In other words, the free market economy is maximally complex. To understand this, you need to read genius physics professor and millionaire entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram’s book.
Game on, I’ll gladly take them on, because no one has exposed any flaw in my reasoning here, they think they have but their because they think they have doesn’t mean they have done so.
The irony is that you all have made the claim that I was in error but have not demonstrated or even pointed out which word or which statement is the case. When you claim someone is wrong you show them step-by-step where their reasoning is flawed, you don’t say “go read this” or “you don’t understand” that’s bullshit you know where the error is immediately and can immediately point out which word or which statement contains errors, no one in this thread has done that. In debate, the person who claims I have made a mistake in my statements must demonstrate this immediately pointing out which words and which statements. My own statement does not apply to me if I have not made a mistake, because anyone who makes a claim that I am wrong must show which words and which statements are wrong and demonstrate that they are, not simply claim they are.
I will not answer people who cannot point out which words of mine or which statements contain errors, and demonstrate this step-by-step, that is not how one conducts informed debate, every time someone claims there is an error, that person must demonstrate it and point it out, otherwise they don’t know, that is the only answer, and because most people here only have a pretense to knowledge here, I asked them to point out my errors in my words and statements, they have to be there, because they exist, so by definition, they must know exactly where in which statement and which word contains errors.
Do you agree or disagree with this paragraph, yes or no? If not then it is pointless to argue with people who are not willing to demonstrate their claim to the error because they are blowing hot air.
If you can’t point out which word or which statement exactly where I made a mistake, then I haven’t made one. That is the only answer.
A’right, I’ll take the challenge. I’ll dissect your original post and we’ll see what you have to say.
From my point of view, it’s the most natural thing for a science to have dissenting opinions debating their respective validities. But don’t claim there are no conflicting aspects in the natural sciences; wave-particle duality has already been named as an example.
You didn’t sketch out your thoughts on how to run the economy, by the way. At least I didn’t notice.
It is highly debated whether Austrian principles match with intellectual property titles. In any case, it’s far from being an Austrian principle itself and therefore, just a question of detail.
In other words, you (willingly or not) set up a strawman.
That’s certainly possible, but wouldn’t clash with Austrian principles either. The more abundant a resource (apart from intellectual property, which is not the best battering ram against Austrian economics, to be honest), the less will probably be charged for it. And if things are of virtually infinite supply, plus the means to duplicate them become increasingly available, that’ll just cause a huge downward pressure on prices.
Granted, of course, no government agency screws it.
How do you define “merit”? Doing hard work with calluses on your hands? That’s certainly a respectable way of earning one’s bread, but a more general definition of “merit” might be:
Producing a good that somebody demands.
And, sure enough, if a good is demanded by a large enough number of people, the producer will eventually get rich in the process. Whether he produced the good by overworking his body in the gold mine or by giving an enjoyable show on a concert is not key; key is whether people demand it, and how much they are willing to pay for it.
In a socialist commonwealth, this subjective modeling of prices and profits is abandoned in favor of a supposedly “fair” distribution scheme where everyone gets the same since all they do is “shape matter that already exists”, right? Now for the history quiz: In which system did people have to endure pressing scarcity and hunger and where did an uplifting of poor people into the middle classes occur?
Your second point is, however, valid. Well then, since government is pretty active in both the production of the intelligentsia and the education system, wouldn’t that be a perfect reason to try the free market (force versus persuasion)?
You’re being simplistic. A growing population also means a potential for a more dendritic division of labor, thus enabling goods to be produced more efficiently at a lower cost which then allows an increasing number of people to purchase them. That implies an increase in “real wealth”, as opposed to a mere growth in nominal wages.
Your example about a widget maker who gets rich because everyone wants his widget: that is indeed meritorious. He, to use your analogies, “shaped particles in a way a lot of people desired them to be shaped” and so he’s done a great service for society since he’s fulfilled the desires or facilitated the lives of many “allegedly rational particle piles”. I’d call that a good thing.
Right now, money is a kind of paper. The fact that most people nevertheless attribute a value much greater than that of paper to it indicates once again a subjective value decision and not the presence of “energy”.
But if it was energy, how come that all the paper money of yesteryear like liras, francs or marks are given no trade value at all? Does the “energy” that permeates currencies wear out at some point in time?
So person X abuses persons A, B and C because he produces goods they desire very much? Would it be non-abusive for him to produce valuable things if “population geometry” didn’t enable him to get rich in the process? Why is that?
Like Jon Irenicus, I’m excited to hear your propositions for the “fairness equation”.
And the “tyrannical class of fools” you talk about, also known as entrepreneurs, are the reason we can have a conversation like that. Otherwise, we’d likely till our clod of earth.
Now?
I will also… take the challenge. I’ll dissect your original post and we’ll see what you have to say.
That assumes that there is actually a conflict, or the fact that particles are merely waves, and when their symmetries harmonize they act as if they are particles. The fact is if something behaves as a wave and as a particle, it’s highly likely that the simpler of the two explanations is the true one (parsimony) it’s highly likely that what we think are particles are waves, which are interconnected, but we don’t have the observational technology to expose this interconnectivity. Just because conflict exists, doesn’t mean someone’s argument isn’t ultimately right. But we don’t live long enough to see this often times… Consider George boole,
"Boole’s system (detailed in his ‘An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities’, 1854) was based on a binary approach, processing only two objects - the yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one approach.
Surprisingly, given his standing in the academic community, Boole’s idea was either criticized or completely ignored by the majority of his peers. Luckily, American logician Charles Sanders Peirce was more open-minded."
That is an entire class of academics and intellectuals were proven to be foolish over the course of history, and then claude shannon picked up boole’s ideas and insights and applied them to telephone switching and created the digital revolution, simply by realizing that we could digitize information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8
Mr shannon is one of the most important and least studied people in economics, and I think Mr Mises and the economists here have a lot to learn from information theory, because it has implications for your reasoning about your values and the economy.
That wasn’t my point, my point was to show economics is filled with inconsistencies, contradictions and fallacies. If you read my other posts, you know that I suggested we do experiments and do more research into how monetary flow behaves.
It’s not a strawman. Austrian principles still borrow and use the lockean notion of property rights, i.e. I produce an item I own said item and I can exchange or charge other people said item a monetary value. I assert that the invention of money and austrian conceptions of property as moral value are imperfect, and that we can demonstrate by thought experiments that they are, usiung logic and geometry. Here is a paper on boundary logic, mathematical logic has been advancing and many here do not know of their the advances in logic coming out of computational science.
http://www.boundarymath.org/papers/BLogic-intro.pdf
Of course but people would be totally energy independent (i.e. no one no longer has to work for anyone else, a form of domination that comes from scarcity and the laws of geometry over a finite resource.
How do you define “merit”? Doing hard work with calluses on your hands? That’s certainly a respectable way of earning one’s bread, but a more general definition of “merit” might be:
[/quote]
I don’t need to define merit, consider the thought experiment: We have a group of 30 people, a man who charges x or y for a widget he produces, gains profit not based entirely on merit but on population size. Denying this leads us to contradiction, do you agree, yes or no?
I assert that a productive person meeting demand, and gaining monetary value from that demand is flawed because of population geometry. He can abuse the price mechanism to extract illegal value from the population, the concept of cosent is flawed, and starts to break down down because of geometry.
Nowhere did I advocate socialism, I’m not sure why you’re bringing this up, I said the invention of money as a store of value and a price mechanism is flawed, not that it is not useful or rational. But as a store of value, their are two-way feedback effects that someone cannot avoid because of the nature of geometric exchange and movement of products between agents and actors.
The problem here is schools with the most money would attract the best teachers, and the schools with the least money would have reduced quality, and no child chooses which school to go to, all of us remember being forced to go to school by our parents because it is required by law (at least it is here where I live)
No it is not entirely meritorious, it is partially meritorious, consider AMD, AMD makes CPU’s now if their competition makes better ones, they don’t sell those CPU’s, so the fact that people demand CPU’s leaves AMD holding inventory they can’t sell, and all of that productive value was wasted (market failure). So yes population geometry proves that we have to try to siphon off exces profit and disperse it due to demand geometry.
Because every individuals action is two-way, it is not one way, each individual is an authoritarian, a dictator, when you set a price for a good or a service, you are dictating the terms of contract, and because human beings have short lives and asymmetric time constraints, they do not always have rational choices. Consider if we were born slaves in ancient rome, many of us would most likely would have had to face death despite our choice to refuse to be a slave, but our instinct to survive trumps any rationality.
They are not analogies, they are facts, when you make a sandcastle, did you not reshape the sand? Yes of course you did.
But no man created matter and energy, so what gives man the right to own something he did not create, but rather only reshapes? Why is ownership not flawed here? Mises did not choose to create himself, in other words his parents forced him into existence not by choice, therefore, mises is derived from matter and energy of the planet. He is an an element of the set of the matter and energy of the universe, why should you as a particular configuration of matter and energy be able to enclose matter and energy that you did not create, only reshape?
But paper is made of matter and energy.
[quote]
The fact that most people nevertheless attribute a value much greater than that of paper to it indicates once again a subjective value decision and not the presence of “energy”.[/.quote]
Wrong, information is made of energy else we couldn’t think, or yes or no? you’re still thinking that the geometric nature of space-time is disconnected from you, every object in the universe is connected to space-time, or would you like to deny this fact?
When we subjectively determine a value of money, we allow our thoughts to control our behavioural outputs, which are physical, so our thoughts, exist, and if they exist, and we can detect them, then they are made of energy, or would you like to deny this?
Because we money is a behavioural extension of who we are, money is a mental prosthetic. Just like a car is an extension of us when we are in it travelling, we sit down in the car, and we drive off. We are connected to the car, would you like to deny this? Money is connected to us via our behaviour, when people stop using one kind of paper (medium of exchange) we just switch to another, but fundamentally we’re still using a mental prosthetic device, that is ultimately connected and leads back to our minds.
Profit is a form of private taxation, we’re just exchanging taxes by force of government, by taxes through force of commodity (where the commodity is used as a mechanism of taxing other popualtions). The price mechanism is a doubled edged sword, just like the government can co-erce you via force to pay taxes, you can use commodities as a weapon. A butter knife can be used to butter bread, but it can also be used to stab someone. Hence the flaw in invention of money and commodity exchange.
We move from allowing any man to acquire infinite value, to basing how much one can profit over a given period of ones lifetime, i.e. we fix how much any one individual can own in terms of property and money from the moment they are born, and everything else is dispersed equally among the population.
The people here have the false idea, that just because you produce something, you are entitled to earn infinite value, I assert that most people make decisions non-rationally and that just because someone chooses to buy your product, does not mean they are being rational.
No a tyrant is someone who takes more wealth then they need, and then uses that as a club against other people.
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” Plato
What is the free market, if not the most extreme form of democracy? That can only lead to one place: Economic tyranny. Plato realized this long ago.
No man deserves to own the planet, no matter how productive he perceives he is, because money when combined with property, are mathematical values we determine who gets what share of the planets resources, so if you have all the money, technically you have all of the planet, why exactly should any individual be allowed to own so much money that he can own the planet? Tell me exactly why you would want this?
Liberty is a two way street, if we choose freedom and non-interference as the core values of economy, then that will only lead to tyranny, plato recognized this long ago.
Here is a scientific experiment for you:
(i) Take a physicist and an economist at random from the population.
(ii) Have each try to predict economic behavior of humans and record how closely the predictions match the result.
(iii) Repeat until a reasonable sample size has been reached.
Which group do you think would have more accurate predictions?
Well, a physicist will better predict the behavior of humans when they’re dropped off a cliff, at least in terms of rate of fall and the like. So there. You can’t refute the logic, no one has even touched it really. God, if you knew anything, you wouldn’t be so ignorant!
-JCFolsom, true devotee of the Econophysics way
[liberty] = [freedom] = [Non-Interference]
[liberty] is not [~liberty]
“[liberty] is a two way street, If we choose [liberty] as the core values of economy, then that will only lead to [~liberty], plato recognized this long ago.”
How much sense does that make when put in more logical form?
Econophysics has not been around for a hundred years, so eventually econophysics would win out because they would incorprate some of economy theory and neuropsychology into their own discipline, econophysics is cross discplinary, this site is not cross disciplinary. They begin with a political theory of values, and reject observation. Mises himself rejected observation, that should tell us he rejects logic.
From wikipedia (praxeology):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology
We can prove this underlined statement is demonstrably false via studies in medicine, specifically the neurology of brain damage. Then his theory of human action would be flawed and his idea of rejecting observation, is irrational. If we damage our mind physically, and this effects our rationality, this means that the idea of subjectivity is flawed, there is only levels of true statements, which are congruent with the surface of reality, or not, and incorrect patterns of statements that are partially true, in that the statement exists, and the pattern it contains exists, but the pattern is incongruent (not the right pattern).
Consider a triangle with equal sides, and we compare it to another triangle, one of whose sides is broken (i.e. there is a gap), both the triangles exist, but one is imperfectly shaped. So a falsehood is an actually existing incorrect statement, so there are only levels of truth and falsehood, which objectively exist. And the concept of subjectivity is incoherent.
Consider the statement: I feel happy. Is this physiological response, objectively existing? Can I cause you by harming your nervous system, to bjectively feel pain and make you unhappy? How exactly is the information being transmitted, non-existent, and therefore subjective? It is in fact true because the information transmitting the pain messages exists by definition.
If we say that existence, is not truth, but something else, then by definition, we are contradicting ourselves.
What mises didn’t understand, is we create new truths, from old ones, every true statement we make is derived from a prior truth. Just like when we are born we are derived from our parents, so is truth derived from it’s parents.
We are creators of truth statements, by way of our ability and power to modify reality.
See, this is an example of the problem. Just because you don’t know how monetary flow behaves, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been researched, observed, experimented with or GASP!!! EGAD!! documented!
But of course, if you don’t read Mises or Rothbard, two of the Austrian heavyweights on money, how do you expect to come here and challenge Austrian theory?
Earlier in the post, I am quoting, you said that Mr. Mises could learn from information something or other. Apparently, you are so unaware of the Austrian tradition, that you are not aware that Mises passed away several decades ago.
I might respond to more of that post, I simply do not have the time to indulge someone who refuses to self-educate.
No. He didn’t reject logic. He rejected the primacy of hypothetico-deductive reasoning, statistics, and experimentation in the social sciences.
Freedom has many definitons, my claim would be that we have not accurately or precisely defined what freedom in terms of geometry, i.e. it’s true form unmystified by other men’s improper conception of what freedom really means when applied to objects (such as people or products) in a geometric space. Remember language and concepts when incorrectly defined, do not map to reality, and if they do not map to reality, they are irrational.
Consider we have two balls, these two balls represent two people, now they are standing on geometric surface the earth, now because the earth is round, this means that if these two people walkd away from each other in the opposite direction across the earth, they would meet each other at the other end and interfere with one another, and yet none of them has lost any freedom.
Freedom as a geometric concept is circular. i.e. in my walking example, two men rationally choosing to walk along a path end up meeting again, not because they have lost any freedom, but because freedom has to obey the logic and laws of geometry.
Mises says that logic is a priori to observation, much like physicist Stephen Wolfram says about physics, a point that you still have not replied to. How does econophysics stand if physics itself is being challenged by praxeology?
That’s not a valid statement, any form of reasoning can be converted to binary format, because all forms of reasoning use binary, shannon showed this long ago, Mises never read shannon’s paper on communication theory, which eventually became information theory.
The act of observing, is the act of detecting, the act of detecting is the act of functioning, and the act of functioning is a logical function. Or would you disagree with this statement?
So yes mises did reject logic. He wasn’t around for the advances in mathematical logic that have taken place today. Every act of thinking and observing is a logical function, you can’t have as much as a single thought, seeing is looking, looking is detecting, and detecting is knowing, and knowing is understanding.
That would probably be more relavent if I was of the Austrian school. I am a New Keynesian who happens to like Hayek. I hang around this forum mostly because I think that a more realistic theory of entrepreneurship is needed in mainstream economics and the Austrians are closer to a better theory than the mainstream. If you think economics doesn’t have enough observation you haven’t read an article in an econometrics journal in your life. In all seriousness, have you ever read a graduate level econ textbook? There is plenty of solid monetary theory that fits the data very closely. Before trying to reinvent the discipline you should first try to understand the current state of the field and educate yourself on the most recent literature.
Mises didn’t realize that logic is NOT apriori to observation, that logic is a function, that is the act of functioning, period. That is where mises went wrong, logic is both and object AND a function at the same time.
Consider the question:
Do we exist? The only way we could answer that question (yes or no) is if logic was self-recursive (it feeds back into itself, it is both an object and a function) so any act of observation (which is a function) is by definition pure logic.
So your response is to ask whether the hen or the egg came first?
Are you even aware of the Wolfram’s computational paradigm for physics?
No, freedom as a geometric concept is preposterously nonsensical. Geometry applies to triangles, circles, cubes and other ideal (none exist in the real world) shapes. That’s all. Geometric freedom? Hey, man, don’t try to make me a square like you.
You haven’t grasped what I’ve said. Or else you would not have asked that question.
What is not a valid statement?
So?
This makes no sense. It’s meaningless.
No. He didn’t. And you haven’t shown he did.
So what? That’s all dependent upon classical logic. It can’t refute it or undermine it.
More jibberish.
Are you in spacetime-geometric and are you a part of spacetime? i.e. if the surface of space were to curve, would you be pulled along with it, without a loss of ‘freedom’? Yes or no? You’re statement is a non-sequitor because space and time, matter and energy are geometric shapes, why the hell do you think we invented mathematics and calculus to describe and calculate the geometry of nature?