Today’s short video was inspired by an awful video about aluminum cans and the environment.
The Nirvana Fallacy is not the only mistake this guy makes, but it is the most frequent one.
False declarations of human “rights,” failure to understand the profit motive, a top-down view of the economy… there is a lot of foolishness to cover!
Today I’m working through a thing I keep hearing people say. “Everything is political.”
It’s a very odd saying, in my mind, for a variety of logical and philosophical reasons.
First of all, it’s a declaration of totalitarianism. It seems very strange to me for people to just agree with totalitarians. It’s a slave mentality.
Absolute power and an absolute obligation for people to obey that power is not a path to good incentives, or good rulers.
It also encourages the kind of thinking… “It’s just politics,” used as a rationalization for all kinds of evils applied to innocents.
Even if we soften it to “Everything affects politics” or “politics affects everything,” we find ourselves walking down the same totalitarian path, just with nicer words around it.
It’s a misunderstanding of something being a thing and something having an effect on a thing. It’s reminiscent of Wickard v. Filburn, which held that products that you make yourself and consume yourself affect interstate commerce, and therefore are interstate commerce. That’s not necessarily true, and even if it were, it gives politicians more (if not unlimited) political power, which is exactly what we don’t want.
There’s a difference between these three things:
There might be a bit of gray area in between, but it seems like these are real distinctions.
This fallacy also creeps into public goods theory (which Hoppe dismantled).
Anyway, just some thoughts I wanted to get out there.
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?”
This chapter is short, but really needs a little supplement from Rothbard’s other writings to really “get it.”
Don’t worry, I got your back. In the video, I identify two more passages that help explain why the goal of “stable prices” is counterproductive. They’re from Man, Economy, and State and Making Economic Sense.
Nothing too deep in this post, mostly some thoughts on the recent crackdowns in Britain against speech.
Just some thoughts about liberty messaging. It’s widely available and usually free. You can find pro-liberty commenters across the whole spectrum, from hardcore anarchists to relatively soft and cuddly pro-freedom voices.
Yet less than one person in a hundred actually is convinced.
Why?
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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of consent from a political perspective. It’s easy to simply call every bit of the state evil and coercive, but it doesn’t seem to convince a lot of people.
So, the thing I’m trying to understand is, what does the average person–not a hardcore anarchist–think of when they envision political consent? Where is the line between a voluntary government and a coercive state? Where is the line between dissidence and withdrawal of consent?
In the video above, I consider a few examples that I’ve seen in popular culture as well as a few of my own devising and try to reach some conclusions.
See my notes for this video here.
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately thinking about the boundaries between a coercive state and a voluntary government. A recent article by Wanjiru Njoya over at the Mises Institute threw me into a bit of a rabbit hole and I thought I’d set down some of my thoughts in a video.
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.