What does this have to do with the Old West?
I’m saying that you can’t point to something and say “AnCap” if property rights weren’t being respected, because they must be by definition.
The question of state v. anarchy is “can either prevent what happened to the natives?” Well, given that the state did terrible things to Indians, I am not ready to side with the state here. Imo societal progress and awareness are what would have solved the problem. State or not, people back then were not open-minded about other races. Perhaps this was caused in their minds because of the state oppressing them for so long, but the presence of a state appears to have exacerbated the Indian problem.
“My take is that the “right kind” and “wrong kind” of anything don’t really matter, and what happens matters.”
I disagree with this on the grounds that without a theoretical model of what is to happen, what can happen, or what should happen, one cannot aim towards anything other than either the status quo or unrepeatable conditions which have been proven to work in that instance. I also find that such a method misses the most important point of why did X fail or Y suceed and so on. Once again however, I do partially agree with you in that pragmatism is certainly necessary.
“That’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t do much for describing what’s happening–or what should happen-- right now, right here in the City of Townsville.”
Empiricism cannot tell us what is happening in the city of townsville and it certainly cannot tell us what should happen.
There is no absolute constraint on human action because human action is really a synonym for human choice. However, we can know both from internal factors (being a human actor) and from external observations about our origins (namely, that we evolved) that human choice is self-interested, specifically, that it aims at all times to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. These terms are used in their formal sense meaning that there is no simple correlation between physiological states and the formal sense of pain (want) and pleasure (satisfaction). An ascetic who walks across hot coals in order to teach himself about god is seeking pleasure as much as the drunkard who is gulping down alcohol - in the formal sense.
Human action is not determinable but its effects are. If you pass a law making it illegal to smoke marijuana, the consequences are absolutely predictable: the law will not succeed in reforming the human proclivity for getting high so demand for marijuana will not be decreased and a black market of buyers and sellers willing to risk arrest will arise. This is praxeological reasoning in action.
Clayton -
“I disagree with this on the grounds that without a theoretical model of what is to happen, what can happen, or what should happen, one cannot aim towards anything other than either the status quo or unrepeatable conditions which have been proven to work in that instance. I also find that such a method misses the most important point of why did X fail or Y suceed and so on. Once again however, I do partially agree with you in that pragmatism is certainly necessary.”
I don’t see our disagreement here as very substantial. I’m pretty willing to just say that’s kind of my view.
“Empiricism cannot tell us what is happening in the city of townsville and it certainly cannot tell us what should happen.”
The best example I can think up is this whole Graeber controversey. People flipped their shit when some fuckin guy (who happens to have a PhD in Anthropology, and did an Anthropological study) suggested that, based on the evidence (of which there was a whole lot) that debt predates money and barter. And that the “barter” that occurred wasn’t a system of equivilancies. Libertarians just could not accept that all the historical evidence points to their logically deduced idea being wrong. Yeah, there should be a mix of the two, but there comes a point when the theory is nothing more than an abstract concept that can’t be realized. Marxian communism probably falls within that category. Before the USSR went on a bloody rampage, Marx was already expelling Anarchists from the international.
@Clayton, no offense, but I’ve had that debate. Yes, I realize we can define things into meaninglessness. That whatever I do is what I do, and what I do is always self-interested, so therefore whatever I do is self-interested, doesn’t give me much insight into my own psychology. Go ahead an contimplate self-sacrifice for a mindfuck right there. My “self” doesn’t benefit much if it ceases to exist after my action.
Ah, but you gained utility from the thought that you would be honored afterwards for your great personal sacrifice! After all, by definition, you…
I’m with you, BP. I’m with you.
Actually, I don’t think it poses much of a challenge at all. Willful self-destruction is of one of two possible types: suicide or self-sacrifice. In the former case, I think it is fair to say that this is simply a mental illness or aberration of the psyche… someone with suicidal tendencies is like someone who has contracted a dangerous infectious disease or has been born with a genetic disorder. In the latter case, there is an evolutionary logic to self-sacrifice which we perceive in other animals, namely, protection of the young.
At an African watering hole at night, when lions begin circling a group of elephants, the elephants will stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle with the young in the center. This is clearly an act of self-sacrifice on the part of the adult elephants. Individually, each adult elephant has a better chance of survival by shrinking back from the rest and hiding with the youths, but they do not do that. They stand their ground even as it often happens that some of their number are lost to the marauding lions.
I am a parent myself. If you walked up to me with a voting card with my name on it and one of my children’s names on it and told me “one of the people named on this card will die in the next 24 hours, the choice is up to you” it would be a no-brainer, I’d happily choose to let my child live in my stead. There is certainly an inscrutable aspect to this fact which defies analysis and I think that’s what you’re getting at. However, such conditions are pathological, they are not representative of the ordinary human experience. Those are “out-of-band” conditions which can be neglected for the sake of reasoning about how people go about their ordinary, humdrum day-to-day activities which constitute 99.999% of the human experience. Property. Exchange. Prices. That is the stuff of the vast majority of human action, boring and pedestrian though it is.
Clayton -
Why is suicide a mark of mental illness? Well, so-and-so killed themselves because they were mentally ill. And how do we know they were mentally ill? Well, because they killed themself of course! Circular logic?
And then we have self-sacrifice with the example of doing it in the interest of the children, but actually it’s self-interest… Just skimmed. Sorry.
I think such ideas are quite a bit more common than you expect. While actual self-sacrifice might be rare, if we’re willing to say that isn’t self-interest, why would we grant the same status to giving up food for someone else, or anything else most folks regard as selfless?
That you can define anything into self-interested action is great. I have no doubt that I can give you any example and you can make it work. Whether or not that tells me anything is another story, and whether or not that really makes “self-interest” mean anything is another.
And another note: ranking everything that doesn’t fit your definition of human action as mental illness probably opens a whole lot of doors that you want closed.
For the same reason that having a viral infection is defined as physiological illness… it’s an obvious aberration of the telic purpose of the diseased organism.
Because giving up food (to the point of privation) is a lot like being suicidal. In particular, giving up food under conditions of crisis is propagating someone else’s genes at the expense of your own - it can happen, but it’s aberrant because every organism without exception is programmed to propagate its genes. Those organisms which were not thus programmed all died out 2 billion years ago and have never re-emerged.
No, not everything that doesn’t easily fit into the pleasure-pain framework of human action is necessarily mental illness. As I noted above, I think that certain forms of self-sacrifice clearly fit the human action paradigm, even though they are boundary cases.
In fact, it is not the theory of human action that identifies humans as being plagued with mental illness, it is the mainstream tabula rasa view of human psychology which is guilty of this. The study of human action boils down to the attempt to answer the question “why the hell did he/she do that?” If you would have done the same thing, then there’s no mystery since it is likely they did it for the same reason you would have so you do not bother asking the question.
But when people do things you would not do in the same circumstance, that’s when the question arises. There are two broad categories of answers. The first category is “they did it because they are stupid/insane/deranged/evil/corrupt/etc. etc.” The second category is “they did it because they thought through - consciously or otherwise - the benefits and costs of the courses of action available to them and thought this course of action had the best benefits at the lowest costs.”
The first broad category is logical nihilism with respect to understanding the decisions that others make which do not agree with the decisions you think you would have made in the same circumstances. It’s throwing up the hands, shrugging the shoulders and saying “God, who knows why people do stupid shit… they’re stupid, I guess.” Such thinking is lazy and does not take seriously the reality of cause-and-effect, particularly as it relates to the human brain. Basically, it’s the same as giving up on understanding why people do what they do and just concluding they’re all mentally ill.
The second broad category of answer, however, is rigorous and unrelenting in the pursuit of reasonable answers for why people do things under the broadest possible range of circumstances. Perhaps thieves steal not because they are “evil” or “insane” or fill-in-the-blank but simply because they believe it is the best course of action available to them. Nothing crazy about them at all. So, you see that it is the theory of human action which seeks to actually give answers rather than just shrugging the shoulders and concluding that everyone we don’t understand is “just nuts.”
Clayton -
You’re just hanging yourself with your own words. As if suicide isn’t thought out and contemplated? Yes, it goes against what you think the telic purpose of existence is. No doubt.
And this is the part where the ‘self’ benefits without the body to justify suicide, and other cases are just extremes, and everything else is mental illness.
There’s a whole lot of qualifiers for something that is supposed to just be axiomatic. Human action is self-interested, except when this happens, and sometimes that, and this thing is just crazy.
Not the telic purpose of existence (I assume you mean the Universe, which has no telic purpose that I know of), the telic purpose of the organism, that is, of a human being. The telic purpose of the eye is to focus an image from the visible light spectrum onto the retina. When the eye does not do this, it is recognized as a disorder and we use lenses mounted in spectacles to correct the disorder, if possible.
The human being has a digestive tract. If you stop eating and commit suicide through starvation, for example, this is a malfunction from the point-of-view of the telic purpose of your body. That doesn’t mean I can tell you what your purpose in life is (what your values should be). Perhaps you’re on hunger-strike to protest some intolerable humiliation and abuse. As a proponent of human action, I would then diganose the social disorder to be the intolerable humiliation and abuse, of which the hunger strike is merely a symptom. This is the sense in which I diagnose the State to be a social disorder of which wars, manmade famines, destruction of wealth and human productivity through financial schemes, and so on are merely symptoms.
Clayton -
Contrary to Hoppe and other Austrian theorists, I do not believe that human action is irrefutable. I don’t even really know what it means for an axiom to be “irrefutable.” Its status as an axiom (assumption) is merely as a starting point for deduction to hopefully arrive at useful conclusions.
Clayton -
Somalia is a pretty interesting example. I suppose that my feelings on it, is that since everyone I-find-authoritative says that Somalia should be “re-instated”, that there should be a state (an argument from authority of course, but I don’t claim it’s a proof, just an argument) there. The Somalians were not ready for freedom, since they clearly lacked the morals for living it well; according to a view of morality whose truth I believe. But freedom is the necessary condition for anything, so it must be for morality. So does this mean that Somalia will one day need freedom? I don’t know, but like in many things, I suspect things. And I suspect that freedom will probably be the right answer at some point.
On the telic purpose of the organism
From a biological point of view, maybe you’re right. This isn’t a biology forum, however, and I think we’d both like to believe there’s more to it than raw biology.
Hi to all.
From the perspective of the actor, suicide is just a matter of time preference. The origin of the urge to end one’s life may or may not be evolutionary, but that is irrelevant to praxeology.
BP, in what way are self-sacrifice (and suicide) not self-interested (selfish) acts?
Oh, and I missed this exchange but I’m with Clayton and AJ about how yanking govt (monopoly) provided goods/services overnight would lead to unpredictable chaos and would prove nothing about the viability (posited superiority) of the same services being provided by the market. If govt food production had been closed down overnight in USSR, millions would have died from hunger and strife before a viable bread market would start to emerge.
“f govt food production had been closed down overnight in USSR, millions would have died from hunger and strife before a viable bread market would start to emerge.”
good point.
The initial shock could surely be great (and I do not believe I am advocating it), yet consider why the heck all of the people who used to do things for payment would stop doing them. People can still carry on their jobs and then be picked up by entrepreneurs who spring in to get a piece of the action.