"These planners say in defense of their ideas, you must plan things; you cannot let things act ‘automatically.’
Sometimes ‘automatically’ is used in a metaphorical sense to apply to things that happen on the market. If the supply of a product drops, then they say prices go up ‘automatically.’ But this doesn’t mean that this is done without human consciousness, without some persons bidding and offering. Prices go up precisely because people are anxious to acquire these things. Nothing in the economic system happens ‘automatically.’ Everything happens because certain people behave in a definite way.
Also the planners say, ‘How can you be so stupid to advocate the absence of planning?’ But no one advocates the absence of plan. The question is not ‘Plan, or no plan.’ The question is ‘Whose plan? The plan of one dictator only? Or the plan of many individuals?’ Everyone plans. He plans to go to work; he plans to go home; he plans to read a book; he plans a thousand other things. A ‘great’ plan eliminates the plans of everybody else; then only one plan can be supreme. If the ‘great’ plan and the plans of individuals come into conflict, whose plan is to be supreme? Who decides? The police decide! And they decide in favor of the ‘great’ plan."
Sometimes ‘automatically’ is used in a metaphorical sense to apply to things that happen on the market. If the supply of a product drops, then they say prices go up ‘automatically.’ But this doesn’t mean that this is done without human consciousness, without some persons bidding and offering. Prices go up precisely because people are anxious to acquire these things. Nothing in the economic system happens ‘automatically.’ Everything happens because certain people behave in a definite way.
Also the planners say, ‘How can you be so stupid to advocate the absence of planning?’ But no one advocates the absence of plan. The question is not ‘Plan, or no plan.’ The question is ‘Whose plan? The plan of one dictator only? Or the plan of many individuals?’ Everyone plans. He plans to go to work; he plans to go home; he plans to read a book; he plans a thousand other things. A ‘great’ plan eliminates the plans of everybody else; then only one plan can be supreme. If the ‘great’ plan and the plans of individuals come into conflict, whose plan is to be supreme? Who decides? The police decide! And they decide in favor of the ‘great’ plan."
— Ludwig von Mises
"No opposition party wants to assign so much power to another party. In drafting socialist programs, everybody assumes tacitly that he himself will be the planner or the dictator, or that the planner or dictator will be intellectually completely dependent on him and that the planner or dictator will be his handyman. No one wants to be a single member in the planning scheme of somebody else."
— Ludwig von Mises
"Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies!"
— Ludwig von Mises
"Prior to 1870, high transportation costs, slow communication, and legal barriers to operating across state lines meant that one or a few firms had dominated sales of a particular product in many local markets. Although these firms were much smaller than the firms that came to dominate these industries nationally by the end of the nineteenth century, the lack of effective competition meant they possessed substantial economic power to charge prices well above their costs. Hence, the rise of oligopolies at the end of the nineteenth century in no sense disrupted the golden age of perfect competition because none had ever existed."
— Anthony O’Brien
The apple fell far from the tree. John M. Clark’s “The Ethical Basis of Economic Freedom” provides NOTHING of substance for a discussion on ethics or “economic freedom.” My hopes were up high in the first few pages. I thought, well, maybe he can morally justify the “balanced” American system. Nope. Here’s just a sample of the nonsense he espoused:
“These ramifying effects [of industry] create problems: something generally needs to be done about them if industry is to be self-sustaining for society in the large, and is to justify itself as a contributor to social welfare, rather than a parasite preying upon it”
I was looking for an ethical foundation for the American system … which he supposedly is trying to provide. Instead I was met with assumptions of the political system being voluntary, prima facie moral, and a suitable means for production. This is 1955. His attack on Classical Individualism is shit. His attack on Marxism boils down to “it’s not balanced.”
“[I]n a modern economy it has become impossible to trust an ‘invisible hand’ to turn crude self-interest into an efficient engine for meeting every social need. We must have a sensitive awareness of what our social needs are, and what the economic machine is doing to them; and we must work with conscious purpose to make the economy meet these needs.” Dr. J. M. Clark, in a modern economy agents act with conscious purpose to make the economy meet these needs. Wherein lies your objection? Because you sound like an idiot.
“I have nothing to hide!” is irrelevant.
- Privacy isn’t about having nothing to hide! Surveillance grants the government a great deal of power to make decisions about you, and because the surveillance is secret, you get no say in the decisions. (Please read the article, or the original paper; I cannot summarize it in a single bullet point.)
- We should all have something to hide. The civil rights movement, interracial marriage, and gay marriage would never have been allowed if nobody had anything to hide. Free speech is essential to the exchange of ideas in democracy, but so is the ability to try new and socially-unacceptable things.
- You do have something to hide. The United States Code is so vast and complicated that you probably commit several felonies a day. (Please don’t use the inevitable argument “If you have nothing to hide, take off your clothes” or similar arguments. The government isn’t proposing to watch you in the shower. Yet.)
- If the government erroneously believes you do have nothing to hide, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The evidence is secret and likely will never be presented to you.
- If the government chooses to use its surveillance against you, it can pick and choose which parts to present in court. Because the rest is classified, you do not have the right to use it to try to exonerate yourself.
- Even if the government does not attempt to attack you using surveillance data, any prosecution (or illegal abuses; see below) it takes against other people will make you reluctant to use your First Amendment rights to free speech. “Better not say anything, or I might end up like that guy.”
Oversight-free surveillance isn’t necessary for national security.
- The problem isn’t surveillance — it’s surveillance without adequate oversight and targeting. National security could be preserved by a program which also respects our civil rights. The Fourth Amendment does not ban surveillance. It bans surveillance without judicial oversight and clear limits. An order to collect all phone records clearly violates this.
- Terrorism isn’t as vast a threat as it’s made out to be. You’re just as likely to be killed by a deer as by Al-Qaeda. Food poisoning, drunk driving and obesity kill more people each year, but we’re willing to cede our liberty to fight terrorism and not to fight Big Gulps?
- Any large data-mining program is statistically bound to be overwhelmed by false positives which consume government time and resources and mean most people marked as “probably a terrorist” and put under more extensive surveillance will likely be innocent.
- Is there really evidence that this surveillance preserves our national security? So far, there is some doubt that the administration’s examples of foiled terrorist plots were actually foiled by the NSA’s surveillance. (Wyden and Udall agree.)
- The NSA could save more lives by using pervasive surveillance to mail tickets to people who text and drive.
Metadata invades your privacy.
Metadata is probably more invasive than most searches that require a warrant. You could not obtain most of this information by strip-searching me:
- From your choice of friends, I can determine your sexual orientation.
- Your cell phone records reveal your place of work, the popular events you have attended (including political events and protests), your mode of transportation, and presumably your favorite restaurants and spots for romantic flings.
- Your cell phone location records are unique, and four data points can be used to uniquely identify you. Switching cell phones will not save you — the new phone will show the same pattern of movement, and can be linked to you.
- Your credit card purchase history (which is also collected by the NSA) can be mined to reveal all sorts of details about you, such as whether you are pregnant.
Targeting people based on metadata, such as who they call and spend time with, is targeting based off of their First Amendment right to freely assemble and associate.
Revealing surveillance programs doesn’t harm national security.
- Oh no, now the terrorists won’t use phones or the Internet! Perhaps we can’t intercept messages sent by carrier pigeon, but by forcing them to switch to less efficient means of communication, we have already disrupted their plans.
- No terrorist will realize “the government is on to us!” after reading that the government is watching everyone. It’s equivalent to thinking the government is watching no one.
- The continued secrecy of programs which violate our rights harms our security — security from the abuses of our government. Consider the case of Joseph Nacchio.
The government has a history of abusing surveillance.
- HTLINGUAL was a CIA project to illegally read mail sent to the Soviet Union and China from 1952-1973.
- COINTELPRO was the FBI’s effort to put political advocacy groups, like the NAACP, Martin Luther King, various women’s rights groups, and anti-Vietnam War groups, under surveillance so they could be disrupted or stopped. Hoover ordered the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the groups. The FBI attempted to blackmail and discredit MLK. Several people were killed by the FBI and police agencies.
- See also Operation CHAOS.
- Legal and judicial oversight did not stop the NSA’s earlier warrantless wiretapping program, which continued under executive order until exposed.
Yes good.
(via thecheekylibertarian)
"Anarchism rests squarely on a recognition that men are not angels, and hence that it is intolerably dangerous and insolent to give men power, as heads of state or their lackeys, over other men. The statists are the ones who need to be told repeatedly that men are not angels; that no man is good enough, wise enough, and properly entitled to substitute his will for the will of peaceful and honest others."
— Robert Higgs
"In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
— Al Gore
Bitcoin Articles
- The Economics of Bitcoin
- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin’s Value is Decentralization
- Is Bitcoin an Alternative to Fiat Currencies and Gold?
These articles are great for learning the basics of Bitcoin.
Enjoy.
"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for"
— Friedrich A. Hayek
"It’s fitting that Obama has approved the disposition matrix and Holder has acknowledged the drone killings of Americans this week. Tomorrow, Obama will give a speech about the future course of the war on terrorism. It remains to be seen if he will acknowledge accidentally killing three American citizens without due process — one of whom was a teenager."
(via azspot)
"There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation."
— Frédéric Bastiat (via thinksquad)
"We have to deal … with a positive perversion of the force that makes for progress. Everywhere we have perceived that competition—the healthful rivalry in serving the public—is essential in order that the best methods and the most effective organization should be selected for survival, and that industry should show a perpetual increase in productive power. In our study of the question whether improved method and improved organization tend to promote or to check further improvement, we have found that these beneficent changes are naturally self-perpetuating, so long as the universal spring of progress, competition, continues. A proviso has perforce been inserted into our optimistic forecast as the economic future of the world—if nothing suppresses competition, progress will continue forever."
— John Clark
This is an interesting and annoying meme. A Facebook friend of mine shared this from Freedom’s Phoenix’s post.
First, Freedom’s Phoenix is a libertarian outfit out of Arizona. They’re kind of on the right. And I think this meme, through its generalistic qualities, preserves part of that conservative, us-them mentality. But what “us” is here … people who are “THIS PASSIONATE ABOUT THINGS THAT ACTUALLY MATTER” (from here on out, I’ll quote it without yelling). And who are “them”? They’re not “passionate about things that actually matter.”
So, what does not actually matter? Sports. Films. Beer. Gambling.
That sucks. I want to experience life. I think it’s safe to say this is a particular sort of asceticism some libertarians have. Let’s call it the Freedom’s Phoenix Asceticism (FPA), as they’re as far as I’ve traced this meme—and with no desire to go beyond that, and no payment for even including their name, I’ll drop the pursuit. Asceticism isn’t necessarily bad. But you have to distinguish between forms of it.
Not that FPA lacks discipline, but for the sake that discipline is crucial to developing skills and long-run happiness, I’ll coin the other term Disciplinary Asceticism (DA). Disciplinary Asceticism is similar to investment. I have a tradeoff between school hours and work hours. I am losing out on potential earning because of dedicating more time to my reading-intensive course load. That would be considered DA. Freedom’s Phoenix Asceticism, if including this form of asceticism, is also including the withholding of enjoying other pleasantries in its program, for what reason I’m unsure. But FPA can be viewed as a more general form of asceticism if anything.
Disciplinary Asceticism’s plan includes many forms of development, possibly even beer, sports, films, gambling, etc.; FPA’s plan, by the way, is “things that actually matter.” Unfortunately, beer, sports, films, gambling, etc. may “actually matter” to people. As DA implies, FPA does not decide for everyone “things that actually matter.” To purport to have such knowledge is pretty arrogant.
The point of the matter is, don’t assume your way is the correct way. That’s not how we get things done. We need agreements, not dictates; and it’s for the betterment of all, on empathy, not “I know best.” So don’t generalize people for being passionate about things. They may also be passionate about what you’re passionate about. But while at a football game, stoked on your team winning, and being in arm’s distance of your favorite player, enjoy yourself. To submit to FPA is not a necessary condition for being passionate about whatever you’re passionate about. Enjoy yourself.
And please, conservatives, have a beer and relax. Jesus brews.
(… Just to clarify: Freedom’s Phoenix members probably enjoy the pleasantries of life. So FPA is probably not the best name for the form of asceticism. I think people just easily bash on sports. And I don’t see a good reason for it.)
