DISQUS

Yet they haven't cut the gas. Which shows just how weak they are in the face of economic reality.

I've never read such unclear writing. Perhaps because libertarianism is so clear in comparison.

"These libertarians are also notoriously guilty of pretending that their favorite kinds of coercion aren’t. "

Huh?

"So forcing people to transfer their own money to their future selves prevents them from later forcing others to transfer them money when old."

Well, that's a good beginning on you path away from libertarian thinking on certain issues. Although I agree with quite a bit of libertarian thinking I think they have big holes in certain areas.

So how can one "force" others to transfer weath to you? It doesn't alway require physical violence. Libertarians recognize fraud as another means. That however is not exaustive.

For english speakers and in english speaking societies there is an understanding that fraud not a form of force. I think the distinction is important but that there are similarities. There are different forms of force, like stealing and robbery. With stealing you do not get the other person to transfer his wealth, you do it yourself. With robbery you take advantage of human nature, a persons fear of physical harm, to get them to transfer the wealth to you. Let's call this "forced voluntary".

Fraud utilzes "human nature" to cause an individual to "forced voluntarily" transfer weath. In this case instead of using human attribute fear to cause an transfer of wealth the human attribute of fallibility is used instead. People don't know everything and therefore can be lied to and will believe these lies. It's this feature that is used to force the victim to turn over resources he wouldn't if he were not fallible.

Is there any other mechanism we know of where one can get another to transfer weath "forced voluntary"? Well in robbery the robber need not threaten the person himself, he can threaten others, perhaps a loved one. What if the threatend person was the very person that was trying to obtain the wealth transfer?

Now I understand that if you kid comes up to you and says "I realllllly neeeeed an X-Box" that you are going to laugh. Suppose however that he says "I'm going to kill myself if I don't get an X-Box" and suppose the threat is credible because he's seriously attempted suicide before. Well then you are forced to take some action and he is the person initiating that force. Your "human nature" requires that you help him, but perhaps in this case not the way he intended as he might be put in a padded room.

Suppose however that he said "I realllllly neeeed foood". You are not going to laugh if he's starving. Being the parent you are going to be motivated to fed him. You are being forced to act to avoid the consequence in this case. "Feed me or I starve". This isn't a case of a fat kid saying "Feed me ice cream" after snacking all day. The compelling nature of your own starving child will not only cause you to feed them but may even cause you to steal to do so.

Now suppose we replace your child with a random stranger. Suppose now that that stranger has tricked you into believing he was starving when he wasn't and you "transferred wealth". Surely that is "forced voluntary" and we don't like that.

Now suppose he was truly starving, or truly about to bleed to death, etc. Most people would feel compelled to transfer at least enough wealth at the moment to prevent him from dying. They can't help it, and in that sense it is "forced voluntary". Sure they hand over the money "of their own free will" but that was only because of the choices presented and those choices were due to the beggars actions an not their own.

Is this an argument to criminalize begging. No, because some cases of begging are not forseeable by a reasonable person. Some cases are however and not saving for your old age is one of them.

So the sentence "So forcing people to transfer their own money to their future selves prevents them from later forcing others to transfer them money when old." has a double meaning if you consider "forced volutary" to be a subset of force.

In other words if we force people to save for their old age we won't be forced to help them later on. People benefit from a kind of involuntary insurance plan by their mere existence within a society due to human nature. This gives a hook for others to control their behavior. Too bad if it violates orthodoxy libertarian philosophy.

The way I see it if I reduce my consumption by X then I get "moral" credit for reducing it by X. It doesn't matter what fraction that is of total consumption. Vice versa, if one million other people decide to reduce by X along with me then I don't get moral credit for reducing consumption by X million, but only my X.

So total consumption really doesn't matter in the equation. What matters is if the reduction is "moral" in the first place.

Now the idea of assuming that climate change already causes 150,000 deaths is where the problem lies. What they are really saying is that C02 emissions cause 150,000 deaths, but that's only half the equation. Considering the carrying capacity of the earth without the C02 emmissions is on the order of millions not billions you need to add back in the billions.

So the net lives saved by climate change is in the billions.

Will, I fell out with libertarianism a while ago because based on my exploration of the concept of morality I found that there were certain rights that went beyond purely negative ones yet were not truly positive rights.

I discussed this over a catallarcy once with regard to good Samaritan law, and in quite a bit of detail.

I've aways disagreed with those libertarians who have claimed that individuals have a right to discriminate against others based on race. I don't have lots of time to discuss it but I think it should be clear that within a society a person of one race can buy a piece of property from someone of another race and then turn around and place some kind of deed restriction on future owners not to sell to that other race.

This obviously violates reciprocity and therefore is not moral. Furthermore it violates others rights to free association and the like.

The problem I see with this however is that if you take a wrong turn it can lead one into the realm of positive rights. Which I believe is a mistake. As much as these rights may look like classical positive they are not.

Will,

Does this mean you are going to become a social liberal? You know positive rights and all.

To answer your original question: "Economic principles only apply to Buddhists insofar as they aren't acting like Buddhists?"

Yes, and the I'd estimate the percentage of Buddhists economic law doesn't apply to being a fraction with the denominator being the total number of proported Buddhists and the numerator being the number of Buddhists who die from privation. In otherwords a number so close to zero as to be insignificant.

Will,

I can agree with your sentence on the empirical.

Your economic example didn't violate the law. In your example the government did not set the price ceiling of the good below the market price.

If you are going to assume that everyone likes the governments edicts so much that they will change their behavior based on mere requests then I don't see the need for the price cap at all. There is no need for it to be mandatory. It can just be a suggestion. Nor does the number of people matter. If you are going to assume ten or one hundred zombified subjects then why not assume a million or a hundred million.

I can think of lots of situations that seem to violate the law but the really violate the "all other things being equal" clause. In your example the violation was that you assumed everyone became a saint. I can think of other ways to twist things so that a shortage doesn't occur. 1) The government doesn't enforce the cap 2) The cap is of so short a duration that people can postpone their transactions to avoid it. 3) The cap coincides with a rise in supply or a fall in demand. 4) The government could spread lies about a product saying it was dangerous and at the same time set a price cap below the old market price.

So what. Does it violate a law of physics if I can fly ... during a tornado. Of course not, but it seems you would hold this as some sort of violation.

Part of the reason why Mises wrote what he did about Buddhists was to indicate that economics doesn't deal with certain special cases. Economics isn't going to tell you what kind of behavior to expect from people like the 9/11 terrorists. The fact that suicide terrorists exist doesn't somehow invalidate economic law.

In effect you have not shown that the mandatory price caps are "effective" or "neccessary". By definition price caps are mandatory, and there would be no way for the government to know whether they were effective without the chance of also causing damage.

Even in your example the government is in effect causing damage if it really set the price below market (which you admit it really didn't). If there really were people who would derive a benefit from the good at the higher price your "price cap" is in effect diverting the good from those people who have a more valuable use for the good to those who have a less valuable use.

I can see no way in which this is beneficial.

Will,

No other ways? That depends on how you define empiricism, and if you do so wrongly you can end up with the kind of mistakes Skinner made. He defined the empirical so narrowly that he missed alot. Our personal expericences with motivation, emotion and the like are empirical. Yet, Skinner treated them as subjective. We aren't after all avitars but real existants in the real world. So internal subjective observations count as empirical in a broader sense.

I disagree with you about economic laws. Seems to me that all physical laws are "ceterus paribus" also. The apple would fall at such and such rate, if .... it wasn't tied to the tree by a string. Physicists are careful to avoid such things. They use qualifiers. The 2nd law of thermodynamics only applies to "closed systems" for instance. Economists do the same thing but many amateurs just don't pay attention to that.

Seems like you are saying that you think you can violate economic laws. Hate to tell you this but economic laws are just as unavoidable as the laws of gravity. For instance, if you legislate price controls that set a price ceiling below the market price you will get shortages. No avoiding this.

In any case it is the same in all disciplines. The laws only apply "all other things being equal".

The economic laws about the behavior of prices arise from individual action in a similar way that laws on gas pressure and temperature arise from the behavior of individual molecules of gas.

... mistake on the part of many to believe that Keynes is more empirical than Mises.

Gene, are all Austrians Misesians? I didn't mean to apply it so broadly as you seem to think. However if they are making computer and mathematical models they are doing a piss poor job of advertising the fact.

Look I'm not a professional economist, nor do I have a lot of time for following the latest research, so I have missed this. Could you give me some examples.

I have read Human Action. I have also read several non-Misesian takes on Austrian Ecomomics like Rothbards "Man, Economy, State". These seemed perfectly reasonable to me given the state of the rest of the economic profession, like for instance Keynesian theory, which I learned in college.

I consider myself in the Austrian camp. However, I find some of Mises pronouncements on the nature of economic knowledge a little embarrassing. He talks like some kind of foundationalist and I don't find that appealing. My memory of this is vague but I have heard quotes from Mises on this subject and on the physical sciences that I would find impossible to defend, and easy to attack.

All in all my opion of Mises is positive and it think it is a mistake on the part of many to think that believe that say Keynes is more empirical than Mises.

I think this whole a-prior/empirical argument is based on a false dicothomy. The basis for knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge are all trial and error. Even innate information we might have such as pain signals and our sensory processing systems were techologies "invented" by evolution which is basically a natural information seeking system based on trial and error.

Mises when to far in trying to found his economic theories on one half of this false dicotomy. He should have stuck to showing why other economic theories were improperly applying both empirical and deductive methods. Instead he ended up making what are unsupportable philosophical claims that are used to undermine his perfectly reasonable economic theories. Miseans are using empirical methods whether they like it or not and are missing out on additional methods in there distain for the empirical. Theories that could be improved dramatically by using some of the other methods of science, such as model building.

I think it is reasonable to point out that methods that work for the physics of macro particle aggregations will not work for something that does not have the same basis. It is quite another thing to claim one can only use "a-prior knowledge" and deduction as the only means to obtain knowledge in the area of economics.

With the advent of computers, you'd think that some Austrian economists would try to build models of their theories in order to show how they work, and to explore possible subtlities that armchair deduction might fail to expose. I am a computer scientist and have thought about this. It really would be possible to simulate human action as envisioned by Mises on a computer. Another area of exploration might be some form of subjective mathematics. They seem however to have shut themselves out of such avenues.