This illustrates how subjective the whole thing is though, which I think is to Rothbard’s detriment. If hating the state is a matter of taste, then getting on Friedman’s (or anybody elses) case about not hating the state is ludicrous. I’ve been arrested for a crime I never commited, so I hate the state as much as anyone else. But that doesn’t make a case as to why the state is evil or why anyone should agree with me.
You’re not arrogant for thinking that you’re allowed to have ethical stances; you’re arrogant for thinking that you can do without them.
Some might say that lying is unethical.
We agree here.
This doesn’t make sense to me. If people came to the conclusion that the state is inefficient and unnecessary, then they wouldn’t believe an economist who told them to expand government. You already stipulated that they oppose govt on economic grounds, so all your really saying is that they might change their mind. Well that can happen with anything, including the view that the state is evil or immoral.
With regards to ethics, you assume that libertarian ethics are self-evident and can be made by anyone who choses to do the right thing, as if people who support the state are trying to be unethical. The fact that even among libertarians there are serious disagreements over the ethical statuses of IP and FRB tells me that individuals ethical judgements are not always aligned. Convincing people to oppose the state on ethical grounds then is subject to the same situation that you painted: an expert would have to explain why X is bad, and if treating X as bad turns out poorly down the road, a layman might change his mind or call the ethicist wrong.
First of all, a necessary evil is a contradictory of terms.
Second,
Rothabard is not criticizing all people, but just certain libertarians. If Friedman believes libertarianism may be incorrect as far as its logical conclusions imply regarding the nature of the State (that it is a criminal organization), then he is not a libertarian, but a non-libertarian who simply finds libertarianism a fascinating thought experiment.
But if he is a libertarian, as most people agree that he is, then he must agree that the State is nothing but a bunch of thieves and murderers. It is in his perfect individual right to not hate thieves and murderers or to discriminate between “honest” criminals who wear their proper uniforms to work, and those who wear their costumes to work (suit, tie, etc…). And it in Rothbard’s right to point this out and make an ethical judgment about this sort of libertarianism.
People know that murder and theft and sexual molestation and torture are wrong. We’re not talking about the finer points here, this is basic ethics that someone has to practice in order to not be incredibly dangerous for anyone else to be around. Just stop believing in the ghosts and the uniforms and symbols for a second and appreciate that they don’t have magic powers. When the IRS taxes, it’s the same as you extorting the money, when the Army kills, it’s the same as you killing someone you don’t like, when the CIA tortures someone, it’s the same as if you did it, when the government locks someone in a cage for years for selling coins, it’s the same as you doing it…
I mean, if someone doesn’t get this, do you really want to be around them? This doesn’t require expert academic study. It’s obviously wrong. A stateless society is not going to work if people don’t get that these things are not allowable, I mean seriously…
Some might say that you will never need to lie in order to demonstrate that the state is evil.
These things are not obviously wrong. If they were, everyone would be a libertarian. Many people think the state protects the weak and the poor, this is a legitimate point of view. They just see economic exploitation as evil just as we see aggression as evil.
Jacob:
Rothbard makes sooooooooo many cases against the State. To say that he was irrational in that belief is absurd
"He didn’t say it was an irrational belief. Nielsio brought in the word irrational when restating Friedman’s opinion of Rothbard, but Friedman himself did not say that.
I guess this whole ‘honesty’ thing is hard to get."
So because people are taking liberties in ‘explaining’ other’s opinions I am made, by you, to be dishonest?
Jacob:
David Friedman is an apologist and a fake anarchist.
“He is a scientist. And what does a “fake anarchist” even mean?”
I figured those points were self-evident. a fake anarchist is someone who says they are against the ultimate power of the state, but then moves to justify it in various ways. Especially through objectivity. One of the most vague concepts in the same sense of democracy. In science, objectivity is imperative, yes, but in regards to philosophy it cannot be held to that account, by any standard. If ‘proving’ that the state is immoral by one example is only subjective, it is impossible for anyone to characterize the state as immoral, or moral, if it is required for the ‘proofs’ to be objective in evaluation.
If I smoke weed and, subjectively, think there is nothing wrong with it, but you say that it is bad we are both giving subjective interpretations of the situation, yes? So if you come in and say, “you know, i have this idea, that i got a few others to agree with me on, and were going to imprison you based on our supposedly objective evaluation of smoking weed.”
There is only a ghost of objectivity involved. and that ghost is born of subjectivity that is lauded by many. It takes pieces to make a whole.
He does what Milton and glenn beck do and that is obfuscate a principled position on the matter.
“Is it “obfuscating a principle” or trying to remain honest and precise in one’s arguments? His point is that Rothbard’s “principles” led Rothbard to be less than truthful and manipulate his audience, because the ends justify the means (a principle Rothbard nominally rejected).”
So you are saying that Rothbard is a straight up liar and manipulator and that his ‘principles’ led him to be so? and by extension that i have a warped sense of all of the things involved?
No, they are obviously wrong. The Spanish Inquisition was obviously wrong. That didn’t stop it from happening. Many very smart people of the time fully assented to the practices and goals of the Inquisition. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition are also obviously wrong. Many very smart people today fully assent to the practices and goals of the War of Terror, oops, I mean the War on Terror.
Clayton -
So why don’t they just steal from the first suitable victim they find? They know that theft is wrong, but they have an inexplicable belief in the power of the government mechanism to make their actions right.
Most socialists aren’t just common criminals, and they’d be offended if someone stole something from them. So what makes the government magical? Why do they have a supernatural belief in the power of a secular institution to make wrong actions right? Won’t they admit that they’re just playing a game, that a “government” is a pretend concept like a “corporation” or a “trust” or a “bank”, or a “church”, and maybe it has utility and maybe it doesn’t, but the point is that this invented play-play kid’s idea of a “government” is being used as an excuse to do things that are wrong, and cannot be made right by playing pretend.
To be fair, i eralize that Rothbard is ULTRA critical, but i’ve never thought of him as dishonest because of it.
I like Thomas Sowell and Rothbard really lays into him on some things that are just misunderstandings/misapplications.
But this thread is a perfect example of why anarchy is so looked down upon. We can’t agree on anything, organization for like minds is nearly impossible. haha.
As much as I love Rothbard and MES, from my own experience with some of his sources he wasn’t above fudging/twisting some of the facts to support his theories. From an earlier thread about the money supply statistics during the boom of the 1860s/1870s, Rothbard deliberately seemed to miscontrue the data as to suggest the U.S was undergoing severe monetary inflation.
I later did go to the library and got the exact book edition Rothbard was using.
The thread (and my criticisms of Rothbard) were never really responded to. Based on my gathering of the facts, Rothbard did fudge some numbers.
bah humbug!
Absolutely not. Sometimes your options suck, and you must choose one that is relatively preferable. For example: I can let my cancer eat away at my brain and surely die, or I can take this poison (chemo therapy) and maybe survive.
[Edited]
This is disheartening.
So why don’t we scower that book and find other inconsistencies? I don’t have a 1957 copy, obviously. But i am left wondering if Salerno edited it or just if this has been noticed at all since the 1957 copy. I am looking in a copy of the 2002 edition and am gonna have to read a chunk of it to find that as the pages numbers aren’t near each other (43 page introduction, dimensions, etc.) and the book isn’t necessarily time consistent… Does the LvMI know this? Seems like bad policy to promote false statistics.
EDIT: I’m dumb, i was looking at P130 looking for the p 153 stats and they are as are.
I’ve been meaning to read what Rothbard said about Strauss, i guess i know now.
EDIT: “The problem is he isn’t really stating that the annual expansion in bank deposits wasn’t 16.9%. It’d be one thing if the yearly averages were 10, 20, 12, 15, etc etc, which averaged out to 16.9%. But in the last year when you have a 50% increase lifting an otherwise 7-8 year statistical average of 4%, and then claiming that there was an average of 17% bank credit expansion,it is very misleading and resembles an outlier. In addition, it seems likely that the overall expansion wasn’t that great and there were less banks reporting in the late 1860s/early 1870s their financial conditions, which means the bank deposit figures for that time period (1860s) was abnormally low, giving the illusion of great bank credit growth than what actually occured. Either the statistics are 1) Entirely truthful,which would give great doubt as to why no one has written about one of the U.S’ greatest yearly MS expansions 2)Not accurate, and Rothbard was misleading to use these aggregates and conducted poor research. Even if he wanted to use these numbers, he should have at least written in a footnote that the totals weren’t accurate, especially the 16.9% figure he was using.”
There could be many reasons for this error. I don’t think he was lying. He states clearly that this is the result of pyramiding of state bank deposits on top of national bank deposits and it doesn’t explicitly say that this happened in one year. It says “…after 1870…” not in 1872. Also, he says, “From then on [May 1871] paper money would be held consonant with the U.S. Constitution.” (p. 153) Although, his stating it as ‘percent per year’ could be considered dubious and was very generous to his argument.
If we are to assume that the statistics prior to May 1871 (the under-reporting) would not have counted all of the paper money as some states had made it illegal. (p. 152). And my guess is that the unreported money that was being counted after 1871 was so because the state banks had a new Federal law forcing them to redeem all of the paper they had and were using. (Kind of an argument that if the Federal government would have stayed out of it there would never have been the statistical explosion that Rothbard is exploiting, which ironically Rothbard would have wanted. haha) To me this could be an explantion as to the dramatic rise that Rothbard was seeing in total money supply. Again, he could also have been following, or interpreting, again in a possibly conspicuous manner, along with the Federal law. But lying i don’t think.
I think this is pretty topical.
I’m rather surprised that people are surprised at the news that Rothbard was a liar. Didn’t he admit as much himself?
@BlackNumero: I’d like to hear someone like Bob Murphy weigh in on this issue. Rothbard wrote a ton so it is possible he made mistakes but that’s not the same thing as lying. Furthermore, Austrian Business Cycle Theory is not an empirical theory (not derived to fit historical events), it is derived praxeologically from first principles. A recession which affects more or less all sectors of the economy is itself evidence that inflation is occuring, somewhere. As you note, these records are not rigorous so Rothbard may have made a mistake if he simply copy/pasted numbers from the book (as I said, I would want to hear from somebody like Murphy on this before I concluded that’s what happened). However, the numbers in the book may be useful as showing evidence of inflationary expansion, even if they do not prove or even precisely quantify the inflation that was occurring.
Clayton -
If this really happened then, in this case, Rothbard was wrong and Friedman was right. Regardless of who caused the inflation, one can’t selectively include/exclude it to make their point appear stronger.
"My standard example was an exchange long ago, after a talk of his in which he claimed that Reagan did not really cut government and offered as evidence the increase in the nominal federal budget. I pointed out that, while his conclusion might for all I knew be true, his evidence combined whatever growth had occurred in the real size of the federal government with the effect of inflation over the period.
His response was that that was all right; because Reagan was responsible for the inflation, it was appropriate to use it to make his performance look worse. "
So…he wasn’t wrong? This seems like a politcal motivation not really a scholarly one. So what if Rothbard thought Reagan could have vetoed the bills that Congress passed that ran huge deficits as he said he would cut spending? The effect of inflation can easily be correlated with the growth in government debt. And the president can prevent the federal debt from growing. I think Rothbard’s devil faced “power elite” outlook was chiming in on one of his shoulders saying…“You know Reagans a puppet for those bankers and GHWB. He acquiesced to the Trilateralists and the CFR,” and his blue pacifist side was saying…“pretty much.”
Why is chemo therapy evil when used as a therapeutic technique? Because it destroys cells? So what! So does going under the knife for surgery. Is that evil too?