Irrelevant appeal to populism.
Isn’t your position that we can calculate efficiency objectively?
re: “Irrelevant appeal to populism.”
No, liberty student. It’s not an irrelevant appeal to populism. It is a critique of libertarianism as it is widely understood and presented. If this is not your libertarianism then (1.) all the better for you, and (2.) you should JOIN ME in leveling this critique.
My point is not to spring a “gotcha” on libertarianism, liberty student. My point is to identify a tendency I think is problematic.
re: “Isn’t your position that we can calculate efficiency objectively?”
Of course not.
To make libertarianism about morals is to put the cart before the horse. Rather than advocating for market order because it produces material wellbeing (efficiency), such a backwards approach simply applies the label “libertarian” to whatever aspects of the market seem to produce material wellbeing. As such a moralizing libertarian theorist gains more information about market processes and other natural orders, he or she revises the theory and proceeds to call that libertarianism. The alternative to this pointless game of No True Scotsman is to realize that the market knows best, and simply get out of its way.
Then prove otherwise.
By whom? Against which definition of libertarianism? How does that definition have any authority?
Your values are subjective. Feel free to tilt at windmills.
liberty student, I was warned about you specifically when I first started commenting on these threads a couple days ago. I’m beginning to see what they were refering to.
lol, you were warned. My legend grows.
Daniel, did you run out of substantive replies?
Then what is it? It seems that your position is that we can calculate efficiency on a global scale. Let me quote from you:
If local efficiency cannot exist objectively, because of what Hayek says about economic calculation, then how can global efficiency exist objectively? Furthermore, how can “inklings” about optimality be objective themselves if there’s no such thing as objective optimality?
If I’ve misunderstood your post, please feel free to point out my misunderstanding(s). 
I’m confused why you think I’m saying anything about objective optimality here. Could you clarify why you think I’m saying that?
Costs, benefits, and preferences are subjective phenomenon. Optimality and efficiency refer to subjective understandings of welfare. I think you guys like to impute differences over subjectivity where there are none.
As a modeling strategy I’m willing to adopt inter-subjective comparisons where perhaps you are not. But there’s no divide over subjectivism.
This is all beside the point. Anyone who can provide a coherent argument for what rent control does can address the question that Jonathan Catalan raises and has raised in the past with me. Anyone with the capacity to explain the problem with rent control has the capacity to explain the concept externalities, global inefficiency, etc.
Objective v. subjective and the question of intersubjective comparisons are a sideshow.
At this level, the fact that most people prefer not to be homeless is an objective one, even though all those people’s preferences are subjective - which is the same point as is raised in Why Capitalism? about material wellbeing - so I believe Daniel is correct there.
The issue is whether this leads to the conclusion that state intervention can ever raise material wellbeing for the general population in a given area, which I don’t think it does. But that could at least be a productive debate.
Certainly. It seems to me that the word “optimality” typically implies objectivity.
First off, when you use the words “optimality” and “efficiency”, are you implying any constraints on them? That is, are you referring to the (subjectively) best or most/more efficient among a given set of choices/options?
Second, why are you willing to adopt inter-subjective comparisons?
Third, I really don’t see how those things are a sideshow. Can you please clarify?
Sorry to be dense - I don’t understand why.
Do you think individual-level subjectivity somehow conflicts with the idea that individuals pursue (if not succeed in obtaining) some sort of point of optimality? What in optimality implies objectivity?
Again, I think there’s a tendency in the Austrian community to take things like mainstream quantifcation for modeling and mainstream intersubjective comparisons and consider all that stuff suspicious. I understand we probably disagree on that. But those are completely separate issues from the question of subjectivism itself.
re: "First off, when you use the words “optimality” and “efficiency”, are you implying any constraints on them? That is, are you referring to the (subjectively) best or most/more efficient among a given set of choices/options?"
Of course - I would have thought “constrained optimization” is implied by “optimization”. I don’t know of any economists that talk about unconstrained optimization - do you?
re: “Second, why are you willing to adopt inter-subjective comparisons?”
Reasonableness and tractability. If we ever got to the point of measuring utility, this proposition would obviously be much dicier. Utils would have to be measured in units of dopamine I imagine. But as long as we’re predicting and testing the behavior of people who maximize their own utility by setting a marginal change in their utility equal to price, whether that utility has to be scaled for actual inter-personal comparisons is largely irrelevant. To put it simply - inter-subjective comparisons are appropriate because we never attempt actual intersubjective comparisons. We never say “Person X gets 10 more utils than person Y”. We don’t care about those questions. So the use of marginal utiliy using a common measure of utility is completely inconsequential. If we did make those direct comparisons I’d tend to agree with you - but we don’t. Why are you unwilling to use it?
re: “Third, I really don’t see how those things are a sideshow. Can you please clarify?”
Because whether you accept quantification or inter-subjective comparison or not, no one is abandoning subjective value theory.
Could you clarify what you think any of this has to do with objective values?
Whose subjective understanding? That is the question. Value scales are heterogenous. How are you standardizing subjective valuations?
I think it is precisely the point.
How? This goes back to epistemic issues. How can you assume a premise, extend that to conclusions, when that premise is something that you cannot possibly know?
- Value Statement
- ???
- Conclusion
The question isn’t whether people prefer homes, it is in a world of scarcity, how much home, and how much they prefer it determines how the structure of production should be organized.