Tag Archives: Austrian School / Libertarian Theory

Can Anarchy be feasible to set up in a particular world?

Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute….

I’ll try to do give the the best answer that is available to us today.

1) If we define anarchy as the absence of RULES (MORALS AND NORMS), then no – without morals and norms humans cannot cooperate.
2) If we define anarchy as the absence of LAWS and JUDGES then no. Without contracts and the common law support of contracts, then no, not in any meaningful sense.
3) If we define anarchy as the absence of GOVERNMENT (meaning group of people who coordinate investments in commons then possibly anarchy can exist, but under very constrained and simple conditions. Realistically it would be very hard for these people to compete economically with people from other groups.
4) If we define anarchy as the absence of LAW MAKERS then almost certainly. The common law alone is sufficient for law making.
5) If we define anarchy as the absence of an abstract corporation we call the ‘STATE’, then absolutely certainly. In fact, when people complain about government they generally are complaining about the behavior of individuals in a monopoly (government) who are insulated from competition, and whose members also for a bureaucracy that is insulated from competition, and who, as members of a bureaucracy, pursue their own interests.

Human societies employ at least these five sets of institutions and by and large, the first three are necessary, and the second two are not. The question is whether in practice a group could compete effectively without the abstract state and the ability to issue commands (we call them laws, but that’s just a way of trying to give commands the legitimacy of natural laws to what are just political ‘commands’.)

So, a homogenous body of people who are not very different in character, belief, genetics, status, and wealth can quite easily create anarchy by writing a constitution with just one a half a dozen rules in it, and then hopefully finding judges that will rule according to those rules and no others.

A government lf laws then, is quite possible. A government of men isn’t necessary. And it’s what our founding fathers were trying to prevent.

Didn’t work well though. Civil war and all that….

Strong men more likely to have right-wing views, study reveals

www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/strong-men-more-likely-to-have-right-wing-views-study-reveals/story-fneuzle5-1226644975491

I believe the “Propertarian” view is that most leftist policies can be considered an attempt by women to control the strongest men, and by weaker men to dethrone them. Libertarianism is an aristocratic philosophy which allows for peaceful competition and voluntary exchange to determine who is most successful. The institution of property is a gentleman’s agreement to compete according to civilized rules: you don’t steal from me, and I won’t steal from you.

These rules happen to benefit everyone else too — every single layer of society, without exception — but many people would rather watch the world burn than allow such competition, because a free market might reveal the unbearable — that no one really values the eight years you spent crafting crappy prose about the extent of feminist views of some obscure historic figure.

Is this more-or-less it, Curt?

Gaga Over Galbraith

Stupid ideas, and discredited economists keep rising from the dead.

open quoteBased on his book sales, John Kenneth Galbraith was probably the most read economist of the 20th century. From the publication of his first bestselling book The Great Crash in 1954 through the 1980s, the American left-liberal intelligentsia and media breathlessly anticipated and wildly celebrated the publication of each new book. Nonetheless, most technical economists, regardless of their political orientation, did not take his work seriously. By the 1990s Galbraith’s work had been thoroughly discredited among professional economists. Indeed, in his 1994 book, Peddling Prosperity, leftist economist Paul Krugman held up Galbraith as the prototype of a left-wing “policy entrepreneur” who, like his supply-sider counterparts on the Right, sought an audience among policymakers and the educated public, outside the cozy circle of academic economists.

In his book, Krugman ridiculed The New Industrial State, Galbraith’s magnum opus. He pointed out its wildly erroneous predictions regarding the evolution of the US economy toward greater dominations by giant corporations that were insulated from market forces . . . .

But discredited economists, much like disgraced politicians, never remain out of favor for long, especially after they have passed from the earthly scene. So it is that Galbraith’s reputation has been undergoing something of a rehabilitation in the past decade. Especially among those mainstream academic economists who are vaguely cognizant of the rapidly accumulating failures of their discipline in explaining economic reality, Galbraith is increasingly perceived as a misunderstood thinker whose insights were ahead of their time and whose work was too hastily dismissed.

For example, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was positively elegiac in his appraisal of Galbraith, exclaiming that he “doesn’t get enough praise.” In an interview, Sen opined that Galbraith’s work would indeed endure and that his book The Affluent Society exemplified Galbraith’s “great insight.” . . .

Robert Frank is another economist with impeccable mainstream credentials who has a predilection for behavioral economics and a soft spot for Galbraith. He has argued that Galbraith’s position that the market economy systematically misallocates resources between private and public sectors “was right for the wrong reasons.” If only Galbraith’s training had been grounded in modern game theory, Frank contends, he would have been better able to defend himself against his academic critics.[4]

Now there are probably various reasons for the burgeoning Galbraith lovefest among mainstream economists. But, I believe, the primary reason is the growing dissatisfaction within the economics profession with the transmogrification of economics into a hyper-mathematical, model-driven discipline that tells us exactly nothing about the real world, as the financial crisis has plainly revealed.

Compared to the arid and mechanistic “theorems” of modern economics, even Galbraith’s unsystematic and pedantic musings are a breath of fresh air, because at least they are expressed in English and make reference to real and meaningful phenomena. This is, of course, not an endorsement of Galbraith’s approach to economics or his various positions. Indeed far from it: rather it is an attempt to explain the unjustified accolades his work is beginning to receive from professional economists. . . .

Robbins did not think much of Galbraith’s mental acuity and dismissed him as a shill for New Deal policies, writing,

I knew Galbraith in the old days; he sat for some little time in my seminar. I must say I am not altogether surprised at what has happened; for I have always thought him a dull fellow, well intentioned enough, but a sort of pedant of New Deal economics — just the kind of man to upset the business community without himself bringing any startling administrative ability to offset the loss of that which he had antagonized.

. . . .

Meade was, therefore, in no sense a conservative or free-market economist and in fact could be classified as a Fabian socialist or social democrat in his policy leanings. Yet he viewed Galbraith in much the same light as Robbins. He wrote in a diary entry,

Later I dined with Galbraith and his wife at the Cosmos Club and then went on to their home in Georgetown to talk. He is the “relentless” type of radical, believes that Russia should be permitted to absorb Poland, the Balkans and the whole of Eastern Europe in order to spread the benefits of Communism, that the outlook for American politics is very black because even if the Roosevelt administration wins the next election the liberal New Dealers are now all a crowd of tired, cautious, conservative liberals etc. I think he may be a little embittered at the punishing experience at the OPA where there was a witch hunt against liberal College professors of which he was the main victim.

. . . .

In a review of books on inflation and the business cycle in the late 1970s, one of which included a book by Robert Heilbronner, Rothbard remarked,

Robert Heilbroner, like John Kenneth Galbraith, might be said to fall into the category of “popular economist”: that is, someone who knows virtually nothing about economics, yet manages to write a series of best sellers on the subject, read avidly and almost exclusively by noneconomists, who exclaim over the profundities therein.

Rothbard goes on to utilize Galbraith as a standard of economic ignorance, describing Heilbronner as “a lightweight, for he knows even less economics than Galbraith does and lacks the mordant wit (derived, if not cribbed, from Veblen) and the aristocratic life style of the famous opponent of affluence.”

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The wit & wisdom of HL Mencken

Mencken meme posters:

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Other Mencken qutoes:

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.

Misogynist – A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule–and both commonly succeed, and are right.

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David Friedman vs Murray Rothbard

The comments on my earlier post of the Reason TV’s interview may or may not have actually been written by David Friedman. If they were, I’m flattered to have him here.

I am particularly interested in the disagreements between intellectuals because disagreement often inspires rigor. Perhaps this casts people as rivals despite their overwhelming agreement on what a better future might look like.

However, the difference between utilitarian and moral approach has huge implications. This debate is worth exploring and resolving.

Rothbard on David Friedman:
open quoteLet us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty [by Murry Rothbard] and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between non-libertarian private police agencies. But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire which in turn is better than the current system. Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too.

. . . such early influences on me as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, and Frank Chodorov were magnificently and superbly radical. Hatred of “Our Enemy, the State” (Nock’s title) and all of its works shone through all of their writings like a beacon star. So what if they never quite made it all the way to explicit anarchism? Far better one Albert Nock than a hundred anarcho-capitalists who are all too comfortable with the existing status quo.

. . . Taking the concept of radical vs. conservative in our new sense, let us analyze the now famous “abolitionism” vs. “gradualism” debate. The latter jab comes in the August issue of Reason (a magazine every fiber of whose being exudes “conservatism”), in which editor Bob Poole asks Milton Friedman where he stands on this debate. Freidman takes the opportunity of denouncing the “intellectual cowardice” of failing to set forth “feasible” methods of getting “from here to there.” Poole and Friedman have between them managed to obfuscate the true issues. There is not a single abolitionist who would not grab a feasible method, or a gradual gain, if it came his way. The difference is that the abolitionist always holds high the banner of his ultimate goal, never hides his basic principlesclose quote (Read more)

David Friedman on Rothbard:
open quoteRothbard’s basic point is correct. I do not regard support for government as an act of willful evil but as an intellectual mistake; my arguments (and his) could be wrong, and some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among available human institutions. And even if we are correct, it is not unreasonable for other people to think we are not, as lots of intelligent people I know do.

The flip side of that is that I think one consequence of his attitude was to make him willing to be deliberately dishonest in his arguments—all being fair in war. That included being dishonest in the arguments he made to fellow libertarians.

. . . .

I’ve written at some length online in the past on what I consider Rothbard’s dishonesty with regard to economic history, in particular his misrepresentation of Smith (unfavorable) and his French contemporaries (favorable); see this old post for examples and further links. And there have been other examples. Murray was bright, articulate, and could be charming, but I don’t think he could be trusted.close quote (Read more)

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An intellectually honest pursuit of the truth can make rivals out of men who are 95% in agreement.

In my view, the criticism made by David Friedman — that Rothbard was wrong on Reagen and Adam Smith — grasps at minutia given the enormous breadth and depth of the hyper-prolific Rothbard.

Rothbard’s criticism of Adam Smith alluded to in this essay seems sound to me, but I’ll admit to having read no deeper that that into Murray’s comparison of Smith and his contemporaries.

I am very sympathetic to David Friedman’s comment “I do not regard support for government as an act of willful evil but as an intellectual mistake.” In fact, Albert Jay Nock, who Rothbard cites in criticizing Friedman, writes extensively about how the state may simply be the best that homo-sapiens are intellectually capable of. This is very similar to Friedman’s view of an “intellectual mistake.”

However “willful evil” is not an expression Rothbard used, so its a bit of a straw man. I don’t think either AJ Nock or Rothbard would regard support of the government as “willful evil,” but as an evil none the less — an intellectual mistake AND an evil.

Perhaps the closest I personally come to David Friedman’s view is that to say that Rothbard focused mostly on criticism. Institutions and norms are required for the existence of property and civilization. I could, with many disclaimers and asterisks make a statement like the following: “The modern state is an approximation of the institutions and norms required for civilization.”

Murray’s student and colleague, Hans Hermann Hoppe, worked in that directions, imagining and explaining how those institutions might emerge in a free society.