“As a soccer referee myself, I object to being compared to state agents.”
This is great! I knew it was only a matter of time before a real referee came forward and spoke out against such a degrading government analogy.
Now,.. if only traffic lights could talk.
wolfman:
Well not quite a monopoly. In a federation type of goernement you have more than 1 governement in place.
Oh, a cartel of governments…
wolfman:
Can explain priori laws for human action??
There’s a book for that…actually multiple books. You can start with Man, Economy and State with Power and Market by Murray N. Rothbard.
Society is not a sport.
However, I will take the time to debunk your argument for the sake of lurkers, newbies or others who do not say from the outset that they will not listen to any counter-arguments - I wonder why you’re on a discussion board instead of posting to your personal blog.
Anyway, your argument has huge, gaping, glaring holes:
I believe you were trying to make an argument by analogy but you technically failed to do that. You said, “Society in all its aspects is like any other sport” which implies that society is a sport, an obviously false assertion. But in the spirit of charity I will assume you meant, “Society in all its aspects is like a sport.”
Even here, your argument is a non sequitir because you give no essential similarity between society and sports. “Society in all its aspects is like a banana and all bananas have a stem, therefore, society needs a stem” is an equally valid argument by analogy.
Again, in the spirit of charity, I will assume that you meant that the essential similarity between society and sports is that both involve groups of individuals trying to accomplish common goals with a minimum of conflicts. Your deduction that this implies that a referee is necessary lacks praxeological depth on both your analysis of sports and society.
Sports did not originate with the NFL, they originated with a couple people competing to see how far they could throw a rock or a stick. No referees were needed or consulted. Sports leagues are, in fact, for-profit businesses which have found that spectators put a high premium on impartiality and sportsmanship and will choose to patronize professional sports that enforce these values more strongly over those that do not. Look how badly baseball was hurt by all the steroids scandals a few years back.
And society does, in fact, have referees (arbitrators) and no Austrian economist I am aware of disputes the need for arbitration in society. The criticisms of anti-statists such as Hoppe, Rothbard and others is against the kind of arbitrators we tolerate in society. In a natural order society, arbitrators emerge in the same way professional sports do… through open competition in a market with free entry. The territorial monopolist of law (State) results in the creation not of a referee and players, but of a two-tiered law. As Conza88 pointed out, an essential difference between a sport and society is that the referees are their own team, they play in the game. It’s like appointing the players on the New York Yankees to be the referees of all games, including their own. Since they play the game (unlike referees who do not play), they have an interest even in the outcome of games they do not play, namely, they can influence who moves on and who is eliminated. And, of course, who can doubt the outcome of a game where one team interprets and enforces the rules?
This brings me to conflict of interest. Your argument completely neglects the issue of conflict of interest. People act to achieve ends through means. When the ends of two individuals come into conflict, a dispute arises and something must be done to settle the dispute. Sometimes, it’s as easy as saying, “Excuse me”. Other times, it may require a war. But most of the time, the most extreme measure that must be taken to settle a dispute is to bring it to a neutral 3rd party (arbitrator) to assist in hammering out an agreement. This is how law originated in the natural order and all law ultimately goes back to dispute resolution (statutes are not law, they are the advertised policies of the government apparatus).
Quite a few Austrian economists are minarchists (starting with Ludwig von Mises himself). So, your generalization that all AE is anti-state is simply incorrect.
Go back to the drawing boards and get a better argument.
Clayton -
Logic is a set of rules that hold over all formal systems which humans use in the course of calculation.
There’s a lot in that sentence, so let me break it down.
Humans calculate as a means to achieving ends. For example, if you are chasing a deer with your spear and it jumps a deep ravine, you must calculate whether you can make the jump without falling to your demise. Some calculations we can do without any external aids.
For other calculations, we require the use of an external device to assist the brain. You can use rocks, an abacus, slide-rule, calculator, pen and paper or whatever you like. All of these methods are formal because they follow a uniform set of rules that are applied at every point during the calculation. In other words, you do not begin long division by one set of rules then change the rules half-way through. The rules are invariant throughout the extent of the calculation.
There is a discernible pattern in any calculation with invariant rules throughout its extent. For example, if we use the mark ‘1’ to represent a single rock, then everywhere that mark occurs, it can be replaced or substituted with itself. This is the Law of Identity, A = A or A->A (read: A implies A). We note that this is true of any calculation, not just some calculations. Therefore, we say that the Law of Identity is universal. Together with the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle, these form the Aristotelian Laws of Logic.
Clayton -
We have a Welfare State because the government thinks it should be a referree.
This is required reading for any serious student of praxeology, Long’s Rule-following, Praxeology, and Anarchy.
The abusive stepfather… the most needed referee.
Logic = rules for noncontradictory inferences. Basically, any thought worthwhile having and anyone which will touch upon truth.
Society is not like a game. At all.