that’s to keep the suckers lining up for more. Even guys setting up a three-card monty racket on the streetcorner know that you have to let the marks win once in awhile so they keep their interest.

But that doesn’t mean the game isn’t rigged. All it means is that the carnival barkers were given some good materiel to work the crowd with so they’ll be ready for more of the same.

[porphyrogenitus]

The Swiss actually issue high-powered weaponry to their citizens.

Evidently high-powered weaponry in the hands of people is not the cause of violence. They even bicycle with them.

[porphyrogenitus]

Subjectivist/social constructivist morality really has no content of its own because it is too subject to manipulation by how one frames the question. By the way, it is thus no accident that the academic left is enamored with subjectivist/constructivist foundations for ethics/morality; – the framers set the outcome and can move the dot around as they please.

To keep it short, I’m just going to leave this here. Oh and this, also, fell off the back of my truck.

[porphyrogenitus]

This touches on one of my favorite Robert Higgs lectures – the last few minutes, especially, because it is obvious the man cares deeply about others (it is often – falsely – claimed that “libertarians only care about themselves, not the less fortunate. What about the suffering of others” – now, that pernicious lie can be disproven in many ways; but it can be illustrated with Higgs, here). But the whole lecture is good, not just on how quality assurance would be provided in a free market but how it is – or, rather, is not – under the current regulatory regime.

“Also, who should be held criminally liable when people are hurt, whether in FDA-cartel-like industry or in a free market, for innately dangerous drugs (side effects) or in contaminated drugs such as this case? Should it be the manufacturer? The administering doctor, nurse, etc? The dispensing pharmacist? If the patient administers to himself, then no one?”

One option left off of here is the FDA. I’d like to hold them criminally liable for the harm they do. But I suppose that’s not possible under the present regime.

But, strictly speaking, everyone in that chain could potentially be held liable if they did not do their due diligence. That would be a matter for investigation and discovery in each case. I think “caviate emptor” would go too far; – but yes the patient should also do their due diligence.

The problem with this individual case and the “capitalism fails” theory is that we don’t have a real market, so it’s (once again) dealing in counterfactuals. But the Higgs lecture is, again, very good on this because it discusses how these individual, obvious cases are pointed to by people who use them to demand tighter regulatory controls, but the deaths caused by tight regulatory control are “unseen.” (Higgs makes the distinction between “Type 1” and “Type 2”) deaths. He points out – several times, IIRC – that even “mainstream” (non-Libertarian, non-Austrian-economist) researchers who specialize in the field have concluded that FDA-style regulations kill far more people every year than they save (and this in studies with all kinds of controls, and often with grant-funding that would incentivize them to reach the opposite conclusion if that was at all even remotely plausible, I might add). However, as with all the “ratchet” effects that Higgs has specialized in, these episodic events are used as anecdotes to form the basis of increasing government.

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“Personally, I am a little uncomfortable and disappointed with the air of Christian bias so far in my listening (I’m only on lecture 7). I was not expecting to get such a heavy dose of that perspective when I signed up for courses tied so heavily with liberty, reason, and logic. It’s not so much that religious topics are covered that’s bothered me, but that it feels Dr. J is overstating or legitimating its role in Western History and in our life.”

1) I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the influence. In point of fact, most of what is taught in the mainstream vastly understates (one might ask oneself why, but that’s not our purpose here).
2) In no small part because of #1, to delegitimate it’s role is to deligitimate Western History and Civilization (btw, this might answer my parenthetical in #1), which within living memory was still referred to as “Christendom” unironically (when doing research on a political theory paper I was writing, I came across a scholarly paper, written in the mid-60s, and not overtly religious at all, which used that word once, unironically, as a descriptor of the West as a whole. As far as I know, that was the last time it was used unironically).

3) For the most part as Professor Jewell’s lecture series goes on, when he describes various Christological/Theological controversies – well apparently a lot of people have a problem with the inclusion/”focus” of discussion on these matters. However, – and this is an analogy* – matters of theological doctrine were as important to them as ideological-political matters are to people today. Now, you might think people are foolish to adopt this or that view. Or you might think they are foolish to place so much emphasis upon it. Or get so strongly stirred up over these things. But if you want to understand them, then you need to know about these things. Dismissal with a sneer before knowing – that is, that things should not even be brought to your attention – is not really a search for historical understanding, or informed rational knowledge (though I guess it would fall within the realm of “rational ignorance theory“).

Finally – you’re probably attracted to this site because you’re attracted to Austro-Libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, who was apparently agnostic-atheist, is basically the founder of Austro-Libertarianism. He didn’t think it was beneith him to know about the religious beliefs and practices of people. Indeed, I’m fairly sure that, given how much attention he himself gave these matters in his studies & writings on American history, he wouldn’t think it was possible to have a good understanding of either American or Western History without knowing these things, and treating the issues at least with some respect (now, as for people who tried to use the power of the state to enforce them, he held the same attitude towards that as he did towards anyone – secular as well as religious – who did that sort of thing). And, evidently (I’m far, far from an expert on Rothbard) one of his breaks with Rand is that he did not think all people or ideas with religious basis/origin should be dismissed out of hand as irrational nutters. (Bob Murphy, earlier this year, made a good converse point: many of the people who read his blog regularly and respect his reasoning and logic on all sorts of matters. . .then suddenly dismiss him as being “irrational” when he talks about Christianity. He made the point that – he’s the same person. Likewise, Ed Feser – a former Atheist, like Murphy – makes the point that he became a Christian on a rational basis. Now, you may disagree with the reasoning of both men, and find flaws in it – but the way to do so would be the same way one does with anyone’s reasoning. Not simply a contemptuous sneer. That, I would suggest, is the irrational mindset).

*which sincere Christians would probably see as crude, because for a truly devout person, matters of faith are more important than matters of temporal politics. You may disagree with that, but this is not in and of itself a necessarily rational disagreement on your part.

[porphyrogenitus]

Re. Chomksy-style “factory democracy,” – which would never be put in practice by guys like him, anyhow – but if it were, well I’m just going to leave this here.

“Do you see what we saw? We saw we’d be given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it — for observing it.”

[porphyrogenitus]

Btw, looking at this guy’s arguments, it seems not only has he been influenced by Keynsianism, but MMT, and stuff like Elaine Brown’s “Web of Debt.”

(He might not have read “Web of Debt,” but it hardly matters; one thing Keynes was right about is people are often influenced by economists without even being overtly aware of the origins of their economic thinking. So it doesn’t matter if he knows the names involved, the line of reasoning has a line of decent).

Anyhow, cutting that story short, I should repost this lecture by Gary North on Social Credit et al, which influenced not just Keynes (as he goes into), but people like Elaine Brown, and other people who think the solution is just for the government to print a lot of money and distribute it to The People.

Edit, Sunday Dec 9: Speak of the rob’t debil again, Bob Murphy found a wonderful article embodying this type of thinking at the near-highest levels. ““I like it,” said Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There’s nothing that’s obviously economically problematic about it.”

But really Gagnon is being a piker. Why not mint two platinum coins with a really pro denomination. Unfunded future liabilities? No problem!

The only reason I can think of for the austerian thinking that Gagnon is displaying there is he must truly hate the poor & elderly or something.

[porphyrogenitus]

“ He’s still convinced that money creation does not cause increased prices”

Why does the government need to tax at all, then? They can just give us free money, which is equivalent to giving us free stuff, amirite?

Dittoes if deficits aren’t a problem at all – hold him to his exact words on both of these things (btw, he was simply wrong when he said that the government owed most of the money to itself – noting that even, technically, the bonds held by the Federal Reserve are not held by the USG, because the Federal Reserve is technically a private organization; it’s a Quango, as the Brits would say). But be that as it may, if deficits aren’t a problem at all (his words), why tax at all? Just to sock it to hated richers, it seems, because stuff that comes from the government is basically magic – it’s free from all constraints.

“that contains a graph showing the growth of the monetary base since 2008 and a relatively flat CPI as evidence that money creation does not cause an increase in CPI.

My assumption is that CPI has not gone up because the banks are sitting on the new money rather than lending it into circulation, but even then, are we to expect prices to go up with exact proportion to the money creation?”

Professor Herbner will certainly be much better positioned to answer this than I am; but basically the banks aren’t lending the money because 1) the Fed is, effectively, paying them a small sum to not hold them and thus sum outweighs any benefit the banks can see from lending it because 2) the obvious bad result, since this method of “fixing” the economy (massive bogus stimulus programs and QE) has nothing whatsoever to do with producing a real economy where it seems that there are investments (loans) worth making.

Also, one reason the CPI hasn’t spiked much is that the velocity of money is still well below previous levels – again because this method of “fixing” the economy has left it enervated.

So your friend’s answer to this is, evidently, “more of the same,” because doing the same thing over and over again, just BIGGER, is obviously going to have a different outcome!

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