The libertarian disconnect!!

We have to make it a cultural thing to not give into deception. It's probably pretty practical to make people aware of a few situations where deception is likely to arise-yes, some good examples would be certain government policies. We have to make it to where when people hear certain offers made by anyone, they can immediately refer to their memory of certain deceptive situations that culture has warned them about, so that they can immediately reject said offers. But that's one example out of many.

 

Psychology, the claim by some people that they know more than other people, without having actual proof.
Its all theory, and one's subjective claim is as good as another's, and doesn't have to make sense to anyone but themselves.

 

BS.
Explain neo-libertarians, the ones who are supportive with a big military and executions? Do they not count?

And what exactly is the number one way for libertarians to deal with "violent" assaults on their property rights? Guns, guns, and more (*)(*)(*)(*)ing guns. Shoot the people who try to steal my (*)(*)(*)(*)!
In Libertarian Utopia, the losers who can't manage to get a hold of the scarce resources are dependent on charity or just waiting for the day they'll need to walk on someone's property rights and get shot or imprisoned. Because somehow that's less violent.

I don't buy the libertarian arguments on "peace." You're perfectly fine with people starving to death if they are losers and the rich don't feel particularly charitable (and of course they never are to the "undeserving poor."), as long as no one steps up to collect taxes. More chaos and death is fine, so long as it doesn't occur by the government's hand or on your property.

Personally I don't buy that violence is never justified. If the upper crust gates out the losers and leaves them no other way of making ends meet, the violent revolution to follow is as justifiable as the decision to let people starve.
I don't pretend that blind indifference to strife and suffering is somehow "peaceful." That's why I'm not a libertarian.

You guys and your "envy" card.
You remind me of those nihilistic guys on TV that constantly (*)(*)(*)(*) people off then say "they're just jealous."
When it comes down to it, if those in power ignore the plight of others around them, at some point it becomes compassionate to use "violence" (because somehow increasing the amount of taxes... which they already pay, under penalty of imprisonment... means "more violence" in your twisted view) to protect the life and liberty of those ignored.

Just my point. Your political ethics are placed above actual consequences.
Funny that it's always consequences for OTHER people.

 

I don't think the human mind is as unpredictable as you seem to think.

However, I can understand why some people are frustrated with psychology on the basis that only they know how they act and think.

 

This is my key malfunction with Libertarians as well. Their dogma is to rigid, unyielding and simplistic to function as a viable form of Government.

Even if they got their way and the States gained ultimate power back over the Federal Government, thier own State will just inflict on them to make up for the shortfall the US Government doesn't provide anymore.

They just don't seem to get that there is "minimum cost" of society and libertarianism is to cheap to pay that cost.

I don't mind taxation in the 30% level, but when I see credible mathematical extrapolations that prove that by 2020 we're all going to be sharecroppers for the Government if you make above poverty level, I have every right to be frightened at that possibility.

 

If we were to find out that a certain area of the brain was wired in a way that causes people to act in a certain manner (As we are doing all the time), would that be in your opinion objective evidence?

 

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. There is plenty to be gleamed from the study of human action. It is how that knowledge is applied that should be a matter of debate.

 

The non-contradiction thing is an interesting point.

Is light a wave or a particle. It can't be both! Oh wait......

Empiricism!

 

A false dichotomy is merely an exercise in poor logic. I have no problem with empiricism as a tool to seek the the truth.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make.

 

Empiricism forces us to analyse our assumptions. Whether they be the wave/particle distinction, Euclid's 4th or anything else. We are forced to explain the contradictions and forced to discover them. Sometimes it takes decades (even longer) to fully reconcile those differences (take General Rel. and Quantum Mech. today) but the point is that we work towards that end even if it means a contradiction in the short to medium term.

 

I agree with all of this.

But if you have a sound conclusion based on sounds premises, and empirical testing disagree's with the conclusion, there is something wrong with the empirical method.

 

Have the premises been tested?

This is a problem with libertarianism and to a lesser extent neoliberalism.

For most people, if ones theory disagrees with reality then the theory is at fault.
For neoliberals and libertarians, if one's theory disagrees with reality then reality is at fault.

There is something wrong with your premises (or arguments) or you have not taken something into account if reality begs to differ with your result.

 

The notion that empirical findings are necessarily the truth or "reality" is nonsense. If that were so empirical findings would never be questioned. Yet scientific theory changes all the time.

Now, if you believe that the premises of libertarians (fundamental private property, self ownership, etc) is wrong, then debate that! However, that never occurs. What happens is that people look at flawed econometrics, whose components they don't understand, and then make blanket statements about the state of things.

 

I have argued many a time about private property rights, self-ownership etc. (ask BHK). This isn't the thread for it. On this thread I made the point that the Austrian school tends to reject empiricism and falsification which in my eyes in tantamount to a disconnect.

There are indeed plenty of things wrong with mainstream economics. Especially due to the fact that any tentative hypotheses are jumped upon by politicians as the new 'endless growth' or 'the end of the boom and bust cycle'. This isn't an indictment of the method however.

 

That is nonsense. The Austrian school does not disregard empiricism, it simply acknowledges the limitations of empiricism as it applies to systems like the economy.

 

The Austrian school, for the most part, is a post hoc rationalisation of free-marketeerism. There have been some insights but there is a lot of propaganda to wade through. They are akin to Marxists in that sense.

The limitations of empiricism are exaggerated in order to fit an agenda. Yes, the economy is a complex system but that is why we have chaos theory. We can increasingly understand the economy through mathematical models followed by empirical testing. There is a wealth of difference between being wary of empricism and outright abandoning of it.

 

The only difference is that matter (whether in gaseous, liquid, or solid phase) adheres to certain laws without contradiction. We can, therefore, use aggregation to predict what a conglomeration of these atomic and molecular units will do under a set of specific circumstances. The same cannot be said of people or, more specifically, the individual, nor are the preferences and actions of an individual objectively "good" or "bad", which means there is no basis on which to determine if the aggregation of their preferences and actions are desirable.

 

A Libbo who doesn't believe in an objective good or bad?

We can make reasonably accurate models of how people act. Consider the endowment effect for example.

Either way, to announce "Oh its just ever so hard" is junk science. Raise your game, try harder.

EDIT: Science makes no value-judgments. One is not concerned with whether or not the results are good are bad, merely with what does happen under certain circumstances, not what should happen under certain circumstances. Stop thinking we are in the business of making normative statements.

 

What??? The Austrians have the most deductive line of thought regarding their proposals of the economic schools. That isn't even close!

Economic models become rather useless when the underlying assumptions used to create the model are wrong. The Phillips Curve,-wrong. GDP as a measure of consumption-uninformative. Unemployment that does not factor in all the unemployed-pointless. Inflation measured by an arbitrary ever changing group of consumable items-insulting,. The validation process of economic propositions is staunchly different then those used by natural sciences. It is naive to think we could have produced The Pythagorean my perfectly measuring every triangle on earth rather than coming to the law through deduction and mathematical proofs. Yet, that is the plight of modern economist.

 

They are infinitely more complicated. Variations in genetics and physiology, combined with the subtleties and complexities of chemical and biological dynamics, make it virtually impossible to create a model that can accurately and universally model human behavior.

Humans are very unpredictable. If they weren't, someone would have created a model that "reasonably" predicted fluctuations in the stock market and made trillions upon trillions of dollars off of it. There would be no end to the amount of money they could make.

 

To take an inductive approach is not to throw away the deductive.

The scientist makes a hypothesis, tests it and then tests it some more. If it holds he keeps it, if not he throws it away.

The Austrian asserts facts as 'unfalsifiable'.

Yes, there are problems with mainstream economics and what they chose to measure. For example, I often loathe the measurement of consumer spending without a breakdown by income quintile. That said, the approach cannot be abandoned. One looks at reality, asserts some axioms and tests the conclusions of those axioms, if they aren't congruent with reality you go back to the drawing board. You don't condemn reality.

 

Very unpredictable, yes. But that is not to say we can't make predictions. The weather is chaotic, the orbit of some asteroids are chaotic. We can still determine the climate or even the outer and inner limits of orbit.

Indeed if humans interactions are so utterly complex then it would seem that chaos theory is the only decent approach.

So I ask you. If humans are so unpredictable, why on Earth do you think the Austrian approach will have any success. You fall upon your own sword.

 

It is a particle with wave-like properties. At least, that's what I think...

 

The limitations of empiricism are not exaggerated at all. It's limited ability to fully explain complex systems is part and parcel to science.

 

It was a response to the idea that empiricists entertain contradictions.

If we were to be logical it would seem that it would have to be one or another (as they were considered seperate) empiricism showed it had both properties and so we had to reconcile these problems and so came up with the idea of wave-particle duality which applies to everything.