[swalsh81]

Maybe we have competing cities. In an anarchist society, there is no reason why there could not be a city that is centrally planned and residents enter into voluntary contracts to pay monthly fees to a central planner to plan these kinds of things. As long as the planner does not use some kind of force to gather fees (practically taxes) on people who have not entered into these voluntary contracts it would be perfectly compatible.

That being said, in a non planned city, you might not have competing roads, but various forms of transportation would compete with each other. You might have subway systems competing with the roads competing with dedicated bus routes competing with various raised monorail systems competing with things we might not have ever thought of.

[swalsh81]

I think I can make this argument using the Bible.

Let’s first assume, to make it harder on me, that the Levitical law did not simply apply to Israel, but to everyone. As Dr. J said, there is a difference between the Old and New Testament, but it is a full joining of the 2 that is usually seized on by critics. So what was the purpose of the law in the Old Testament? To show that all people are sinners, that no one is perfect. (Galatians 4) The Law, in the Old testament, the system by which society punishes sin, showed that we are sinners but the New Testament shows that we are under grace, God’s forgiveness (Romans 5-6)

But are we, human beings, to deal with the sin of others (aside from things that infringe on natural rights we will save that for later)? sometimes. I Corinthians was written by Paul to show the Corinthian church how to deal with sin. I Corinthians 5 involves someone sleeping with (presumably) his step mother. This would have been an instance of stoning in the Old Testament. But what are we to do?

11 But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother [a member of the church] be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.

12 For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?

13 But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

What is he saying? In verse 12 he makes it clear that it is not his duty to judge those that are outside the church and in verse 13 he says that their judgement is God’s to dole out. But in verse 12 he says that judgement for sin WITHIN the church can bet levied by those within the church. But that judgement is removal.

Of course Galatians goes on to say

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

We are not talking life long excommunication here, or imprisonment, but a temporary disassociation.

I can find plenty of places in the New Testament that tells the church to spread the Gospel and to love their neighbor. But NOWHERE can I find any call or even permission to use government against anyone in order to promote the Bible. In the end, what is government? It is coercion at the point of a gun. This is diametrically opposed to every thing Christ taught.

So then, what about natural rights? I dont think that I have to make any biblical argument against murder or theft. We are granted life by God, thus no man has the right to remove life from us. We apply that life to physical endeavors and the product of our labor, though, biblically ultimately belonging to God, is granted to us and, again, no one has the right to remove that. There are plenty of verses against murder and theft.

But what about the last one expounded by Locke and Jefferson: Liberty. According to the Bible we each have a free will. Who is responsible for that free will? each individual. As Paul said, it is not for us to judge those outside the church that is left to God. We dont have the right to use force to enforce the Bible on those outside the church, and the “force” to us inside the church really isnt much of a force at all. If it would be wrong for me, individually, to hold a gun to someones head and cause him to follow commands in the Bible, how can it possibly be right for me to do the same thing through government?

But entrance into the church (in this case referring to all believes instead of a local church group) is according to many places by faith alone. No work requirements needed. Thus, both becoming a part of the church and all actions after that are completely (here comes the libertarian word) VOLUNTARY. All sinful actions to those who are both saved and unsaved are judged by God not by men.

So what is the purpose of government? I have had people use this verse

3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

But the word evil in this case has the connotation of injurious. That is, the role of a just government is to fight those intent on causing harm. I am not saying that this was specifically the intent of that wording but this sounds a bit like “no victim no crime”.

In my opinion, a real reading of the Bible presents the most libertarian religion there is.

[swalsh81]

yes I just realized that this is the wrong one. I guess I saw 2 that said 1877 and picked the first for “prior.” my fault there.

[swalsh81]

Thank you for the reply. I didnt really expect much during everyone’s Christmas break.

You have answered my question. The basic purpose of the question was in regard to the ever present God/science-vs-god debate. Which, of course, adds another level to the problem with the definition of science.

Science, is limited to the observable, measurable and repeatable. That is, only the natural can be studied by science. Science, then, being the search for the truth about the universe. But it seems that modern science has turned the definition around, contorting it to “only the natural can be studied by science and proven science is truth thus only the natural can be true (or for the sake of a logic problem …all truth is natural).” This causes a distribution problem in the logic. Reasoning also poses a problem because this definition leaves out anything that is unnatural or supernatural. it also seems to lead to the idea that anything not proven true is then necessarily false and that all unnatural and supernatural then does not exist.

So one person says that he believes something does exist whose existence cannot be naturally/scientifically proven and then uses it to explain something else. The other person says that the first person is, in fact, wrong because of the fact that the assumed existence of that thing cannot be proven true. The first person is not proven true by the inability of his assumption to be proven false. But the second person is not able to prove the first wrong by the inability of the assumption of first to be proven true. This is my context for using the word belief. A belief being, not only something that has not been proven, such as fairies under your garden, but also something that cannot be proven such as invisible fairies. Unprovability does not necessitate either truth or falsehood.

So back to the original sentence I had a question on. Why would it be a fallacy to believe something that has no natural evidence, while admitting that it cannot be scientifically proven true? and Is it also a fallacy then to limit truth to those things that are natural when truth is a characteristic whether proven or not?

I hope that all made sense. If my wording etc. did not make sense, feel free to look at the core of what I am talking about where you think I am missing something rather than the specific questions.

perhaps I am conflating truth with logic too much?

[swalsh81]

I would like to know what Prof. Herbener says too.

From what I see, no it doesnt look at preferences. I would be very interested to know if you could even test that since preference are not homogeneous. Marginal utility is individual. Its one of the foundations to Austrian Economics.

[swalsh81]

that was me I knew this question sounded familiar. Art Carden gave an answer during the lecture as well.

[swalsh81]

There may be a type of GDP that removes government spending (I dont know) but the number typically used by politicians and media include some government spending. I dont think (someone correct me) that things like Social Security spending is included in GDP. But there is some government spending included like defense.

What I see as the major problems is that it says nothing about quality. We could pay 10,000 people $100,000 to dig holes and fill them in and raise GDP by $1B. protective tariffs that do, in fact, raise domestic production but drive up prices for the consumer, increase GDP. Here’s one for you, again someone correct me if I am wrong, but domestically produced electronics, a market that has seen huge technological improvement AND price cuts would actually LOWER GDP ceteris paribus. Of course people would buy more but, all in all, a lower price for a more advanced computer means a lowering of GDP even though it is better for the economy and the consumer.

I heard one person say, GDP is about the worst metric we have, but it is the best thing anyone has come up with so we still reference it.

The thing about having a metric about how well the economy is doing is that you would have to somehow measure things like marginal utility which is subjective. you would need to measure malinvestment and overinvestment which, if you could do, then central planning might work but Mises and Hayek pointed the knowledge problem in such economies.

[swalsh81]

Thanks for pointing that out SmartMuffin. I intended to say something about that but, as you might see, I got a bit sidetracked

[swalsh81]

Interesting question. I’ll see what I can do point by point

*WARNING WALL OF TEXT*

Why is only labor and not businesses and investors asked to contribute to reducing the deficit?

Conservative governors vilify the sellers of labor (in this case public workers, particularly teachers) but don’t ask the buyers of labor (businesses) or investors to do their share.

This statement is a bit of a false dichotomy. It seems to say that businesses and investors already pay no taxes, will have their tax rates kept at 0 and only the workers will suffer new taxes. This couldnt be further from the truth. I do not recall the source for this, but you may have heard people talk about how the top 1% of earners (ceos, businesses, investors etc.) pay 50% or 70% or some large number of the taxes. On the surface, this is irrelevant if they also make 50% or 70% of the income. But, in fact, they make about 30% of the income. Meanwhile, the lower large portion of the income brackets made something like 15% of the income and paid 3% of the taxes. Thus, the businesses and investors are already paying much more so it would not be unreasonable or unfair for the lower brackets to pay more because they are already paying significantly less as a proportion of income. This wasnt the page I remember but there is alot of good graphs http://www.businessinsider.com/who-pays-taxes-2012-8?op=1

Secondly, this completely misses the fact that, for all practical purposes, businesses do not pay taxes. This is from my blog which I started and then, unfortunately, cannot keep up with. http://lawperverted.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/do-corporations-pay-taxes/

Yes; deficits can be remedied by cutting costs but they can also be eliminated by raising revenues.

In theory, he is correct. But unfortunately, the Laffer curve will come back to bite him. A 0% tax rate will yield no taxes for obvious reasons, but so will a 100% tax rate because 1) there will be no incentive to work and 2) there will be no money with which entrepreneurs and business owners can invest thus stalling the economy. This means that you can only raise taxes to a certain point (all other things being equal) after which tax revenue will begin to fall. What that point is no one actually knows, but tax increases are not a panacea. By extension, this will mean that, after that point the government CANNOT spend more money and it will necessarily go to debt because tax revenue cannot be raised by further tax increases.

The argument is that if taxes are raised on businesses, they will leave the states and investors will change their investing strategies, thus eliminating jobs. Almost a decade of tax cuts introduced under the previous administration did not create jobs so one might expect raising them to the level before the cuts might not reduce jobs.

I am not sure how we got from deficits to jobs but here we are. Again this statement can only be true ceteris paribus. The reported unemployment numbers are pretty…cooked. They leave a lot of people out, they have adjustments, they say nothing about quality of production etc. Not that I agree with everything (or much at all) Bush did, but if he wants to look at presidencies he can look at this graph of population-employment ratio http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/01/the-dismal-december-jobs-report-shows-a-lost-year-for-u-s-workers/ Bush came in with the .com bubble popping (fault of the FED), monetary expansion(fault of the FED), 9/11 and a new war. He lowered tax rates and employment actually did increase. Then the housing bubble popped (fault of the FED) and employment nosedived with it. But, one thing this shows is that you must use the comparisons with other things equal. The economic situation is very much different from the time that Bush lowered taxes to now.

Certainly reduced estate and gift taxes can’t be argued on the basis of job creation and are essentially a means of further concentration of wealth in the hands of the already wealthy.

This statement assumes that, even if wealth was justly gained, after a certain amount of money, it is justifiable for someone else to confiscate it and that it is the right of the government to determine how much money is too much and at what point private property should be seized. See Bastiat for more on that. “The Law” and his articles in “Economic Sophisms” are both very good.

I have a spreadsheet that I have taken then data from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ along with inflation and population data and done some analysis. Hopefully one day I can get it all up on the internet somewhere. One interesting and relevant point, since he wants to compare now to Bush, is that, in 2012 dollars, in the year 2000 the government received about $9600 per person and spent about $8500. Revenue went down in the middle of Bush’s presidency, but in 2007 (right before the housing crash) the government received, once again, about $9400 even with the tax cuts. However, what changed was spending which sat at just over $10000 per person. In 2012, the government received almost $7900 per person but spent over $12,000. I say this to point out that, yes, tax revenue has in fact gone down, though not necessarily because of the Bush tax cuts but it is the spending that continues to increase. I would venture to say that the person you are talking with does blame the spending on the Iraq war (no we shouldnt have gone into Iraq etc nor should we have stayed indefinitely) but does not acknowledge that spending on entitlements has risen like it has. Another thing I found (and you will mostly have to take my word for this since I cannot link the chart from my excel) is that overall military spending per capita in adjusted dollars has remained basically static overall since the end of WWII. It has fluctuated up and down but the trend line is for the most part level. Entitlement spending, on the other hand has ballooned. That is of course not to say that military spending isnt too much anyway.

[swalsh81]

I feel like I remember Dr. Woods saying something else on either his facebook or Liberty Classroom’s in the last week or 2 of December. But I cant find the post. It was before the post about Constitutional History because he merely said that there would be a new course but did not say what it was.

[swalsh81]

Well we do know a decent amount. Like you said, we have the debates, we have the Federalist Papers written by the people involved in writing the Constitution to explain what they had written, we have correspondence between the writers of the Constitution and between the writers and concerned citizens and on it goes.

There are multiple problems with using precedence to determine meaning. Every precedence will be stretched in order to allow for something new. Every time precedence is cited it will divert farther and farther from original intent.

Furthermore, if we look at “societal consensus” to define the Constitution, then what exactly is the point of having a constitution? How do we determine what consensus is? After all I have never heard of a vote on the meaning of the constitution. It seems that the people that are always calling for something like “societal consensus” or that the constitution is “living” are also the ones who want to speak for the rest of society as to what the new meaning should be.

The constitution was designed with the ability to change through the amendment process. If the public believes that government should have a new power, then the public can grant that new power through an amendment.

But besides all that, the constitution was meant to restrict government and to grant certain specific powers. Thus, when in doubt whether the government has power _______ the answer is more than likely that it does not.

[swalsh81]

according to the Liberty Classroom facebook page, there will be a course n Constitutional History released sometime this month.

[swalsh81]

Yes you are right. But devaluing currency is, unfortunately, not meant to benefit the average person. This type of currency manipulation is a direct result of too powerful a government. It allows politicians to do things that benefit the politically well connected businesses and banks. That, in turn, gets campaign contributions and lobbying money to go to those politicians from those businesses and banks.

This kind of policy is not really fought against by the general public because those politicians and their pocket economists are able to convince them that their policies are causing aggregate economic indicators to get better. GNP and other aggregates goes up. Politicians, to an extent, also believe that simply having high GNP and other aggregate numbers is a sign of a god economy and follow the Keynesian by-any-means-necessary approach to get to these numbers without looking at the unseen consequences. But, as you know, those indicators really mean little if anything when it comes to purchasing power and quality of production and investment.

Unfortunately the general public doesnt really have a good understanding of purchasing power and quality of production and investment….and, for some reason, they tend to trust their politicians.

[swalsh81]

well the 4 of them are very different scales of minarchists. Friedman, for instance, believes in a central bank. Hayek and Friedman and Rand? (not sure) believe in at least a minor welfare state/minimal public social safety net funded through taxation. Yes neither Mises or Friedman are full on anarchists, but they are far from side by side on the size of government.

[swalsh81]

As far as infrastructure you can take a look at this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MseBlo-Sno0

Personally I think that infrastructure is far less of a problem than, for instance, security for children. Remember, that in an anarcho society there would not be NO LAW, law would be created through voluntary contracts. Towns may come together and build their roads socially but funds would not be taken through force. This type of situation would make it very attractive for businesses to help fund the roads to get people to their businesses.

As far as private police you can look here mises.org/journals/jls/14_1/14_1_5.pdf

What to do about child abuse and the like you can see some correspondence between Walter Block and someone with similar questions here http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block167.html

That all being said, I do partially agree with you. I have questions about the abilities of a stateless society to deal with the threat of a large scale or nuclear war and the like since, for one thing, should the world never have developed the state, things like nuclear weapons would be very unlikely to ever have existed. I also have questions about the ability of a new stateless society to remain just when men are corrupt and large businesses are likely to buy up their own police forces and enforce their will. Large forces beholden to an interest is what created the state. Again these types of large companies may not have been able to grow to the size they had without the protection of the state.

BUT, I cannot completely reconcile the ability of the state to use force to collect taxes to fund these things with the principles of individual rights.

Hope most of that made some sense.

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