I’m not entirely sure you understand what strawmen are; it’s literally impossible for an explanation of my own philosophy to be a strawman.
Furthermore, a divergence of opinion doesn’t necessarily mean I am “too lazy to do any serious study”; I frame business cycles within an equilibrium framework of rational expectations, hence your theory becomes invalid (as other economists have noted, like Cowen and Tullock). You might disagree with me, but I’d prefer sound counterarguments, not insults.
What’s this “libertarian utopia” you speak of?
Regardless of how you answer that, I fail to see how the fact that we’re not already living in “the libertarian utopia” 1) means that one has been impossible to realize thus far, or 2) constitutes a counter-argument against “the libertarian utopia” in general.
Do you think it’s possible for free-market regulation to exist?
Since wealth cannot be measured objectively, it would seem that you are indeed using normative criteria, unless you’re assuming that individuals seek to maximize what they see as wealth.
With that said, I think you’re still using “efficient” and “efficiency” as weasel-words. While you’ve rather carefully explained what you mean by those terms, it seems that you’re still betting on your opponents lapsing into using their own definitions for them and thus seeing your statements as implying that what is “efficient” is therefore “good” or “desired”.
The reason I’m standing by my accusation of equivocation is because, otherwise, your argument seems to lose a lot of its impetus. So things are the way they are because of everything that’s happened before, including all the choices that people have made… as a German would say: ja, und?
I consider aggression one feature of the natural world to be used; the amount we now see can be considered the efficient amount.
…because the costs of removing the government and individual policies is estimated to be too high. It still doesn’t prove much of anything. Like z12345 said, it’s a trivial, boring argument that was known to us already.
BTW, to the above, a German would say Na und?
"bcyclwutztht, would you discount the Roman Catholic Church?
I have no clear procedure to demarcate what is spontaneously-generated or not; I believe all social interaction is a continuum, and what has been produced cannot be so easily disentangled as you assert."
The assertion belongs to Mises and Hayek, not me. You are the one wishing to apply the term “spontaneous” to all the order you see.
Here’s your argument, as I read it:
(1) All spontaneous order is good.
(2) All social order is spontanous.
(3) Therefore, all social order is good.
You are wrong on (2).
OK, I pretty much agree with that.
But not in specific legal disputes, they’re not, they’re just bullshit. If I steal your wallet and you sue me for damages and my counter-argument is, “I donated it to charity, it’s serving a greater good”, that would just be a bullshit cover for an obviously wrong and illegal act. Even worse, let’s say I am king and all disputes are required to be mediated in my courts. You bring suit in my court asking for damages because I took your wallet without your permission. What will I do? I will laugh and then I will throw you in stocks or have you beaten for insolence. The many justifications which the State gives for its expropriatory acts are in no wise distinguishable from the wallet thief who claims to have donated the wallet to charity in order to serve the greater good.
Now, I think we can account for the origin of such a blatantly immoral social construct without having to violate rationality. I reject the Rothbardian hypothesis that the State is the result of a sort of positive-feedback brainwashing mechanism or the Hoppean hypothesis that the State is an alliance of rent-avoiders, contract-breakers and so on, against land-owners, creditors and so on. These accounts are both inconsistent with human rationality.
I agree with this to an extent. I reject libertarian theories that do not allow room for retaliatory violence as simply detached from the particulars of this physical world, this biosphere and human nature and society.
Would you have made this statement on Aug. 6, 1945 (the day the US military annihilated an entire city in a single moment)? Was that an efficient level of aggression for the day? I think that the concept of efficiency has limits and those limits break down once you start talking about overwhelming, one-sided force… which is exactly what a government is.
Clayton -
bcylwutzht, you’re right to assert that I believe all social order is spontaneously-generated by rational individuals, insofar as it a self-organizing natural process.
However, I am not casting a normative judgment of “good” on such orders; rather, I am casting a descriptive light onto the circumstances (what exists is what exists because of individuals making efficient decisions).
But they do not reveal efficiency.
Are you using the word efficiency any way differently than Mises used rationality? We all agree that people consider expected costs and expected benefits when acting, but the market and money prices give us an idea of the actual costs and actual benefits of the action. An action cannot be ex ante efficient; efficiency is an ex post judgment of the efficacy of the means in achieving the ends sought. Every time the state acts, it might be rational, but we cannot determine its efficiency, because we have no good way of valuating the costs and benefits.
Who has been basing his argument here on post-hoc realizations of “the greater good” arguments? Who are you debating when you are making that statement. For what purpose?
Yes.
Personally, I do use monetary wealth as a measure for wealth-maximization; in this argument, I only am suggesting subjective value.
DD5, I was discussing the issue with the person to whom I replied; furthermore, he had no problem with my response–only you did. Additionally, you called it a strawman argument, which it most certainly is not (once again, it merely states my opinion on how ideologies are rationalizations for interests, an idea explored by economists such as Vilfredo Pareto).
Awesome. I appreciate your thinking on those issues.
No, I don’t believe the Stigler critique applies to such momentary phenomena; he is quite explicit that he suggesting only stable, durable features of the social world are efficient; if anything, I would bet he would say that our disuse of nukes ever since was the efficient response. Of course, one could argue that the risk of Statist violence is a cost that social participants do factor.
If the government were as undesirable as you assert, than I would think there would be a social consensus of its heavy costs; you seem to think that only due to its might does it still reign, but if that were true, why are most preferences not aligned to your beliefs?
Completely agreed. Though most people would prefer a world where no one farts around them, farting has been quite a consistent feature in the natural world. Too much farting would probably lead to the extreme farters’ destruction by others. Too little farting would probably lead to destruction by gastro-intestinal diseases (cancer). “The amount we now see can be considered the efficient amount.” Same thing with aggression and the state. Of course, the world constantly changes (Panta Rei) and with it the “efficient” amounts of everything in it change as well. Still think “efficient” is redundant when “everything persistent” already does the job.
Z.
Thanks. Here’s my blog post on my “alpha-male vestige theory” of government.
Clayton -
Clayton, I edited and added more to my most recent post.
I think such a consensus is inevitable in the long run. Perhaps the very long run. But it’s inevitable. An atheist living in medieval Catholic Europe may have come to the (very reasonable) conclusion that belief in the Christian God is irrational and unjustifiable and that violent actions taken on the basis of this belief (say, burning heretics at the stake) constituted a heavy and unnecessary cost to society. But he would have been very out of step with the social consensus.
Oh no, quite the opposite. I believe that the State is actually becoming less and less powerful* over time but that almost all of its power is due to its social currency, that is, the perception of the public that the State is good and necessary.
See above. The overwhelming majority of people (at least, in the West) believe the State is good and necessary.
Clayton -
*NB - there are a few statements in that blog post that I think are uncareful and a few that I would revise now… but it’s about 95% correct
Hoppean hypothesis that the State is an alliance of rent-avoiders, contract-breakers and so on, against land-owners, creditors and so on. These accounts are both inconsistent with human rationality.
Could you quote to any original sources of his articulating this? I’m not sold on the “Human rationality” argument, because whilst I do accept Mises’s concept of ‘rationality’, I certainly do not buy into anything stronger than that. I do consider the market a corrective mechanism for repeated errors in means-end causality thinking, though, for reasons I outlined before.
StrangeLoop, since you didn’t address my accusation of equivocation that I re-iterated in my last post, I’m assuming that you’re letting it stand. Are you sure you want to do that?
Hence saying that the optimal amount of regulation may be greater than zero says nothing about whether government must do the regulating.
Then I agree with z1235 and JonIrenicus that your argument is trivial. The only reason I can see for making it is equivocation: your real argument is that government is good because, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be here. But instead of making that argument directly, you couch it in the language of “value-free” economic science, hence the equivocation and (dare I say it?) intellectual dishonesty. Fortunately, many (if not most) of your opponents in this thread have seen through to your real argument, and proceeded to demolish it repeatedly.
I thought I had addressed it, but apparently you weren’t satisfied; I do not believe that a mugged person “desired” the mugging. Likewise, I do not believe a stock market investor “desired” a loss; however, losses are an assumed risk. Risks are mitigated as much as one desires.
To quote once again from George Stigler, “We, or at least I, mean by maximum efficiency that a given goal is achieved as best as one knows how. The concept of efficiency contains two values: a valuable goal and valuable means (inputs) with which to achieve that goal. Maximum efficiency consists of achieving a maximum value of output from a given value of inputs.”
Intellectual dishonesty? Your psychoanalytic exegesis of what I “really” meant seems more misleading than helpful.
I have presented my thoughts as clearly as I can, without subterfuge or subtlety.
I am asserting that government is efficient because government has persisted for so long and so ubiquitously; I am not asserting that government is normatively “good” in itself (I don’t believe in instrinsic goodness). People pursuing their own goods self-interestedly has led to this social arrangement, and hence the outcome can only be judged by the process that created it: individuals rationally choosing to maximize their benefits and to minimize their costs.
I would disagree with this on one simple premise: women do not flock to these men to offer themselves sexually. Likewise, non-Statist persons (e.g., celebrity musicians) do receive such attention; that is, your basic premise would imply that our passive attitudes toward State personnel would be more toward their reproductive privileges, not passitivity toward coercive practices like taxation.
I do believe there is an innate taste for leadership, though (hence why so many find bottom-up market orders counterintuitive).