Non of this is relevant to the fact that the collapse of the state will lead to social breakdown never seen before in Amerika.
Yes, bringing a thief to justice makes us all less safe. Stockholm syndrome FTW.
Wow, just wow. What a remarkable quote. I mean holy cow, I am really dumbfounded, stupefied even!
I don’t even know if it’s worth any more effort. If your entire premise for progression(Or in this case regression) is based on a logical fallacy. I mean does one even consider all the terrible things we’ve succesfully moved away from throughout history? Things that were once “tradition”?!
Fact eh? How can you prove this? Can you somehow see into the future? Are your responses always found in such desperation? Best to leave these mistakes unposted. 
“Non of this is relevant to the fact that the collapse of the state will lead to social breakdown never seen before in Amerika.”
So let me get this straight. The State collapses due to its own makings, and the resulting impoverishment and disorder will be blamed on the anarchy that follows.
Are you also going to blame Capitalism for the poverty that it inherited?
Anyone know if this book is any good? I think Doug Casey recommended it.
The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill
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The Market for Liberty: 40th Anniversary Facsimile Edition by Morris and Linda Tannehill |
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The Market for Liberty: 40th Anniversary Facsimile Edition by Morris and Linda Tannehill |
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The Market for Liberty: 40th Anniversary Facsimile Edition by Morris and Linda Tannehill |
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The Market for Liberty: 40th Anniversary Facsimile Edition by Morris and Linda Tannehill |
I dare you to disprove it.
You have millions of years of human history showing progression culturally, not cultural stagnation or regression. Why embarass yourself by asking for such a trivial task.
Not too mention traditions were once new, and they replaced older traditions. All of which were fabricated by individual MEN based on their subjective inputs, it all comes from praxeology.Besides, there is a reason why your comment is a blatant logical fallacy. The statement itself is lunacy, it is a clear visual representation of a nonsensical statement.
Not everything traditional is good, and neither is everything modern, methinks.
Anyone know if this book is any good? I think Doug Casey recommended it.
The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill
Yes it is excellent, an absolute must read. The copyright owner made mises.org take the PDF down, but it is still around if you ask the right people.
And how is this an argument against tradition?
Traditions are not set in stone, those that are found to be unadvantageous to human prosperity are eventually abandoned. However, proper evolutions happens through a process of trial and error rather than simply restructuring it through rationalistic pursuits.
Have I ever argued against the reform of traditions? The reason why tradition is so important is that traditions are the knowledge and rules of society, and they emege from a process involving the actions of a manifold individuals thus providing traditions with far more tacit knowledge than would have been at the disposal of a single person otheriwse. It is through those knowledge and rules that society can operate, without things like manners and social morals, contained in traditions, social relationships would be far more difficult for individuals would have no ways of knowing the rules of social interaction.
Furthermore, as I have repeatedly emphasized, tradition is a process of trial and error, the knowledge that they contain have been the result of a process of falsification. The traditions that are present are the traditions that have emerged from the actions of individuals in the environment that has led up to the present conditions. The singular human mind simply does not have access to such knowledge, it cannot centralized all of the knowledge that has led up to the present. As a result, rationalist philosophers who think that they can just forget about the contemporary traditions, and replace them with their own moral designs are fooling themselves because they do not have the knowledge necessary to make such judgments at their disposal.
Anarchy = lack of rulers
Anarchy != lack of the rule of law
As has been pointed out, none of this is relevant because anarchy simply wouldn’t be sustainable. Like it or not, anarchy isn’t a feasible option right now, if you want to make the case that we should make various choices at the margin to cut the state back, I’m with you there. But to simply “abolish” (whatever is meant by the that) state would cause chaos, people are simply too reliant on the state and there aren’t the necessary social institutions. Look, Russia didn’t become a free market paradise when the communism collapsed, their attempt to implement capitalism was an extraordinary failure. One anecdote that Russ Roberts is fond of is that an economist had been planning a conference in Russia shortly after the collapse of the communist regime, he booked a number of rooms in a hotel and all was going well. Shortly before the conference he got a call from the manager of the hotel informing him that the contract was being breached because he had got a better offer. Without the institutions of private property, rule or law and the like, capitalism doesn’t work. But as Doug North has argued, we can’t create those institutions over night.
See,this is a problem with all “plans” for anarchy that are bounced around here. They usually follow one of two forms.
Either they simply say, “push the button” to “abolish the state” and a priori everything will work out. Or they plan it down to the minute detail on the assumptions that their plan will meet no resistance and their actions will have no unintended consequences. Well, neither of these are possible. Unfortunately you need to make marginal changes to scale back government, looking for examples of such changes throughout history, consulting theory and if possible doing laboratory tests to determine the likely result.
So thieves should keep on thieving until they find a 9-5 job?
This is really too much, it sound like hayekianxyz just created a rhetorical parallel to my pro-market argument, replacing the word markets with “institutional context forces”. Amazing. The “Institutional context” is nothing more then the current playing field of the market. It’s just another way of looking at “Markets” as a whole.
First, where are the market forces here? When I say institutional structure I mean, prices and their informational property, profit and loss accounting, private property and the like. The whole point I was trying to make was that this situation isn’t entrepreneurship, it’s central planning. You’re not responding to market signals and basing your choices on profit and loss, you’re planning the social institutions you wish to impose on society. When I talked about actors with limited cognitive skills, what I was trying to get at was that these defects are mitigated by the institutional structure they’re in. Well, you guys don’t have that luxury, and whereas the market will weed out inefficient entrepreneurs and group selection will weed out inefficient norms, there is no analog here.
Second, if anarchy does come around and when entrepreneurs are competing against one another for customers and trying to cut costs in order to maximise profit , I can assure you of one thing. It won’t play out in accordance with the whims of a dead philosopher,meaning, the private producers of defence won’t adhere to proportionality, to the NAP (whatever that means) and they won’t give a damn about your human flourishing or my performative contradictions. They’ll care about lining their pockets, whether this be achieved by collusion, peaceful cooperation or open warfare.
So your also arguing against speculating just as Lam is? I simply maintain that this argument alone need not be given attention, it stands alone as sheer folly. But let just kindly remind you…
Speaking for myself, I am not interested in attempting to “Plan Anarchy and or Society”. What I do is simply speculating how best to provide a specific service, just as a shoe salesmen speculates how best to move his products, or what new line of shoes to carry. Nothing beyond tha
Billions of people speculate everyday. But as I’ve already pointed out, the difference is that they speculate based on their particular knowledge of time and place, and where there is information missing they usually know where to look or don’t need to know in the first place because they have access to market prices. You’re in quite a different position, you’re planning society to fit a preconceived ideal detached from any market prices.Like I said, rationality is context dependant, there’s no way you could get this right, even if you might well be able to do a fantastic job of it anarchy really was here.
The fact of the matter is that the task you’ve set yourself is a fool’s errand. Trying to figure out the production of a particular good without reference to technology, geography, culture or institutional settings (and this include a whole lot) is absolutely absurd.
I come at it from the ground up(Praxeologicaly you see), looking at A through W before I consider X. Coming at it from a high cultural level is naive at best, society and cultures are nothing beyond the collective summation of individual subjective valuation. Long story short, AKA consumer sovereignty. It is true that the valuation of individuals can influence the products of society, however it is equally true that the products of society influence the subjective valuations of the individuals. 20 years ago many people did not think twice about saving their money to buy a Tablet PC, now they do. 20 years that demand or desire did not exist, now it does.
See, you’re advocating what people have already called a naive, atomistic conception of individualism. There is constant interaction between formal and informal institutions and members of society. Institutional entrepreneurs seeks for rearrange and change the institutional structure, but they’re constrained by their culture in ways they don’t fully understand, as well as ways they’re more than aware of. In time, through historical accident, the institutional structure and the actions of individuals, this culture will change. But our future is largely determined by our past, path dependency is an unfortunate fact, but it’s one we must live with.
Apparently it’s not only scineram making one line posts. He just happens to fall in the unfortunate intersect of the sets “does not ramble” and “disagrees with the orthodoxy”.
Not too mention traditions were once new, and they replaced older traditions. All of which were fabricated by individual MEN based on their subjective inputs, it all comes from praxeology.Besides, there is a reason why your comment is a blatant logical fallacy. The statement itself is lunacy, it is a clear visual representation of a nonsensical statement
You guys are all relying on the same strawmen, nobody has argued that because something is tradition it is “right”. Lam is arguing that traditions generally do a very good job of passing information from one generation to another and adapt through trial and error. This isn’t to say that traditions will always be above criticism, just that there should be prima facie assumption that traditions are correct, even if upon further investigation they turn out to be inefficient.
As two good examples of traditions that, contrary to appearance, had a certain logic about them, see here and here
I read Leeson’s book on Pirates. But these two articles, unlike that, are superficially thought out.
For instance, suppose in a trial by ordeal, the defendent and the prosecution were of different religions.
(I suspect the “heretic” relative the regional majority was the one “caught”! Historically, this worked against technological innovators and most of all merchants.)
This statement is the opposite of your previous, where your defending tradition and any alteration there-in.
Yes but they still had to forcast, guess, and speculate a method before it was falsified.
None of this, loosely speaking, is at all incompatible with markets. The exchange of traditions, their creations, maintenance, and death occur praxeologicaly speaking on the market. Traditions are just a form of consumer good, they are a human activity that people desire to do, nothing beyond that. Yes things come and go, and there is a trial and error process, this is called profit and loss. These are market activities you are describing to a tee.
The difference here is that it is my goal to foster an environment where traditions, and the people who adopt them, may do so freely at their desire. No tradition is forced against their will. I don’t expect Christianity forced onto a Muslim, and vice versa for example. The difference between you and me is that you seek to maintain a coercive monopoly to uphold what your views of tradition ought to be, onto everyone else. You then trick yourself into thinking that this tradition must be the most enlightened one, since it has lasted the longest or is most prominent currently and you conveniently ignore the fact that it lasts specifically because of the violent monopoly which holds it in place.
The difference between you and me is, you want to force tradition onto others against their will, making them adopt what you personally think is correct, and have them forget their own sentiments and methods. I seek to foster an environment of collaboration, allowing people to adopt the traditions which best suits their needs as determined by the subjective ability to satisfy each individual.
As a result we have no idea of knowing whether your methods of tradition are most desired or least desired. This in effect is equivalent to the economic calculation problem. A police station for example does not know whether it is performing well, or poorly, in the eyes of the citizen’s they aim to protect. They are, and their traditions, are entirely disconnected and immune to the subjective appraisal of the individual. A typical police station can only use basic metrics like, have there been more homicides or less. This tells us nothing of the citizen’s(consumers) approval of that firm. So despite the fact you deeply desire to keep tradition, your systems are still broken at an economic level. They are entirely disconnected from the scrutiny of consumers, individuals, citizens or whatever. They have no methods by which to measure their performance in the eyes of consumers. They, by default, have a static number of subscribers, that being all citizen’s in their geographical region where they hold a monopoly.
Incidentally it’s worth noting that “Tradition” is nothing more than a consumer good, and what you are referring to is a form of consumer demand. If your traditional ways were so highly favored you wouldn’t need that monopoly to maintain it, people would assume it’s existence voluntarily. Furthermore your traditions are not exempt from the natural laws of reality and economics. DD5 brought up an amazing point that everyone seemed to skip over.
This is very important, especially relating to traditionalism, as you favor it. There may be a long widely held tradition that mandates all humans grow wings and fly, but such a tradition would be laughing in the face of reality. To illustrate in modern times, the traditional methods of the state are becoming defunct, they are at odds with reality and consistently teeter society on the edge of resource bankrupcy. Simply because we desire things to continue as they are does not mean they simply can. We may desire oil and steel to be infinite, but they are not. In reality, on earth, we live in a praxeological nature and forcing society to move against the grain of the wood will only last so long. Consistently forcing society to be structured as you see fit doesn’t magically change the fact that man’s genetic makeup makes him behave in these praxeological ways. And when I say Fact, I mean FACT, not the loosely used abused term that Scineram likes to toss around to keep his post count high.
And again you are repeating yourself, I hear you loud and clear. So we maintain that man is not aware of the future (Correct) and that his process is one of trial and error (Correct). So the first point brings speculation, and the second brings profit and loss. This I agree with and always have. Those that speculate (Guess) correctly win and those that don’t fail. This is the market. I think you’re making progress.
What your missing perhaps is we are advocating for a system of freely moving methods, where methods are freely preferred to others. The individuals who those methods serve are the immediate and perpetual arbiters . To argue that any system is superior or preferred simply because it is being forced onto them, meanwhile while complaining that outside idea’s are crowding out your own coercively provided methods, is entirely hypocritical.
In short, your adherence to traditionalism would be best served on the market. Not forced onto people who disagree with you.
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Great! Why do feel that this in any way is incompatible with markets? Markets and tradition go hand and hand, as traditions are nothing more than goods. They are actions man seeks for certain satisfaction.
The problem is that Rothbardian anarcho-capitaism, and an emphasis on tradition do not go hand-in-hand, though, for while the former is based upon a sudden, push-a-button change, the former demands piecemeal reform in order to ensure the continuity of tradition.
As hayekianxyz has pointed out, if anarcho-capitalism were to be enacted in a sudden period of time, all of the tacit knowledge regarding the rules of society and social relationships would have to once again emerge in a completely new society - it is impossible to know exactly what would happen, but I’d put my money on chaos. In fact, any ideology that advocates for sudden reform of critical social institutions is diametric to any that emphasizes the importance of tradition, which requires a gradual and piecemeal approach to reform.
Lam: “In fact, any ideology that advocates for sudden reform of critical social institutions is diametric to any that emphasizes the importance of tradition, which requires a gradual and piecemeal approach to reform.”
How soon is sudden? Is it a week, 1 year, decades, or something else?