Why do I get the feeling JJ knew that?
I think it still technically answers the question?
"Tim, what are your thoughts on this article about Norway?
“Why Norway is a BS Argument for Higher Taxes” - SovereignMan.com"
Seems like a bunch of vague platitudes. The guy doesn’t like how the security of the Norweigan welfare state to his mind makes people less amibious, or something. Though Norway having some of the better stats for intergenerational economic mobility (http://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf) tends to lead to me to believe that the Norweigan economy is still more rife with real individual opportunity for personal advancement than the less secure USA for example. Frankly I didn’t see anything in the article worth considering: Norway is a rich country, has high marks on all indications of social health, and the supposed problem of “lack of ambition, no focus on individual success, etc etc whatever” does not seem to be borne out considering we have actually facts showing Norway’s economy to be MORE “individualistic” than less welfare-oriented nations. And yes, there are millionaire bussinessmen in Norway too.
Yeah this is pretty much all you need to know.
Econometrically Tim has failed to address any of the statistical arguments. PIIGS nations are inferior to CASSH nations, and Cash nations are inferior to even more capitalist countries.
Hey genius, welfare states never stay limited and reasonable in the long run. They grow and and grow, and rights slowly erode away.
Also since we’re not just Libertarians, but also Austrians, we object to fiduciary media created in the fractional reserve banking process. The state is Keynesian, we are not, Keynesian economics is inferior to Austrian economics. Politicians are economically illiterate, even more inferior than standard neoclassical economists that teach at Universities, so they’re a step behind even the Keynesians.. Everything that you just said is worthless and statistically insignificant.
As an immigrant I have learned that Americans are very whiny and entitled even though they live in a relatively rich country,Capitalism is the only way to develop a market economy because Populism is economically irrational. Your welfare is superfluous, private welfare is far better I’ll use any private charity with brand recognition as an example.
Tim, so this part wasn’t worth addressing?
"Sure, the system gives them lots of leisure time to enjoy… but this is not necessarily a choice they make freely, rather the only choice they have.
Now, even if this lack of economic freedom seems a reasonable price to pay for national healthcare… even if tamed aspirations and an uninspired career are valid trade-offs for more leisure and less hard work… Norway is not a replicable model.
People who think that ‘we should just be like Norway’ are missing an even greater point: all of this central planning is made possible by huge oil reserves… and for that matter, oil reserves that are DECADES past their peak production.
Norway’s model is not only unreplicable in most other countries, it is also unsustainable.
Mediocrity works great when you can fool society into accepting it and have the oil wealth to finance it. But the true path to prosperity is, and always will be, a system based on economic freedom that rewards hard work, creativity, and achievement."
I hear Saudis and Qataris get a lot of freebies from the state and seem to be doing quite well, too. A monarchy or a sultanate much?
The State in Norway practically runs people’s lives with the amount of control it has over economic outcomes. If you prefer a universalization of living standards, you have some serious issues. It’s a country of 5 million. It’s not hard to provide for 5 million. Get an economic system to provide a decent standard of living for hundreds of millions. Now that’s an achievement.
This worship of European countries is pathetic. Learn economics, and realize countries can succeed for a multitude of reasons. That some countries are both “successful” (at least for the time being) and not economically free does not mean they are successful because they are not economically free.
If mankind sold commodities to aliens and spent the proceeds on buying technology from the aliens and stocks/bonds/real estate etc in the aliens societies, mankind could do what Norway does, i.e live beyond their means, i.e. consume more than they produce.
Are you sure about that?
You can be singular or plural.
Most of my divergences with some hardcore libertarians are grounded on my view of their rather naive concept of rights and legitimacy.
I think they should apply basic economic principles to their own positions as well, and try more to avoid content vague and ideologically charged discussions that emerge from working only in terms of categorical moral absolutes.
Because, regardless of any libertarian slogan, your rights, to property or of any other kind, are not absolute nor inalienable.
And no right can be made absolute, unless you believe in an absolute power source who may endow people with divinely protected rights.
Such a concept may be a wonderful allegory to compound and empower the language of a declaration of independence, but if you take it too far as an applied principle to the workings of the real world, you will sooner or later discover first hand how reality can be a treacherous little thing.
In the real world, any claim you make to a given set of rights needs to be generally respected by other people, otherwise you have no such rights. You can claim to be a free man, but if you find yourself locked in a cage and no one seems to be coming to open it, your claim has been denied.
And other people will respect any claim you made insofar as they perceive the costs of challenging your claim to be greater than the costs of recognizing any right attached to it.
It may look trivial enough as a point, but such a common-sense consideration is seldom invoked or remembered before people commence firing rhetorical torpedoes that are void of meaningful content, such as the NAP argumentations we frequently see.
The only right nature or the “creator” seem to have endowed us all is the right to fight. And this is not a “fair fight”. Some will start in better positions than others and there’s nothing that can be done about it.
The only right any living soul has is the right to fight for all other things she wishes to secure for herself.
This is as valid for the peasant claiming ownership of a small plot in the hinterlands as it is for the King claiming his crown posessions in the capital.
The King may be powerful but he has no absolute right to act as he will. He needs to fulfill a lot of demands and requirements in order to secure his crown.
That is, if he does not behave according to the expectations of his noble supporters and other powerful people inside his realm, or if he is in the way of a more powerful foreign warlord willing to conquer his kingdom, somebody will challenge his god given right to rule soon enough.
So, regardless of homestead priority or natural rights-babble, if you want to use your land as a testing ground for nuclear weapons or as a safe harbor for undesired immigrants, you may expect retaliation from your neighbors, insofar as they are in position to retaliate.
Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I’m very libertarian.
I love shooting rhetorical bullets like “my home my castle” whenever someone starts talking nonsense about revoking gun rights, or banning cigarettes, and other authoritarian shit like that.
But even though these propaganda pieces are very effective for the purpose of shutting down some collectivist dogma regurgitating machine, they cannot be taken too literally or too extreme without backfiring.
That is, “absolute property rights” are meaningless abstractions when the point is acquiring understanding, despite the fact that they may be excellent devices to propel political talking points.
As a general empirical rule, property rights will be more extensive when external costs deriving from indiscriminate use of property are less extensive. And this can be only sorted out in practice, through real world negotiations, litigations and perhaps violent disputes.
And I’m not saying that the tax-funded bureaucratic machinery of government is the most effective, or moral, or logical mediator to all these externalities issues.
I hardly think so.
But if you think that some abstract absolute natural rights allow you to dispose of your land and property as you wish, I shall advise you that the real world may not comply to your terms.
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ToxicAssets,
Whether rights metaphysically exist or not has zero bearing on their suitability as a grounds for a legal system. I hardly think that most of us here accept them as metaphysically existent, so there is no need to point it out anytime rights are brought up in the legal sense.
@ h.k.
“As an immigrant I have learned that Americans are very whiny and entitled even though they live in a relatively rich country”
We sure have come a long way since the Revolution, you know?
^ +1
“The State in Norway practically runs people’s lives with the amount of control it has over economic outcomes.”
Documentation to that effect? I’ve heard people say things like this a lot and never saw much to back it up; I’m not necessarily accusing you of this, but it sounds like a thing people say because they want it to be true and they vaguely suspect it to be true. I’ll consider sources.
“If you prefer a universalization of living standards, you have some serious issues.”
I don’t really. Although plenty of people would probably call me an outright socialist in many respects, I don’t really care about “equality” in and of itself, I care about everyone(or at least as many as possible) having some decent ‘minimum’ standard to allow access to things people need(decent education, training, growing up in a socially stable environment, whatever) to live up to whatever potentials they have. I do suspect that in a society where most people have more or less an equal opportunity regardless of whatever circumstances they were born into (and Norway to me seems to be such a society, judging by the OECD stats) most people WILL obtain a generally similar living standard because most people are of generally similar capabilities(the vast majority of people being, obviously, around an “average” level of intelligence, etc.)
"Learn economics, and realize countries can succeed for a multitude of reasons. That some countries are both “successful” (at least for the time being) and not economically free does not mean they are successful because they are not economically free. "
That some countries are “successful” (at least for the time being) and economically free does not mean they are successful because they are economically free.
Of course, the very fact that Norway has a welfare system and that it is less economically “free” in some respects does not by itself make it a prosperous country – the fact it has a lot of capital, created through capitalist production processes (I’m not arguing for communism here), makes it wealthy. And it redistributes that wealth through a state-run system that has created a very stable and generally equal society (again, I’m not touting equality as some metaphysical moral good, but when a wealthy industrialized country is ‘more equal’ it necessarily means more people have a higher standard of living) wherein people are still free to read what they want, eat what they want, persue their own interests, get rich if they so desire(as plenty have), marry whom they want, associated with whom they want, travel where they want if they can, etc etc etc. And of course Norway’s oil (state-owned production) is a big factor in its ability to do this; but plenty of other high welfare states are able to do so without the oil.
I think we all agree that rights do exist in some sense, since rights are talked about all the time and they are the reason why some things happen and other things don’t.
My point is not on the existence of rights, but on their nature.
What are they and where do they come from?
My definition is that an established right is any practical constraint on the potential behavior of some others towards oneself, that one may generally expect from the rational consideration of alternatives by each of the others.
Rights are violated insofar as these expectations of constrained behavior are not met on occasion.
And rights are denied insofar as these expectations do not exit and/or are generally not met.
That is, a “right” that is constantly violated is not a right, but something else. A wish, a desire, an unsatisfied claim perhaps.
USSR had oil and high welfare. Former Yugoslavia, Greece, Portugal, France, and Italy had high welfare and not much oil. Each and every other western socialist-democracy is on the verge of a total collapse as we speak. Do you actually think that free markets, greed, and speculators are responsible for the “once in a century” financial crises we seem to be experiencing almost every year, at this point? What evidence is there that high welfare actually produces sustainable flourish and prosperity in a society?
Whatever affluence and prosperity you observe in the quickly-unravelling social-democratic western world are remnants from the capital created during the industrial revolution which has been eaten up through the socialist-Keynesian, centrally-planned policies over the last hundred years. If you take your head out of the fallacious correlation=>causation “scientific empirical evidence” mirages and learned some real economics (Austrian) it would become abundantly clear to you that private property and free markets create (capital) while socialism, central-planning, wellfare, warfare, and Keynesianism devour it. Everyone is much better off with the former while all but the polit-buro elites end up as feeder cattle in the mud with the latter. How many times must history repeat these lessons before people like you finally learn them? You get taken each and every time!
Here’s some evidence for you to gnaw on:
Presenting the decline of the West in two easy infographics
" According to Toshl’s data, users in Western Europe earn an average of $2,062 per month, but spend $2,396. This is an average monthly deficit of $334 per person, or roughly 16% of income.
Toshl users in the United States are in even worse shape, earning on average $1,871 per month. But they spend $2,290 per month, an average monthly deficit of $419, or 22% of income.
So who in the world is living within their means? Australian, Brazilian, Russian, Canadian, Filipino, and Indian users all show positive surpluses each month. Chinese and Singaporeans are essentially at breakeven levels.
Both of these infographics point to the same conclusion: the west is living far beyond its means and is struggling with pitifully anemic growth. This is a long-term trend, and one that is only going to accelerate."
Great post, Z.
I mean, what else do you think is the necessary result of proportionally high state spending, restrictive taxes which limit consumption, among other things, and economic regulation? The state determines what services people are getting, in what quantity they are getting them, and for what price. You don’t see an inherent problem in nationalized industries, and state spending in general? Norway may only be 5 million people (and therefore decentralized in some sense just by that fact alone), most of whom are largely ethnically homogenous, and this probably limits the damage done by state spending, but how could you possibly see the gov’t stealing and spending nearly half the product of its citizens as anywhere near preferable to the citizens spending their own money themselves, in way they deem most beneficial?
“In 2011, 28% of state revenues were generated from the petroleum industry.”
And there’s your giant subsidy to inefficiency. It’s a shame the benefit of having such valuable resources in the country is eaten up by the state.
You say you don’t care about equality, and then you completely defy that statement on the next line. If you support some minimum standard that you subjectively determine, then you value equality in itself in some degree - just likely not in the degree that you’d support an “equality of poverty.”
I’m sorry, but I see this as kind of disgustingly controlling. Sure, I definitely sympathize with a standard in which the vast majorities are free from poverty, but if I were to support any standard above that level, I’d have serious qualms about stealing on a grand scale to achieve it. Luckily, capitalism has made concerns about my conception of poverty mostly obsolete in places like America, and if allowed to function more freely, would surely continue the trend.
I’ve been to Denmark once before, and my impression is that everybody has about the same size house (small), most don’t have cars (they use the rail system), restaurants, clothes, and other consumption goods are very expensive. It is a beautiful country, and people are generally happy. Great. In some sense, I can see the appeal in equality among a small number of culturally knit people, all living similar lifestyles. But this if for people to determine by themselves, consensually, as groups of people; not at the expense of those around them. I should have no right to steal from you to relieve me of my envy. And the reality is, the people of Denmark would probably be much better off if they had more decision-making at the individual level. They’d be wealthier and get the goods and services they actually desire for prices they think are reasonable, and their tight knit culture, and general “happiness” (who wouldn’t be happy in such a beautiful country?) wouldn’t disappear or collapse. Once again, we come back to the same point. Is Denmark “successful” because of state spending, or in spite of it? This is a question no statistic can answer.
Nah. Their standard of living leeches off the creations of billionaires from past and present, of whom they are not equal in income to. Great innovations, especially in this day and age, usually create income inequality. There is nothing wrong with this.
Irrelevant to Marko’s question.
Not according to my definition of “coercion”, which is “the use or threat of violence”. The state threatens everyone with violence all the time. Therefore, per my definition of “coercion”, it coerces everyone all the time. I consider that coercion to be aggressive and thus immoral.
Irrelevant to Marko’s question.
The question is which set of norms.
The set of norms to be obeyed in a voluntaryist society is much smaller than that in today’s society or the kind of society you seem to support.
I invite you to prove that “social programs” are “worth it” for “society”.
I invite you to actually answer the question. Would you do it yourself? What sort of physical shape you’re in is completely irrelevant to that question. Would you be willing to do it yourself?
I invite you to prove that “no one would refuse to pay taxes” and that “social programs help people”.
In my opinion, no they wouldn’t.
My take on rights is thus radically different from the hardcore libertarian one.
Much like socialists, they believe that rights are emanations of some rationally “self-evident” and universal justice principle.
The difference is a minor one.
Libertarians believe this principle is the non-initiation of aggression.
And Socialists believe this principle is the equitable distribution of wealth.
Both think society does seek (or, at least, should seek) the application of their vision of Justice.
Both, at some point or another, believe to have a fair amount of concrete evidence that societies around the world are approaching their vision, even though they admit some occasional setbacks. They believe they have figured out the historical mechanism that serves as the social input of ethical norms and civilized behavior.
And both of them are completely delusional.
No such universal “self-evident” principle could ever make any sense.
Neither aggression nor wealth are universal concepts to begin with.
They have different meanings to different people, and they can only make sense once a context is provided.
Some people consider themselves aggressed by the mere existence of some other people.
And there are many forms of wealth that are not amenable to distribution.
We can know now what is traditionally considered as aggression or wealth, but we cannot predict the future perceptions of future people.
The future of these traditions will depend on the complicated and very unpredictable way the developments unfolds.
Rights and laws do not emanate from some rationally, self-evident, axiomatically established justice ideal.
Rights and laws emerge from the self-organization of a social system of individuals acting within an environment of circumstances that change, and whose global evolution is of transcendent complexity and cannot thus be foreseen, much less reduced to the rise of some simple cosmic principle of justice that we were trained to worship.
Even if we can discern a rational pattern for the evolution of rights, morals and the idea of justice, it doesn’t mean they have a purpose to fulfill , much less that we are in a position to claim anything about their “ultimate design”. If anything, such a design would be the less self-evident of all things.
Both hardcore socialists and libertarians visions are very much like the creationist take on life and the Universe, but even worse, because creationists don’t usually claim to understand the designs and intentions of the creator.
Things are much more complex than that.