Posts with this tag contain an extended text essay of the topic in question.
Some thoughts after the election results. In short, if you care about liberty and not just Trump, now is the time to be extra vigilant and ensure that the people who want unchecked authority don’t Wormtongue their way into power again in the next four years.
My written notes here.
Seeing a lot of people, including libertarians, oddly enough, pronouncing these blanket oppositions to what the corporate media calls “political violence.”
This is another case of people failing the Bastiat test–looking only at the bare surface level of such a policy, and failing to account for its secondary effects.
Worse yet, these oppositions actually seem to preach from a moral perspective, and not merely a strategic one. Yet another blundering oversight.
Because what kinds of activities do you have to disavow in order to oppose “political violence?”
I am pleased to say that the Mises Institute has published another one of my essays! This time, it’s an essay that organizes and crystallizes my thoughts about Modern Monetary Theory, specifically the negative effects of moving goods from the private sphere to the public sphere.
Find it at the Mises Institute website here.
I was inspired by part of a Lew Rockwell speech that was posted at the Mises Institute website last week!
Today, I’m talking about the dangers of positivism in economics. Basically, in complex systems like the economy, you need a logical, causal framework to evaluate ideas. A purely positivist (i.e., each idea must be tested empirically) approach can be disastrous.
Why? Because empirical testing of uncontrolled systems can lead to counterintuitive and non-generalizable results!
The temptation to fiddle endlessly becomes a source of wealth for the fiddler and a source of poverty for everybody else.
Not only are there unlimited legions of bad ideas to “test,” there are an equally unlimited number of statistical tests to apply to the subsequent data, and a finite confidence interval means some of those statistical tests will give you false positives!
Anyway, check out the video up top, and the show notes here.
Check out my latest article over at the Tenth Amendment Center, examining the fundamental idea by Locke that “it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases.”
This simple idea, and our failure to keep our government accountable to it, is the root of many of the problems we’re dealing with today.
“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.
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.
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.