"The answer to constraining rent-seeking expendtures is to constrain the ability of government to create rents."
— Allen Dalton
Be Wary
The invisible hand will smite you.
"Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here [the Fed] with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths, and four-legged rats."
— Robert Wenzel
"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk’"
"Suppose the tax were levied by the town … and the full value on the amount were to be returned the next day to each payer in bread. Would it not be a sacred duty in every man, in the virtuous integrity of his nature, to deny such a proceeding? Doubtless it would. All but the meanest souls would thereby be raised to dis-annex themselves from the false and tyrannous assumption, that the human will is to be subject to the brute force which the majority may set up. It is only tolerated by public opinion because the fact is not yet perceived that all the true purposes of the corporate state may as easily be carried out on the revolutionary principle, as all the true purposes of the collective church. Every one can see that the Church is wrong when it comes to men with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other. And is it not equally diabolical for the State to do so? The name is of small importance. When Church and State are divorced by public opinion, they may still carry on an adulterous intercourse."
— Charles Lane
"Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined."
— Henry David Thoreau
"Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many—they are few."
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many—they are few."
— Percy Shelley
"Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for … anyone."
— Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
David Friedman at Boise State part 1 of 4. Samuel Wonacott gave the introduction.
Enjoy. It’s an interesting lecture. I feel the Q&A could have been better. But all and all, it was a good event.
On Bourgeois Logic
Interesting take if only for its interpretive differences. Obviously the quote Dave presented lacks the full context. However, the summation accurately represents that section of Theory & History. There are other portions of the text that I feel should be included to elaborate further and benefit interpretation.
Mises is talking about Marxist class analysis and differentiates between the caste system (in which birthright determines social status) and class system (not disregarding birth as a contributing fact, but allowing for greater freedom in changing social status). So here is the important differentiation (equality in law):
[A]ll members of every caste but the most privileged have one interest in common, viz., to wipe out the legal disabilities of their own caste. … But no such conflicts are present in a society in which all citizens are equal before the law.
The following quote would be better phrased by placing “legal” before “privileges,” “protection,” and “barriers.” Mises is at that point differentiating between the two systems: Caste and Class.
Another quote from this section that I really enjoy is:
What has to be shown is how the individuals are induced to act in such a way that mankind finally reaches the point the productive forces want it to attain.
So Mises is hinting at comparative institutional analysis and the utility possibilities of different institutional structures. Because, in his understanding, the contemporary system doesn’t provide goods and services as efficiently (meaning the fulfillment of demands for the maximum utility of the consumer).
“In the unhampered market economy there are no privileges, no protection of vested interests, no barriers preventing anybody from striving after any prize.”—
Justin, Henry, this is what I’m talking about. Rash Dave injects his prejudices into this statement. He isn’t thinking about what hampers market activity, he’s thinking about what hampers his market activity.
I don’t see how you’ve come to that conclusion, Ben. I certainly haven’t followed your discussion with him, if this was a portion of it. However, I’m pretty sure that he perceives impeding on his market activity as impeding on market activity, as they’re one and the same when it comes to legislated restrictions.
"If the utility to the individual cannot be measured, it would seem to be at least as difficult to measure the total utility for the community even approximately, for purposes of comparison with the total sacrifice which, in its turn, is always a definite sum for each given or projected distribution of taxes (even though this sum in turn may not always be easy to ascertain). Such comparisons are nevertheless made, for otherwise the deliberations of the tax-approving assemblies, that ‘bargaining between the Government and Parliament’ (Wagner), about whether or not this or that public expenditure is to be accepted or rejected, would be completely without purpose."
— Knut Wicksell, A New Principle of Just Taxation, 1896
The Fundamental Principles of a Pure Theory of Public Finance
I wish I could link to this article for you guys to see it. I haven’t been able to find a PDF of it and I don’t have the time to type it all out. Maybe I’ll scan my copy. This is a great read though. It’s a Positive Theory of the State
An entire community consists the political enterprise and participates in it:
Is the [political] entrepreneur the community, and must the hedonistic calculation derive from the community itself? The entrepreneur produces coercive force. This force of coercion is applied to the maintenance of the community in certain forms, to the achievement of certain aims and ideals, to the collective satisfaction of certain needs. The form, the aims and the needs of the community are not under discussion. It is certain, however, that if they were identical for all associates, the action of the political entrepreneur would be redundant; coercion would cease and all political organization would disappear. The continued existence of the State means that coercion is necessary in order to make the needs of a majority to prevail. The hedonistic calculation appertains only to part of the community, namely the majority. However, given the hypothesis of general participation of all the members of the community in the political enterprise, coercion assumes a milder form; it takes the form of contribution quotas and not of tax. A further struggle develops with regard to the determination and distribution of the contribution. The individual’s readiness to vote for the expenses of coercion will vary according to the size of the contribution. The expenses of coercion cause collective action always to be more costly than individual or independent associated action. It may nevertheless happen that, despite these expenses, the maximum size of the corporation, which comprises the entire community, proves more economical. But we already know that the greatest total productivity of collective production is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine collective action; the expenses of coercion must also be taken into account*. The whole question lies then in the proportions in which a particular need is felt by the members of the community, and in the possibility of distributing the contributions in unequal fashion[, to decrease the real cost through cost sharing being tied to marginal utility of economic units].
Coercion consists in obliging all the associates in the enterprise to contribute toward a particular purpose, for example, water supply. Let us make the broadest hypothesis and postulate that it is a question of achieving a purpose or of satisfying a need, that is of a general nature. The enterprise levies a contribution from all the members of the community. Let us further suppose that the contribution quota is equal for all members. The objective economic expression of the advantages of collectivizing the production of a good, will be the price at which the consumer can buy a given product. This price, whether it is paid before the service is performed or at the moment of consumption must be lower than the price previously ruling on the market. For example, water previously cost twenty pence per cubic metre and now, with collective production, it costs ten pence per cubic metre. All the associates should agree on this collective production, which proves less costly for all. But this is not a sufficient reason to induce all of them to collectivize production, and indeed we see bitter discussion and opposition against assuming certain types of collective production which are manifestly of a general character and more economical. What are the reasons for this?
In the case of equal contribution by all members, as in the case of prices paid at the moment of consumption, the reasons must be sought in the fact that, at the moment of deciding what needs are to be satisfied collectively, not all the associates can agree on the preference to be accorded to one rather than to another need. The process is as follows. All individuals have before them a more economical way of satisfying their own needs, this being the coercion which will distribute the costs of the whole community. According to the urgency of his own need and the greater or lesser ease with which he can satisfy them in isolation, everyone will try to make that need prevail, the collective satisfaction of which will afford him the greatest advantage. Any collective production which fulfils [sic] the condition of the greatest economy and which yields products of general consumption, could with advantage be accepted by all the associates. But they think in terms not of the isolated differential utility of a single productive act, but of the relative utility of all the possible types of production that could be collectivized. For conflicts to be avoided, the political entrepreneur’s power of coercion would have to be infinite and limitless; but it is certain that this power too is, at every moment, finite in extent and efficacy.
There are other cases when collective production yields the most economical product, the contributions on the part of the individual associates being unequal. Then the political struggle against the sanctioning of collectivization becomes unavoidable and obvious. It may, for example, be said: water is a good of general consumption which can be obtained collectively at a lower cost, but in order to obtain it let us raise existing tax rates proportionally. If the existing system is already unequal, this means that the inequality will be accentuated and that the economic calculation will differ for the various economic units according to whether they are favoured by the tax system or not.
Hence here, too, the calculation of advantages entails not merely a comparison of different total costs or prices, but a more complex comparison of the various associates’ relative utilities.
In conclusion: even when the political entrepreneur represents the entire community, the very fact that the entrepreneur functions means that the community needs a service of coercion in order to distribute the costs. This means that the calculations of economic advantage differ from one associate to another when it comes to determining the needs to be satisfied collectively. The collectivization of the satisfaction of some needs always aims at a participation in the costs by economic units which would not voluntarily have so participated.
—Giovanni Montemartini, The Fundamental Principles of a Pure Theory of Public Finance (Gionale degli economisti, 1900)
Hey there. I’m pretty sure you should research what the primary axiom “libertarianism” is based on is: the non-aggression principle.
Just do a simple definition search on the word Libertarian and you will see.
That libertarianism is based on minimization of the State? No. Libertarianism is based on not initiating force against anyone, including their “property” (which we could argue about what is defined as property. Personally I feel property encompasses simply tangible creations and trading such goods).
It is those who wish to MINIMIZE the role of the state, not eliminate it.
Libertarians are those who wish to minimize illegitimate force (the initiation of force), preferably to eliminate it. The State is first and foremost founded on the confiscation of property, both communal and private, to fund its existence, regardless of what the owners of said property wish to be done with it. The State is, at its inception, a violation of liberty. Furthermore, the State holds a monopoly on certain activities in society and prosecutes others, even if they voluntarily organize to provide such activities, for doing what the State says it is to do. So, it’s a restriction on the liberty of association, regardless of whether or not the activity is mutually-beneficial.
Libertarians are a softer (and in my opinion more realistic and responsible) version of Anarchists.
No, libertarians are anarchists if they are to be principled in the Non-Aggression Principle, the axiomatic basis of libertarianism.
You clearly are having trouble differentiating between the two.
You clearly don’t know what libertarianism entails.
Libertarians understand that, in order to maximize freedom for all, you have to have some authority, you have to have some limitations, you have to have some necessary “evils” in order to secure the freedom for everyone.
You have to have some slavery in order to have some liberty? You have to have some theft in order to have some philanthropy? I’m pretty sure you’re equating two opposites as if they’re the same.
I’m a utilitarian. I understand utilitarian arguments for the State. And I understand the flaws therein. Do you believe in Free Markets? Explain to me how the State’s monopoly on sectors of human interaction is not in conflict with free-marketism.
What you advocate is NOT libertarianism. It is purely anarchism.
Libertarianism is anarchism. Minarchism (that which you profess) is watered down libertarianism.
You advocate for a society with no authority, with no restrictions and limitations on what you can do.
No, I don’t believe any sane anarchist or libertarian advocates for such a society. Authority exists. Restrictions of actions exist. And those are natural within society. You do something to someone in a way that the community disagrees with, even in anarchism, and you face penalties (ranging from ostracism to expulsion, maybe even death depending on the views of the culture and agreements within the society).
You are an anarchist. Please quit dragging Libertarians through the mud. There are gradient levels that you’re ignorantly disregarding. Please learn something and quit repeating the misinformation.
Please, learn something and quit being misinformed.
And yes, from the anarchist position, Libertarians are still statists - even though the state they advocate for is minimal. This is obvious. This is a fact. Libertarians are NOT for the eradication of the state. So your own reply proved my point and shows your own flaw in your propaganda. Thank you.
No, libertarians are anarchists. Minarchists are “statists” (I really dislike that pejorative though). Libertarianism is for the eradication of the State. Minarchism is more closely tied to Classical Liberalism than Libertarianism. Though, their mothers are the same. The primary distinction lies in the continuation of knowledge in Libertarianism (from private security agencies argued by Gustave de Molinari in the 19th century to denationalization of currency argued by F. A. Hayek and continued with by George Selgin).
Please, do some research before spouting.
(via hob-nob)
I really enjoyed this.
My friends,
In the last week or two, I have heard frequently from you that the current financial mess has been caused by the failures of free markets and deregulation. I have heard from you that the lust after profits, any profits, that is central to free markets is at the core of our problems. And I have heard from you that only significant government intervention into financial markets can cure these problems, perhaps once and for all. I ask of you for the next few minutes to, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, consider that you may be mistaken. Consider that both the diagnosis and the cure might be equally mistaken.
Consider instead that the problems of this mess were caused by the very kinds of government regulation that you now propose. Consider instead that effects of the profit motive that you decry depend upon the incentives that institutions, regulations, and policies create, which in this case led profit-seekers to do great damage. Consider instead that the regulations that may have been the cause were supported by, as they have often been throughout US history, the very firms being regulated, mostly because they worked to said firms’ benefit, even as they screwed the rest of us. Consider all of this as you ask for more of the same in the name of fixing the problem. And finally, consider why you would ever imagine that those with wealth and power wouldn’t rig a new regulatory process in their favor.
—Steve Horwitz
