I am made of atoms, thus I behave like an atom. Oh wait, no I don’t.
Ah yes, the fallacy of composition. Nice catch!
Things never observed are assumed to exist in order to make the facts fit the theory.
It ties into the scientific realism vs instrumentalism debate, i.e. whether theoretical entities such as strings are real or just useful theoretical fictions. IOW, the so-called “hard” sciences also involve a good deal of “mental constructs”.
-Jon
“Many Austrians argue against intellectual property on similar grounds. How does this discredit economics as a science?”
Because economics is ultimately tied to chemistry, biology and ultimately physics, the world is interconnected, the causal chain in economic theory relies only on what it thinks it understands, you made the statement
“Money is obsolete? So we don’t need a medium of exchange and economic calculation?”
Our current FORM of money is obsolete, we’d have to invent a NEW money that takes into account population geometry, because we’ve seen what having too much money and property has done to the political system (it’s a nightmare of corruption). We need to limit personal wealth aquisition for the sake of our sanity, in nature as one approaches the speed of light you require more and more energy, in our current economic system, the more money you have, the more money you make. Thereby giving you some amount of power (as long as people obey the law), over others to exploit them willy nilly because they are depedent on you (not truly resource independent), no one is truly independent from the earths natural energy (air, water, food, etc) and as smaller groups of private actors start to control what the earth yields freely, this needs to be checked and balanced.
Next is limits on personal wealth (i.e. maximum property and monetary ownership), because money is a flawed medium and store of value. One man should not be able to control the world via hoarding of property and the legal means of exchange (money, power, etc)
My lawyer charged me $500 for doing nothing essentially (looking at something for an hour), for his one hour thats a few days work for me, that is why money is deeply flawed when indivduals are allowed to set prices, because most people don’t really understand (are not fully rational) they are a patchwork of instinct, impulse and rationality, we already know that rationality is bounded. So there has to be some kind of checks and balances, by removing asymmetries of information (absolute publication of all prices and profit margins, and personal wealth statistics), no information can be hidden so we can solve these problems.
“Real poverty is due to a lack of productivity,”
In the ultimate sense you are right yes, but when we use a flawed medium of exchange (money) this is wrong, money is not a neutral store of productive value and hence the eternal tension. Think about it this way: You can be the most productive person in a population size of 30, but you won’t get anywhere near as wealthy without money + population size, and using our current form of money as a store of value, Say a man creates widget x, now in a population the size of 30, he charges x/y for that item, now that’s not a problem he makes a decent respectable profit and its not harming society, but now we multiply that by millions of people, and all of a sudden has the potential resources to exploit and control property by renting seeking behaviour because money is one of the stores (at least as long as we obey the law) of political power, and therein lies the rub.
“Economics is based on human action. Yes, in the broadest sense, everything is composed of the same elementary particles, but if it’s even possible to describe human action, let alone predict it, in such terms, we’re still a long way away from anything approaching it.”
Yes we are and this is exactly why economics is flawed, you said we can’t understand it and then you said
“The science of economics uses different methodology from that used by the natural sciences.”
"And therein lies at least part of our problem: Flawed methodology.
“In those, the underlying laws of nature are unknown, and we must discover them through empirical observation and experimentation, essentially trial and error.”
But we do have partial understanding of them, else there would be no computers, so yes we do understand at least some of the laws of nature, they are just incompletely understood, and incomplete understanding is still understanding. Most importantly: We have to consider the results, i.e. computers, electronics, etc… all those are descendents of physic theories, so yeah the physicists do understand SOMETHING or else modern technology would be quite impossible by your reasoning.
"In economics, the underlying laws of human action are already known, being deducible from self-evident and irrefutable axioms"
This irrfeutable axioms is utter tosh, does a retarded person have the same degree of action and freedom then someone who is not? No? why? That is a valid economic and scientific question.
“, especially the Action Axiom. To attempt to discover them empirically is redundant at best, and can only introduce needless errors and imprecisions.”
Again this is nonsense, math and axioms are models of reality, not reality itself, if it applies to physics it also applies to economics.
This is is a contradiction you said a few paragraphs before: “Economics is based on human action. Yes, in the broadest sense, everything is composed of the same elementary particles, but if it’s even possible to describe human action, let alone predict it, in such terms, we’re still a long way away from anything approaching it”
Then you said: "In economics, the underlying laws of human action are already known, being deducible from self-evident and irrefutable axioms"
So which do you believe? It seems you don’t know.
Those mental constructs that allowed us to understand more of reality created your computer… so lets not beat around the bush, modern society is totally dependent on physics for its high technology.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill
But you, the exception to the rule, can set rational prices?
You read like a bad self satire.
Please don’t read stuff into my post that is not there, you’re assuming way too much… when I come up with these ideas I’m not assuming we gungho jump into a complex system and start monkeying with it
I didn’t say I would set prices, I said that the idea of people setting their own prices is FLAWED because people are fallible, therefore the price mechanism has a flaw big time, We can perform a thought experiment: Say I owned the world and it was my property, I could all charge you rent simply for use of an artifical imaginary legal construct to enforce my domination over the economic system, The concepts of property, money and price are double edged swords, and I’d hope the people here (who presume to be open minded and intellectual) can stand informed debate, rather then retreat into their imaginary value laden worlds that are disconnected from physical objective reality “out there”.
I said that they have to be checked and balanced. Because the invention of money as a store of value is provably flawed. Next is the undecidability problem: Why should (perceived) economic productivity be what determines one wealth, and most importantly who decides who is productive and who is not, and what something is “worth”? It’s all based an someones personal imaginary values.
In the real world, the world is made of geometry, the world is not an idealogy or economic theory, it is a physical real place, made of matter and energy and geometric shapes. All that changes in reality once you think of your values VISUALLY and represent them as physical and social interactions between people, is simply relationships and movements of objects, information and people.
Therefore if any value system that does not submit to world geometry is flawed from the outset. I.e. irrational because it is disconnected from the world of objective reality (geometry).
Because the only alternative to me owning what I produce is for someone else to own what I produce. An obvious moral hazard arrises.
But the cconcept of ownership is flawed as well it is a two-way street, anything you “produce” already existed in nature, you did not produce yourself , your parents did. Do your parents own you? After all they invested their labour and money into you. By your argument we should all be allowed to own people we produce because they are made of the land (property).
And therein lies the contradiction: The inconsistent application of principles, willy nilly (out of nowhere) when we decide we don’t like it. The idea what you produce is only yours is demonstrably flawed. You didn’t make the sun, nor the matter you’re made of, you’re inventing legal concepts de novo out of your imagination to justify eternal domination of said “produced item/good/service”. It cut’s both ways, I’m saying that our conception of property, money, ownership, are fallbile and not immutable and eternal things and this is demonstrably true to any rationalist.
To see this argument in action, lets give you total ownership all the way down the line universally… every item you produce and consume (i.e. own temporarily) you ahve to pay for clean up of said item and environmental damage it causes, and you have to store it in your back yard, you’re not allowed to dump what you consumed, owned and produced on anybody else willy nilly, you got to find a way to pay for it all.. suddenly ownership doesn’t look like such a great thing does it? And you willingly annul your legal obligation of ownership.
Trust me, you and I have very different concepts of “property, money, ownership.”
Go get educated then you can come back and rant about how “irrational” you think everyone else is. The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard.
But I’ll start you off by doing some of your homework for you.
Not in its current form.
No, because people are, by their nature, not property.
Actually, my argument is that people of any age should be treated equally under the law and that there is no such thing as a “run away child” only emancipated children.
Yet who claims to own the sun? I’ve never seen it.
In reality, everyone on earth owns the sun jointly, because we all make use of it. If any person were to destroy, or violently prevent common use of, the sun he would be a criminal.
No I didnt. But I’m using this matter at the moment. In a few hundred years someone else can have it, but its mine so long as I am able to keep using.
You are making a claim that you haven’t backed up with anything. You have to show my concepts are different, objectively, and where the error is, a claim to know that I am wrong is a claim to demonstrate it right now, which words and which statements of mine, and how are they incorrect? Otherwise you have no valid claim. Don’t handwave, because you really are handwaving here you’re being dishonest. You don’t refer people to books when you make a claim you should make the argument right now, because it’s an intellectually dishonest tactic people that have no valid arguments use against those who DO have demonstrably valid arguments. So show exactly where the error is and explain it.
It is up to YOU to show me that my concept is different and are completely unrelated, and do not share the same basic idea of property being a zone of control over a particular space and item of matter and energy. By the way, just because someone invents a word or concept, does not mean it maps to reality, and its quite obvious you don’t understand that principle.
Why? You’re in our forums, bub. You’re the one making the bizarre claims. You’re the one challenging libertarian political philosophy and Austrian economics in an online community devoted to them. The burden of proof is on you.
How fantastic.
You come onto this forum to tell us how our ideas are wrong but the burden of proof falls onto me to know about your ideas.
I don’t care about your ideas, so if you want this conversation to continue you better learn about mine.
I gave you a resource to better understand our ideas so you could actually critique them instead of sloganeering about ambiguous defects. If you don’t want to read it, fine. But then why are you still here?
Of course, I’ve already made a number of cheap shots at your ideas. You could have started by answering those.
The reason why he directed you to a book as opposed to refuting each individual point that you made is that you are so far off base that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
From your very foundation of what you claim, that economics is a science in the same way physics is a science, you are wrong. Economics is the study of how humans act and interact with each other and with scarce resources to which they have access. The reason why we cannot treat this as a science in the same way as a science like physics, is that each individual human being has free will. While it’s true that humans are made up of energy and elements in the same way that all matter is, the fact that we have the ability to act and make conscious decisions makes studying economics the way you would study physics invalid.
For example, you could put a group of ten people in a certain situation with certain resources and observe how they behave and interact. If you repeat the same experiment, whether it be with completely different people or even the exact same people, the outcomes will likely be different. The reason is that human beings are not atoms, their behaviors are not predictable, and thus we cannot derive economic laws in the same way that we can derive physical laws.
There are, however, some axioms of human action which apply to all human beings, regardless of who, what, where, and when. I advise you to look around this site, as there are a lot of articles written about these axioms, the Action Axiom probably being the most important. There really is a lot of valuable information on this site, and if you really want to have a reasoned debate, it would make sense for you to understand where we’re coming from with regards to our approach to economics. At this point, it really is difficult to even address your arguments, again, as so much of what you say is so far off base from what economics actually is.
Uh-huh. Right. Because information is just bubbling out of the ground. It’s like air.
I guess, in a sense, it is. However, saying information isn’t scarce is like saying matter isn’t scarce: true, but meaningless in terms of economics. All information is not fungible. Indeed, in terms of artistic works, that information is unique. Saying that information is not scarce is like saying I can steal your car because an equal mass of dirt is underneath it free for the taking. Indeed, it is the information put into the car that makes it useful and scarce.
“The reason why he directed you to a book as opposed to refuting each individual point that you made is that you are so far off base that it’s difficult to know where to begin”
That’s BS, if you know I am wrong you should be able to show it immediately, it’s more handwaving. What statement is invalid? You can’t say I made an error and then not point it out, because that means your bluffing or you don’t understand what I’m saying to begin with.
No, we understand perfectly well. You’re repeating positivist-monist claptrap. Now, stop wasting our time, educate yourself on the matter, then return. Until then you’re just blathering on to no end. Your understanding of ethics is shallow, typical of natural science nutjobs who think they know everything. BTW, your silly little objection “but those mental constructs helped build your computer!” does not address what I said, i.e. that physics itself is replete with these. That, unlike every response to you in this thread, was mere handwaiving. Amateur. I still want that equation I asked for earlier.
-Jon
" guess, in a sense, it is. However, saying information isn’t scarce is like saying matter isn’t scarce: true"
That’s all that needs to be said, applying “economics” to things that aren’t scarce is a bunch of handwaving poppycock. You’re trying to enclose a commons that is infinite and justify it via some imaginary theory of scarcity based values, and claim its moral, it’s bullshit and you should be above that kind of stuff
If we invented startrek repkicators tomorrow economics would have to adapt to the fact that objective reality had made the ‘science’ of economics and the legalist captialist moral theory obsolete. So yes economics is quite a mishmash of rational and irrational conceptualizations not entirely based in reality, it is a subjective theory of how society should be organized based on a mishmash of partial truth and much error, divorced wholly from other sciences. Economics is ultimately a political theory of how certain groups of people are allowed to dominate legally other groups by inventing a legalsitic/moralistic framework not based on multi-discplinary approach and multi-discplinary rational analysis… this is why economics is such a contested area of science, because it isn’t.
Economic theory has more in common with creationism then it does with science: Concepts are invented and bastardized to fit some invented theory of politics de novo and applied to the world of matter and energy, you’re letting your metaphysics dictate how reality should be shaped alone, rather then using a combination of metaphysics and emprical rationalism to understand the world. It’s like trying to understand the world locked inside a phone booth, you’re not going to understand much.
Yeah yeah, go tell someone who cares, i.e. people who are as “rational” as you are. Tell you what, instead of telling us all what irrational fools we are, go invent a Star Trek replicator. Run along now, troll.
-Jon