I think the costs of labeling and printing all those things are such a waste these days, when the producer could instead put up a website or answer machines by phone for those interested, and just print that one line of contact information on it. That the government still requires the entire nutritional information to be on the box of every single product is a huge loss for everyone IMO.
"Legally, yes. However, maybe he believes in a concept called “oogle property” which you violated by “walking along.” His assult on you was thus retaliatory and thus not aggression.
If I walk inside your house at night and you forcefully kick me out of it, is that “aggression” to you?"
Then he’s not in a rational state. That doesn’t mean he’s not committing aggression.
And sure, that’s aggression, but it’s not the initiation of it. I don’t see a legitimate reason for you to be in my house (certainly not easement) so I’d be justified in kicking you out.
“But in such a scenario, no matter how unlikely, the firement would not be acting wrongly by violating the mans property rights. The man should be punished for not allowing the families to be saved (assuming he is somehow actually able to stop the firemen from tresspassing). Agreed?”
I don’t think he ought to be punished, just restrained.
“You are making many assumption here. For starters that statelessness would look anything like anarcho-capitalism. That courts and arbiters would be fair and neutral, and that property rights would even be respected to any reasonable degree to begin with. None of these are reasonable assumptions,”
It doesn’t matter if you think they are reasonable or not to the point I was making, just as it doesn’t matter if I think the scenarios you bring up are unlikely or not to the point you’re making.
That said, I didn’t say statelessness, I said anarcho-capitalism. I’m talking about a specific kind of statelessness because that’s the kind of statelessness that recognizes the the homesteading principle I’m applying. I’d disagree with you about those assumptions being reasonable, but that’s an entirely different issue.
'You don’t know what courts would do in an anarcho-capitalist society.
Here is a question for you, if I homestead land, do I have a right to descriminate? Should I be allowed to tell someone, “you are not allowed on my property.”’
Yes you have the right to discriminate against people and yes you have the right to keep them off your land but you must take steps to do that. Someone walking across your land for the purpose of easement (or perhaps retrieval of something he owns that is on your land such as a piece of paper blown by the wind) and not damaging your property isn’t aggressing against you. If you don’t want people on your land at all, you have to homestead the land in such a manner as to prevent them from doing so.
That the government still requires the entire nutritional information to be on the box of every single product is a huge loss for everyone IMO.
The marginal cost of doing so is almost zero, not to mention there are all sorts of other costs involved in putting it online.
Exactly.
This is implicit in all anarcho-capitalist models, but many Austro-libertarians somehow believe that the non-aggression principle (as conceived by them) would universally hold in all legal systems. As David Friedman states, “I predict that, if anarcho-capitalist institutions appeared in this country tomorrow, heroin would be legal in New York and illegal in most other places.” I disagree with his prediction, actually, but I agree with its core premise: coercive measures that violate the Austro-libertarian NAP will be produced by private law. I actually even believe business regulations could form within an anarcho-capitalist society. Of course, my fundamental prediction is that laws would, more often than not, be economically efficient.
I tend to endorse all welfare-maximizing private law, and I believe all law is necessarily coercive insofar as it limits possible behavior.
In order to make this statement, you must first believe that welfare maximization is possible. In order to believe that welfare maximization is possible, you must first believe that welfare is objectively quantifiable*. Please demonstrate the objective quantifiability* for welfare.
- I consider the phrases “objectively quantifiable” and “objective quantifiability” to be pleonasms, but I use them here to hopefully reduce ambiguity.
Proof by wikipedia. Problem: even the wikipedia acknowledges this bit:
Incomparability between agents
Since for any two VNM-agents X and Y, their VNM-utility functions uX and uY are only determined up to additive constants and multiplicative positive scalars, the theorem does not provide any canonical way to compare the two. Hence expressions like uX(L) + uY(L) and uX(L) − uY(L) are not canonically defined, nor are comparisons like uX(L) < uY(L) canonically true or false. In particular, the aforementioned “total VNM-utility” and “average VNM-utility” of a population are not canonically meaningful without normalization assumptions.
Perhaps this is simplistic, but I fail to see how the concept of expected value in probability theory equates to the concept of human (dis)satisfaction. How are you defining “welfare”? It seems you’re defining it very differently from me.
Furthermore, quoting from the article:
This is just math, by which I mean even if u can be found, there’s no necessary correlation between it and the real world.
Maybe you can easily address these issues I have, but for now I remain unconvinced that welfare (i.e. “how well-off people are”) can be objectively quantified.
EDIT: JAlanKatz got ahead of me here. What Wikipedia refers to as “incomparability between agents” in the article seems to be, in effect, another way of expressing the Austrian-economic theory of subjective valuation.
I’ve only read the first couple of responses, but I sympathize with Eric
No offense, responses given to him are the reason why a lot of people criticize libertarians as being idealists and ideologues who believe in the “magic of the free market” when are only answers to why something would happen is because:
- They want to make their consumers happy!
or(the even more cringe worthy argument)
- So you want those thugs pointing a gun to your head!
Instead of offering any modern day or historical evidence to back up assertations we spend our time simplying a problem and then trying to rationalize it as the only absolute.
The libertarians are trying to argue incentives versus the magic-wand theory of law. Government regulators are unlikely to produce good rules because of the incentives they face…
I don’t know that anyone excepts people to behave the same way in their ‘house’ so to speak, as in public. In particular, I think we all behave differently at Mises Institute and answer more quickly and, well, gruffly, than we would if asked these questions at a liberal forum or a coffee house.
The great thing about markets, by the way, is that they are not magic. You’ve offered nothing in the way of criticism of these points other than a cringe. And no, no one wants those thugs pointing a gun at their own head - they are only happy to see it pointed at the heads of others. Scroll up and read the poster who is happy to see people shot to maximize ‘welfare.’
So, do you have some reason companies in a free market would prefer to upset their customers? Or some point other than random cringing?
As far as your last paragraph, yes, you’re right, I value things other than empirics, particularly in cases where no isolated laboratory exists. I value empirics in chemistry and physics precisely because we can have lab testing there, but even there, almost no one simply rests on the data. We still want a unifying theory, we want theoretical understanding that is consistent with the data. Hayek referred frequently to the American obsession with data as the only form of knowledge as a particular weakness in our philosophy as compared with Europe. Guess who is reading Hayek now? Scientists working on complexity theory and cognitive science, among others, who want to understand how things connect and work, which requires a theory.
Actually, by the way, I’ve written several long posts on incentives detailing how the market would behave, what goes on in the current situation, and the parallel example of kosher foods for which no legal requirements exist (they did in NY at one time - the religious community itself protested until they were taken down because they found that, with kosher labeling laws in place, they were unable to trust the certification, but when competing companies did it, they were able to trust it). Of course, very little of that has been quoted in replies.
I believe that cardinal utility does permit interpersonal comparisons, but I would also concede that certain normative assumptions are required (of course, I believe that the fact-value dichotomy is false, anyway).
Overall, I would contend that the compensation principle is a reasonable method for interpersonal comparisons of utility.
I didn’t make my posts to offer any for or against positions on this topic. I made it because I think the way some of you guys go about trying to convince people to your side of the argument is ineffective and divisive. You’re not going to convince people by directly, indirectly calling them a statist and simplying how you think the market would react and the overused gun argument is a piss poor attempt at appealing to emotion.
And yes I know the Austrian position on empiricism in economics, but providing real world evidence to show trends and back up your claims is a lot more convicing theorizing about what you think would happen.
So if you want the body of someone else in order to make love to, but that person doesn’t allow it, then she (or he) is coercing you?
You need to reevaluate your understanding of NAP.
We all, unless radical pacifists, believe in force to maximize welfare; however, this economic justification is almost always implicit (the “law and economics” movement being an exception).
Consider the righteous Austro-libertarian appraisal of property rights, for instance; I find ethical cases for communism more appealing than the Locken proviso or any other ethical libertarian arguments–however, I find property rights to be more efficient and to maximize wealth. If we are willing to shoot trespassers or thieves or rapists, then we believe in force to maximize welfare.
The NAP defines “aggression” based upon specific presuppositions (e.g., self-ownership, etc.).
If person A believes that rape is actually a gift to person B, then B’s forceful resistance is coercive. Of course, I wholly applaud B’s revolt against that transgression.
In the arena of socially competing interests (varying ethical commitments, etc.), I believe we never escape the state of nature, but that power simply triumphs power (e.g., more cooperative societies overtake others not on the merit of transcendent morals, but on efficiency).
Well, I think you should qualify that claim with “to some people.” I’m sure as hell more convinced by a priori knowledge than “real world evidence” which, as I and many philosophers spend our lives pointing out (I’m a teacher) does not come complete with its own interpretation. You need a framework to fit the data into, and, unsurprisingly, that framework will determine what you think the data means. Pointing to guns is not an argument, it’s an observation. It’s worth observing that people never sell their ideas in public by saying “lets have a ballot initiative on whether or not X should be shot.” Why do you think they don’t do that?
As a teacher myself, I realize that logically coherent ideas (Leibniz’s monadology, Spinoza’s geometric proofs, etc.) are always bunk without substantiating data.
Well, no, a person need not have any particular opinion on maximizing welfare (or think that such a term is coherent) to be willing to shoot a rapist. A woman who has never heard the term might be quite willing to shoot a rapist because she doesn’t appreciate being raped - and, more specifically, for moral reasons having nothing to do with economics. That is, she might think “shooting rapists doesn’t maximize utility” and do it anyway because she believes she has a right to.
Yet what matters is by what theory you determine whether or not the data substantiate the particular idea.