Firstly, if you assume that humans should be left to decide for themselves what will make them most happy libertarianism is the inevitable result. Collectivists point to research that shows that people are generally quite poor at predicting what will actually make them happy. This is the ultimate justification for central planning. Central planners can correlate statistics and determine what actually makes people happy, then work to maximize this. Individuals are too biased, too stupid, and too lazy to work through the data and apply it to themselves. Therefore the net happiness of mankind will increase if it is left in the hands of those who dedicate themselves to its study. A good example of this is a recent “happiness study” that concluded that income past a certain amount didn’t result in any increase in happiness. Of course this was immediately latched onto. If you buy the collectivist argument, this justifies taxation on any amount over this monetary threshold.
Secondly, central planning removes the problem of prisoner’s dilemmas from the market-place. The idea here is that there are some limited cases where competing actors will provide a worse outcome for all parties by competing. This is used as justification for areas where the government interferes in commerce such as banking.
Thirdly, central planning can alleviate situations in which economic latency is considered unacceptable. In the free-market it can take time before a satisfactory equilibrium is reached when there is economic instability. For example, in the course of competition a large hospital might go out of business, even though the smaller competing hospital isn;t large enough to handle all patients yet. This justifies the government regulating industries in which any interruption in service is considered unacceptable.
are there simple refutations to these points besides the fact that government has consistently failed at them in real life? I feel that there must be a theoretical basis for rejecting them without historical data.
To start with, there’s the obvious absurdity that if I don’t know what makes me happy, how on earth are some people who have never met me, don’t know of my existance going to know what makes me happy? There’s no way to know this. Unless of course, I am given the chance to figure it out for myself. This does mean occasionally failing and learning from these experiences. However, in order to learn from this others can’t be coerced into protecting me from the responsiblity of these actions.
Moreover, how can anybody measure “net happiness”? And what makes it something to aim for? Presumably if these was one person who gained immense pleasure for seeing every other person commit suicide, they should be forced to do it.
They’re going to have to justify this one. Statists have this misconception about competition, as revealed with phrases such as “cut throat competition” competition is merely a process that goes on in the market that promotes the most favourable outcome to the consumers. If this means that the banks have to cooperate to acheive a more favourable outcome they will. All tragedy of commons situations now arise because of poorly defined property rights.
However, the burden of proof is on the statist to prove that this would be necessary.
If a big hospital goes out of buisness, it’s because it is poorly managed. If it is necessary to the running of the economy, and for the good of the people an entrepreneur will buy it and manage it himself, better. If not, it goes out of buisness and the smaller hospital can buy its assets and expand its own operations.
The alternative is keeping inefficient buisness in operation. What good does that do?
Even assuming that such statistical inferences were possible, central planners never have the interest of the people at heart. They always have some sort of ideological dogma, such as militarism, imperialism or whatnot. Give power to one man over others, and you have a recipe for totalitarianism that ends up hurting the people. We’ve seen what happens in command economy - consumer goods are underproduced because central planners replace the consumers’ interests with their own political interests, and instead manufacture weapons, mal-invest in capital goods, or send people to the moon while the people on the earth are starving (Soviet Union). That’s what’s so great about the free market, it’s about balance and equilibrium - I don’t just mean in prices, but in power relations. Nobody in a free market has more state-granted and coercively enforced rights than anyone else. Which is why when egalitarians approach equality from the standpoint of empowering the government to deal with power or material inequalities, their efforts become counter-productive, and frankly ironic. Since when does replacing a (state-created) corporate elite with state officials solve any problems? Just because Marx was so naive so as to not include politicians and government officials as a class in and of itself?
If this is the case, then said individuals will likewise be incapable of wisely selecting masters. Do these collectivists then advocate a platonic society of philosopher kings and eugenics?
The interesting part about utility calculations, is that nobody seems to factor in the dis-utility arising from coercively enforcing decisions upon people. For all we know, it may very well exceed any perceived benefits.
Not necessarily. For taxation to be justified, you still have to either completely disprove property rights, which would mean trying to disprove self-ownership, or somehow resolve the moral double standard inherent in coercive government taxation. Unless I’m missing something, the right to own something doesn’t stem from the potential utility or happiness arising from said ownership - though I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the reasoning some people use.
Although the prisoners dilemma is itself sound, it relies upon a proof that certain goods cannot be provided on a private basis, e.g. healthcare, education, etc.. I think many books have been written adequately addressing the way in which such goods can and have been privately provided.
Not really. The government will run into the calculation problem. If the market does not respond instantaneously, it is because time as a constraint is a fact of life (interesting note, in mainstream economics, time is not one of the factors of production). Mises and Hayek have showed very well how the government is unable to even work out where an equilibrium lies without any competition or market price mechanism. Besides, do you really posit that an enormous hierarchical bureaucracy operating on the Peter principle can really react faster than competing firms on a market? Besides which, what would be the incentive? In a market, firms will make a profit by satisfying consumer demand, while a government has a steady flow of income no matter what quality the services it provides are.
First of all there is good reason to be skeptical of this research; the growth of human happiness is not the sort of thing that can measured by putting it in a test tube. You can follow the scientific method to the letter but it will be all for nothing unless the assessments are valid.
More pertinently, the questions to ask of the collectivists are “given the validity of your methods for attaining human happiness, how does it follow that it is permissible to coerce people into going along this method, especially considering that coercion is a cause for unhappiness?” and more generally “why is utility so important that it can justify coercion at all?”
Basically, the collectivist’s argument runs “doing such-and-such will make people happy, so we must force people to do such-and-such;” not only is this a patent non sequitur, the program, if implemented, would be counter-productive.
on the first one I’d say that central planners, even if they are saints among men, still artificially limit the combinations that the free market would bring. the central planner can therefore never know if his solutions are optimal, while the free market continuously provides opportunity for improvement (can someone do it cheaper?). worse, heavy taxation guarantees that no solutions but the central planners can even be tried, because most investment capital has been taken.
on the third one, I agree that there is zero reason to think that the government can guarantee service any better than private firms, and in fact has less of an incentive to do so.
of the three, I think the prisoner’s dilemma can have the greatest case made for it, but like you said, there is literature on the matter. I will check it out.
"The Department of Eudaimonistic Enforcement has initiated a new edict today which would force undergraduate students to submit their choice of graduate studies to the DEE to determine how happy it will make them. The law goes on to state that any study which is determined to increase the student in questions happiness by 10 utils or more will be permitted to enter the field of study.
When questioned about the possible response of the Agorist Liberation Front to the new edict, Claire Remos said - head of the DEE, ‘We are prepared to deal with any retaliation by choice extremists but largely doubt that such action… will occur a third time within a year.’"
Thorsmiter, some of your Youtube videos are alright.
The problem with collectivist ideology can be put into a hopeless quagmire when you propose the following issues:
Methodological individualism as an epistemic primary.
The impossibility of interpersonal value comparisons.
The arbitrary assertion that dissimilar objects (all people are unique) can be added together and imply an a normative as regards the behaviour of other unique objects (other people). This is the most general way of saying that all people are unique, why does it follow that a greater number of unique objects can be considered to have a normative superiority over other unique objects? This is like talking about electrons and photons having a superior right to normative superiority because they outnumber protons.