Technology is a lot like policy: the good analyst looks at the short and long term issues and the primary and secondary and less obvious effects.
I recently heard someone blurt out that hydrogen is the solution to our energy problems on a libertarian-tangent show, and it was bugging me, so a bit of a rant.
“Exploitation theory” is something I see being constantly used in socialist arguments, even today. What you won’t hear is that exploitation theory is an uneconomic mess that was completely destroyed by advances in price theory that happened while Marx was still alive.
Oddly enough, even Marx’s opponents, like Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread, use this faulty idea of exploitation to make their arguments, and it’s kind of painful to watch.
Above, in a ~16 minute video, I’ll break down the problems with exploitation theory and provide a concrete example where a person might choose to rent a tool from another without either person exploiting the other, and with no aggression or differences in ability.
The bottom line is this: anytime someone tells you somebody is exploiting someone else without providing evidence, you can simply dismiss them using the arguments in this video. Their attempts to label certain relationships as exploitative is just them trying to steal a base, and you shouldn’t let them.
My notes and script, if you want to read them.
Video also available on BitChute.
In this article by Frank Shostak, I think he’s made a bit of a mistake. It may be that I’m missing some subtle point, but I really do think I’m on to something here.
I saw this post today and I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany.
As silly as it might sound, I’ve been trying to put up reasonably original stuff, without repeating myself too much. Kind of a “dissertation” attitude toward posts.
Honestly, it’s caused me more often than not, to tell myself it’s not worth saying something that’s been said before.
Section 4 of Chapter 15 of Mises’s Human Action is called “The Sovereignty of the Consumers.” Mises talks about the unhampered market economy and how that democracy, in which “every penny gives a right to cast a ballot,” might be more democratic than any government could ever hope to be. This passage got me thinking about these concepts, and how the state impedes them.
For God’s sake, cite your sources and watch out for people who don’t cite theirs!
There’s a short clip of Klaus Schwab running around the libertarian social media sphere where he’s talking about the danger of libertarianism.
It’s being touted as this great proof that the totalitarians are running scared, so I tried to find the original video.
I did, and it is not what they’re telling you, as much as I hate to say it.
Link to the original video.
Link to the same speaker, same topic, one year later.
Check the video above, also available on BitChute.
I’ve just started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and I found a lovely example of how fuzzy language obscures what the state is and how it differs from “society.”
Some fun recently over on Twitter where someone was totally missing the fact that Mises was mocking Louis XIV, Mussolini, etc. when he called them “the most peace-loving of all men” in the face of their paper-thin justifications for their aggression.
It’s worth noting that this sort of very subtle sarcasm is common in Mises’s writing. Sometimes the sarcasm would go on for several sentences with no sign of it except a nagging feeling in your gut that Mises has suddenly changed his position radically and without warning.
We liberty-lovers face a powerful and dangerous foe: the modern state. Yet we seem to end up fighting each other more often and more angrily. It’s a fact that in an ideological movement, small differences are crucial, but we really should try to be smart enough to avoid infighting as much as we do.
Consider: the two major parties are split into two or three different wings, but they mostly aim their invective across the aisle–at least in public. Libertarians and other adversaries of the state aim nearly as much at each other as they do at the state and its flunkies.
After having some time to think about what I wrote about using the “freedom from fear” to justify gun control, I kind of tripped and fell into an even more interesting conclusion:
What if the gun control isn’t the end goal?