J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
@ Agorist.com
I almost titled this article “Cut the Crap,” but I decided at the last minute it was just a bit too undignified.
I found myself in an Internet flame war yesterday with Kevin Carson who had written a blog called “Libertarians for Junk Science.” Carson and I had crossed swords in the past when he attended a Yahoo Group I moderated for the Movement for the Libertarian Left.
The MLL had been started by Samuel Edward Konkin III who thought there could be libertarian outreach to leftists by teaching them how their revolutionary anti-ruling-class values could best be achieved by first understanding how the Austrian School of Economics, through Konkin’s theories of counter-economics and Agorism, destroyed what they called Capitalism and what Sam called State Capitalism.
After Sam passed away in 2004 J. Kent Hastings took over as list moderator, and got to a point where he wanted me to take over the moderator’s duties. What I found when I started paying attention to the list was that instead of being an outreach of libertarian ideas to the left, the list had become doctrinaire leftist and any attempts to reintroduce libertarian ideas resulted in typical leftist tantrums.
So I set up rules to keep posts courteous and on topic, deleting posts which failed to meet those standards … and a war started against me, calling me an authoritarian fascist. As I said, typical leftist tactics, and the reason Sam — who observed how the SDS had been taken over by doctrinaire Marxists during the Vietnam War — had set the MLL list up to be moderated in the first place.
Kevin Carson was one of those unhappy with the way I was moderating the list. Apparently allowing libertarian ideas on a libertarian list was displeasing to the leftists who had — when Kent was simply allowing anything to be posted — taken the list over.
It’s not my purpose here to reignite those flame wars — either the one on MLL or the one that took place yesterday in the comment section of Carson’s blog.
But I did find in that discussion yesterday a theme worth coming back to my own turf to write about.
It’s this. If an idea can’t be expressed simply and elegantly, it’s bullshit.
Take, for example, the central theme of Christianity: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Five words. If you need to make it a bit more explicit, it doesn’t add very many more words: “Whatever excuses you make for your own faults, give those same breaks to everyone else.”
Or how about Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It’s an easily understandable idea. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea — but you need to understand the simple idea that “People won’t work if they don’t feel they’re getting the benefits of working” before you understand why putting it into practice has severe unintended consequences.
The ideas that Kevin Carson and I were flaming each other over had to do with the source of “value” — a fairly abstract concept to begin with.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx held to the idea that the value of a thing was dependent on how much labor went into making it. That idea is called the labor theory of value. That simple idea is the basis of both classical economics and Marxism.
A later economist, Ludwig von Mises, contended that the value of a thing comes from an individual’s desire for it at a particular instant in time, as compared to other objects of desire. That’s called the subjective theory of value. It’s the basis for the laissez-faire economics promoted by libertarians.
Kevin Carson has a theory which attempts to “subjectivize” labor theory of value. To me, that’s like trying to go north and south at the same time. Two simple ideas that lead in different directions can’t be combined, and the trick of making it look as if you have done so requires a magician’s sleight of hand.
We live today in a country filled with sleight-of-hand artists selling bullshit.
The President and Congress of the United States are trying to put forth an improvement on health care, by moving funding and control of it from health-care-providers to the government. In doing so they are trying to replace one simple idea — health care is a marketplace good just like food or clothing — with another simple idea: something as important as your health is too important to be left to the marketplace. The assumption of this second idea is also simple: the government is better at making important decisions than you are.
The thousands of words of argument and the legislation being debated all depends on these simple ideas, but special interests — both private like pharmaceutical manufacturers and insurance companies, and public like politicians addicted to aggrandizing wealth and power for themselves — work hard at hiding how simple the real questions are.
Or take global warming. It’s a simple idea: What human beings exhale — carbon dioxide — is a poison that is destroying the earth.
Makes it real easy to take sides on that one once you realize that the fact that you’re alive is their problem, doesn’t it?
Or even more directly, “Having babies is destroying the earth.”
Sort of starts to make a pattern, doesn’t it?
How about, “Being rich is unfair to the poor — so make the rich poor and the poor rich.”
How’s that again?
Yes, it comes down to ideas that when you peel away the layers are that simple.
The people who want to run your life want you to feel stupid. They want you to regard them as the experts.
If they can make you feel stupid enough to regard them as experts, they’ve won — and winning in this case means they’re the master and you’re their flunkie. When they whistle, you’d better hop to.
I don’t trust anyone who can’t express their “great” idea in a few words. That, to me, is the signature of a bullshit artist.
And we’re up to our waist in such waste these days, aren’t we?
My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!
December 23, 2009 - 11:09 am
Neil, if you whine about being expected to read the first hundred pages of a book before you start criticizing the ideas in it, then you possess an unbelievable intellectual laziness and probably don’t have a very good attention span either. The problem is that you really just don’t understand the ideas you’re discussing.
But if you really want simple statement of the LTV, I’ll give it a ago.
First, here’s a quote from the book that does an okay job of summing the LTV up:
“The labor theory and cost principle are logically entailed in man’s nature as a being who maximizes utility and (more to the point) minimizes disutility. […]
“A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.
“Such statements require no verification beyond an a priori understanding of human nature. Mises himself wrote on the self-evident character of the axioms of praxeology, repeatedly and at length…
“Similarly, the labor theory of value is based, not on an inductive generalization from the observed movement of prices, but on an a priori assumption about why price approximates cost, except to the extent to which some natural or artificial scarcity causes deviations from this relationship.” (Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, pp. 70-73)
The theory does not contradict the idea that value is subjective (in fact, subjectivity is the mechanism on which it relies). It does not discount the idea that people can volunteer their labor or earn windfall profits. It does say that anyone is entitled to an income. All it says is that, in a competitive market for a reproducible good, the combination of laborers trying to earn the most amount of money for their labor and buyers trying to find the lowest prices pushes price down and causes to them correlate with the amount of disutility experienced by laborers.
Think about it: if the average people is unwilling to do a particular job for less than $20, then they generally won’t do it unless they earn roughly $20; instead, they’ll look for different work that they believe compensates them fairly. Of course, the laborers would almost certainly love to earn, say, $50 for their work, but market competition will prevent them from doing so and drive the price for their labor toward $20.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but if you want further explanation, I suggest you read the damn book yourself.
You don’t have to agree with the idea, but please stop attacking strawmen. You’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favors.
December 23, 2009 - 11:12 am
Whoops. correction: the LTV does NOT say that anyone is entitled to an income.
December 23, 2009 - 1:47 pm
It doesn’t help that there are still paleo-socialists suggesting a prescriptive labor theory that DOES state the things which Neil is (correctly, in my opinion) arguing against.
Carson isn’t one of them, though, and his LTV should not be conflated with their LTV.
December 23, 2009 - 2:14 pm
“Two simple ideas that lead in different directions can’t be combined…”
Why? That comment is a great example of how simplicity is a great way of communicating concepts, but not necessarily – or even ever – an adequate way of reconciling them with a total intellectual approach.
Truth is sometimes simple, sometimes complex. The difference, I’d assert, is our viewpoint – our preconceptions, blind spots, assumptions, etc. The truth is necessarily what it is, and our ability to communicate it succinctly is more of a reflection of the communicator than the accuracy.
December 23, 2009 - 3:15 pm
Thank you, Mr. Schulman! I’ve been waiting for someone to finally speak out, and there’s no one living better suited to do it than you.
December 23, 2009 - 4:17 pm
Dr. Q,
Let’s go through the “summary” of the Labor Theory of Value you quote, take it out of “bury them with bullshit” mode, and put what there is of actual ideas into simple English:
Translation: Men tend to be lazy.
Translation: Nobody’s going to sell anything if it’s not worth his while, and it might not be for a while because of competition.
Translation: This is obvious to anyone with two brain lobes to rub together.
Translation: Kevin Carson has some blue-sky theory out of his ass — without looking at what happens in the real world — that makes him think what something costs to produce has something to do with what people are willing to pay for it. Obviously he’s never been to a liquidation auction.
I’ll leave it to my readers as to which one of us has actually learned anything from reading books.
December 23, 2009 - 4:22 pm
Jeremy,
When you cut through the crap and translate it into English, the bullshit becomes obvious to any idiot.
As I demonstrated above.
Neil
December 23, 2009 - 5:03 pm
Jason,
You’re quite welcome. I’m through caring what ideologues think about me or what I write. Readers like you make it worth while for me to keep writing.
Neil
December 23, 2009 - 5:52 pm
“Kevin Carson has some blue-sky theory out of his ass — without looking at what happens in the real world…”
Kevin’s theory is intended to describe price fluctuations in a free market. Is the “real world” a free market? No? Okay then.
“Obviously he’s never been to a liquidation auction.”
And obviously you still don’t get it.
December 23, 2009 - 6:01 pm
A liquidation auction implies that someone miscalculated and produced more of a good than there was a demand for. It does not change the fact that price tends to correlate with disutility in a free, competetive market.
December 23, 2009 - 6:03 pm
The LTV does not mean that the price of a particular good will always be the same. You’re still attacking a straw man, Neil.
December 23, 2009 - 6:08 pm
And Neil, you’re one to talk about pulling things out of one’s ass. We’re all still waiting for you to justify your ridiculous UN comment from yesterday.
December 23, 2009 - 6:45 pm
“Kevin Carson has some blue-sky theory out of his ass — without looking at what happens in the real world…”
Kevin’s theory is intended to describe price fluctuations in a free market. Is the “real world” a free market? No? Okay then.
“Obviously he’s never been to a liquidation auction.”
And obviously you still don’t get it.
If Kevin’s theory could accurately describe price fluctuations in a free market, Kevin wouldn’t be making his living emptying bedpans for a living. He’d be a filthy rich Wall-Street broker.
I’ll let my other readers conclude what I get and don’t get.
December 23, 2009 - 6:49 pm
Oh, really? That must be why in a free competitive market being a garbage collector pays so much more than being a movie star.
December 23, 2009 - 6:51 pm
The Labor Theory of Value — Adam Smith’s, Karl Marx’s, or Kevin Carson’s — doesn’t mean anything in the real world. That’s my fucking point.
December 23, 2009 - 7:00 pm
What problem did you have understanding it the first time? Kevin Carson wrote on his blog that libertarians believe global warming is crap not because the science is crap but because libertarians find the theory of global warming conveniently pro-statist. So I suggest that Kevin Carson is a phony who hangs around with libertarians so he can throw mud on libertarian ideas because he’s covertly in love with the UN Conference on Global Warming’s premises. And his response is that I didn’t understand what he wrote because he’s not calling for statist solutions but to remove subsidies that favor fossil fuels — which is provably bullshit because the government of the United States is systematically crippling domestic production and refinement of shale oil and conversion of coal to oil because of the global warming bullshit.
I’ve pulled all that out of my ass? Stick it up Kevin Carson’s.
December 23, 2009 - 7:27 pm
“That must be why in a free competitive market being a garbage collector pays so much more than being a movie star.”
Yet another straw man. Actors are unique individuals. Did you read the caveat that the LTV only applies to reproducible goods?
“What problem did you have understanding it the first time? Kevin Carson wrote on his blog….”
The US government is taking statist measures to combat the supposed problem of global warming…. therefore Kevin Carson supports statist measures to combat global warming? Do you even listen to yourself, Neil?
December 23, 2009 - 8:59 pm
Okay, the LTV is starting to get so narrow as to be a minor special case, and therefore almost irrelevant. But let’s restrict ourselves to “reproducible goods.”
Can we agree that a white glove is a reproducible good? Maybe it’s worth ten or twenty bucks — possibly less because gloves sell in pairs and one of them is missing. But suddenly that singular glove without its mate sells at auction for thousands of dollars because it was once worn in concert by Michael Jackson.
Please do go on about how the labor that went into the making of that glove has anything to do with its market value.
Oh, wait. Now you’ll come back and say that it’s no longer a reproducible good because that glove had a special collectible value.
That’s subjective value — and I have now conclusively proved that Labor Theory of Value is horse shit.
But, right. I’m just arguing against another Straw Man.
How about this: Get Carson’s scarecrow ass back to Oz. He’s writing unentertaining fantasy. Maybe the other pseudo-intellectual Munchkins will elect him Mayor.
Do you read what Kevin Carson wrote? He wrote that the cause of global warming might be State subsidies for fossil fuels, and eliminating those subsidies would be a “solution.” But if the State’s intervention isn’t to subsidize but to suppress fossil fuels then Carson’s theory is sheer garbage.
December 23, 2009 - 9:17 pm
“Oh, wait. Now you’ll come back and say that it’s no longer a reproducible good because that glove had a special collectible value.”
You’re starting to get the hang of it.
“Do you read what Kevin Carson wrote? He wrote that the cause of global warming might be State subsidies for fossil fuels, and eliminating those subsidies would be a “solution.” But if the State’s intervention isn’t to subsidize but to suppress fossil fuels then Carson’s theory is sheer garbage.”
I’m failing to see how this demonstrates that Carson supports the UN or any statist measures to combat global warming.
December 23, 2009 - 10:39 pm
I already had the hang of it. Cost of production is irrelevant to the market value of a good.
Because only a UN fellow traveler would accuse libertarians of being global warming skeptics not because it’s junk science but because they’re ideologically opposed to it. You only have to take one whiff to recognize a skunk.
December 23, 2009 - 11:41 pm
It’s a shame to encounter this degree of intellectual dishonesty at the Rational Review. It’s not like Carson called Schulman out and demanded he go tit for tat on Ricardian economics or something.
Schulman attacked Carson. Carson defended himself with his record, including research on the economic theories both men’s positions are based on. In response, Schulman insisted Carson was pulling a fast one because he was relying on book learnin’ and couldn’t dumb his points down enough.
Schulman’s position is the online equivalent of putting one’s hands over one’s ears and yelling “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”.
December 23, 2009 - 11:59 pm
Neil, As you know, I’ve long been a fan. The “left”-libertarian thing drives me batty: we are not right, sure; but we are not left. Both right and left are statist. It is not we who need to learn from them; they need to learn from us.
But what baffles me is that despite your anarchist props, you (if I remember right) seemed to support the Iraq war and the US military–the enforcement wing of a criminal gang–and a form of IP, a form of artificial monopoly which can only be enforced by a state.
December 24, 2009 - 2:17 am
“[O]nly a UN fellow traveler would accuse libertarians of being global warming skeptics not because it’s junk science but because they’re ideologically opposed to it.”
Wow — libertarians are all ubermenschen, and none of them ever, ever, ever see what they want to see because they want to see it rather than because it’s there? Whodathunkit?
Speaking of science, I have a question about your temper. Is it possessed of infinite energy, or is it living disproof of special relativity? It seems that it must be one or the other, as it appears to take you from Reasonably Intelligent to Goddamn, This Guy Is Fucking Stupid at faster than 186,000 miles per second.
December 24, 2009 - 3:28 am
Kevin Carson can’t dumb his economic writings down more because once you pierce his jargon — as I’ve done above — there’s nothing original or valuable about them. I never visited his blog before yesterday when he pulled the typical statist tactic of saying, “You don’t believe that because you have evidence but because it’s in your interest to say that.”
I got drawn into a flame war by Carson when he started calling me “Jesus” Neil Schulman, dimwit, and other such ad hominems — and I lost my temper and shouted back — then apologized — not because I don’t think his work is crummy but because he’s not important enough to allow my pulse to race.
I have “book learnin'” of my own — but I’m also capable of thinking of my own … and every minute I’ve spent parsing what Kevin Carson’s theories come down to, I discover he states a premise then makes exception after exception after exception until after pages of this crap you realize there’s no real world cases left where his theories have any actual application.
As Thomas Knapp will be the first to point out, this is J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review. I write this and answer for what I write. If you don’t find value in what I write, please go spend your time reading Kevin Carson. He’ll appreciate having you as one of his fans. To me you’re just someone else’s sycophant.
December 24, 2009 - 3:41 am
If Zen has any lesson to teach, it’s the same ones Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics try to teach: labels lie, categories lie.
So what if I am or am not an “anarchist”? What the fuck difference does it make? Is there some Board of Anarchists who’s going to censure me if I don’t stick to the Anarchist Party Line and recite the Anarchist Catechism?
I want individual freedom … as much as is offered on the menu. Everything else is debating strategy and tactics.
I thought Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and I was happy to see him hanged. I wish the armed forces of the United States had narrowly stuck to the mission of putting him and his rape-room sons out of power, doing the search for WMD’s that was the casus belli of the invasion, then pulling out and leaving the people of that region to decide for themselves what came next.
If George Bush had done that I would have praised him to the skies; instead he blew every victory he’d won by bogging down the U.S. military into another goddam bug hunt, and fuck Bush to hell for that.
I answered anything you have to ask me about my defense of informational property rights two decades ago, Stephan. I reprinted it on this very site three days ago. It is impossible that you don’t understand that I make a natural-rights defense of property rights … but you either fail to understand what I’ve written or refuse to. I sure could use a sycophant of my own like Jeremy here to give you a hard time about it.
December 24, 2009 - 3:52 am
Why would a collectivist want to spend his time around libertarians, whose philosophy is individualistic? So when Kevin Carson uses the hoary old class-warfare tactic — you believe that because it’s in your group interest to — I go first to the assumption that it’s because he’s being subversive and writing to undermine the fundamentals of latter-day libertarian thought, which are truer to Ayn Rand than they are to Proudhon. And he wants to make libertarianism more socialist than individualist.
I don’t consider Kevin Carson’s challenge to libertarians on global warming worthy. I consider him just another toady of the Big Lie … and I consider that nothing he has written is original enough, imaginative enough, or cogent enough to deserve my serious study. I have the right to decide for myself who’s a genius and who’s ballast and to tell my readers what I think.
That’s what I think.
Ludwig von Mises is tough going, but it’s worth it. So is Alfred Korzybski. So is Carl Jung. So is Ayn Rand in An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
I’m not willing to concede that just because someone writes densely that means there are actually any ideas beneath the density of prose.
I lost my temper but when I got it back I apologized for ad hominem. But I will never apologize for the content of my insights.
As for whether I’m reasonably intelligent or fucking stupid:
A man does not get to judge himself intelligent or stupid. That’s for somebody else to judge. One could hope for an objective judge but the truth is that most people think someone is smart when they say something they agree with, and stupid when they say something they disagree with.
I’m a writer. I lay myself open to have what I write judged every day I publish my thoughts here.
Am I smart? Isn’t that the last question that needs to be asked?
How about:
Am I just saying things to make me popular among a set of people with fixed ideas? That would make me seem smart to those people. It works for Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and Bill Maher. And Kevin Carson.
Do I care about the truth of what I write or am I just writing to win debating points?
Do I care about being clever more than I care about discovering truth?
When I write something short and to the point, am I being merely pithy or insightful?
Am I a simpleton or can I boil the complex down to its essentials?
I’ve been a published writer for close to four decades. An awful lot of my stuff can be found just by Googling what I’ve written as a guest columnist on Rational Review for years. Or reading my books, several of which I’ve made available to be read free on the web. Or just reading what I’ve posted daily for 55 days here.
I’ll let my readers decide.
Neil
December 24, 2009 - 8:23 am
Neil,
I agree with your point about labels and categories whole-heartedly. “More anarchister than thou” arguments are stupid. Communication and reflection, not one-upping the opposition, is the pursuit of choice.
It just seems hypocritical for you to be so transcendent in your own approach, eschewing labels as distracting or besides the point, while labeling and condemning somebody else’s.
December 24, 2009 - 8:37 am
” It is impossible that you don’t understand that I make a natural-rights defense of property rights …”
Maybe he thinks you’re being too wordy and trying to trick him, so he just decided to throw out any arguments not presented at a 6th grade reading level.
That’s the aspect of your argument that bothers me the most: this idea that, if you can’t say it simply, it just ain’t so. You are correct that there is a *great* deal of value in the ability to communicate succinctly. But there’s also a great deal of value in delving into to particulars of a subject, of parsing out the contradictions, of understanding that “we are the master who makes the grass green” and that if the world has complexities, it probably has more to do with our preconceptions and biases than with the world out there.
There’s another approach here that Roderick Long demonstrates in his position on global warming. If one lacks expertise, cannot take the time to review the evidence, or simply is uncomfortable in an area of inquiry, there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with taking an agnostic position. “I don’t know” is the foundation of honest pursuit of truth. You can even say, “I suspect X, Y, and Z, but until I study the matter more I cannot venture a position that I’m willing to defend”.
As Carson said, there’s all manner of complexity in Mises, Rothbard, et al. You just don’t like the complexity Carson is engaging in. Which is fine; plenty of people disagree with Carson who are less well read than you.
December 24, 2009 - 11:10 am
You’ve apparently struck a nerve or two. keep it up.
December 24, 2009 - 12:41 pm
Actually, there is an even shorter version. Confucius was asked if there were one word he would use to describe ethical behavior. He said “reciprocity.” To love your neighbor as yourself is to seek reciprocity, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It seems inevitable that you re-awaken the discussion with Kevin, which, judging by the number of comments here, you seem to have done. It isn’t a bad thing to continue discussing something, even where views don’t seem likely to converge. It also isn’t a productive thing – nothing ever comes from an Internet discussion, except more discussion.
Brian Doherty has an interesting essay recently on the topic of longstanding controversies in the libertarian movement. He examines closely that between Hayek and Rothbard. It is a controversy that has spanned many decades and seems unlikely to be resolved.
December 24, 2009 - 2:58 pm
That’s a strong point and I’ll do some reflection on it.
December 24, 2009 - 3:30 pm
But I did write it in clear and basic English.
Here are a few choice excerpts that make my case swiftly and to the point:
No jargon here. I make my arguments in English.
I write in plain language and make my arguments so that it doesn’t require a specialized knowledge of jargon to understand my arguments. But there are a class of “experts” who make a point of writing in jargon for the precise point of separating themselves out from the rest of humanity so that ordinary people can’t understand them and they can raise themselves into a wise and omniscient priest craft.
They can kiss my ass. Are those five words clear enough?
The proof that Global Warming is not science but a scam can come down to two easy to understand points:
1) The major greenhouse gas on planet earth — 95% of greenhouse gas — is water vapor. Carbon dioxide — which comes out of our mouths when we exhale — and methane — which comes out our asses when we fart — are a tiny fraction of the atmosphere compared to water vapor. Yet these con artists have gotten away with the idea that fractional increases in fractional gasses which living things make will destroy the environment. It’s an obvious lie which anyone with an IQ above room temperature can understand.
2. Climate change on earth tracks closely with measurements astronomers have made of climate change on other planets in the solar system, where human beings don’t exist, where living things don’t exist, where capitalism and industry don’t exist. That makes it obvious that the sun controls the major climate changes on this planet, not human beings, living things, or capitalist industry.
Either one of these is a proof that man-made capitalist global warming is horse shit. You don’t need to know more science than this to understand that they’re lying for reasons of seizing political power.
And when they cripple the energy supplies human beings need to survive and suggest the cure for global warming is reducing the population, you understand the object of the fraud is totalitarian control.
Is that God-damned clear enough?
I don’t object to Kevin Carson merely because he is unclear. I object to Kevin Carson because once you pierce his cloud of obscurity you find horse shit.
December 24, 2009 - 3:48 pm
I think you can rely on Kevin to expose his ideas all by his own self. Consider his idea of championing “libertarian socialism” as a term. As if state socialism had not so totally corrupted the word that it is beyond repair.
If you visit c4ss.org and follow the link for Libertarian Junk Science you’ll find that Kevin has commented there on your thread here. The only thing that I found of interest in his comment was the suggestion that deleting posts and banning persons from the old Left Libertarian list was not the best way forward.
My reasoning is that if a group or a discussion cannot tolerate dissent, it isn’t very strong. I think libertarian ideas are really very strong, so if someone applies them in ways that I find difficult, it seems better to engage that person and, say, his neo-conservative desire to see the USA become the world’s policeman and combat evil, at whatever expense in lives and treasure, rather than shut them off. And I admit, it is not an easy path to follow.
December 24, 2009 - 5:18 pm
Kevin Carson:
J. Neil:
Now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, objecting to the use of aprioristic economic theory as “blue sky-theory out of his ass without looking at what happens in the real world.” Awesome.
Ludwig von Mises:
J. Neil:
1. Again. We don’t live in a free market.
2. And, now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, apparently objecting not only to the use of aprioristic theory in economics, but also believing that an accurate economic theory ought to produce quantitative predictions. Really, dude?
Do you know anything in particular about Ludwig von Mises’s economics? You just angrily dismissed to two of the three central ideas that von Mises is known for.
(At least you didn’t bring up Kevin’s work on calculation problems in big corporations, which would have given you an opportunity to angrily dismiss the third.) All of which indicates to me that you are either ranting in utter ignorance, or else you just don’t give much of a damn about what’s true and what’s false, as long as you get to slam Kevin Carson in the process.
In either case, you ought to be embarrassed.
December 24, 2009 - 6:13 pm
I have no interest in debating Kevin Carson at c4ss. The man baits me and makes me lose my temper and I’d prefer to write here where I can rethink and delete my angry remarks. Anyone I care enough about to write back to can come here anyway.
December 24, 2009 - 6:41 pm
Kevin Carson:
J. Neil:
Wrong. I appreciate a priori model making and do it myself. But if the models don’t test out in the real world, they’re useless. Von Mises has a reputation as an economist because his praxeological models are predictive of real-world outcomes, and therefore useful.
When I say that Kevin Carson’s models are blue-sky out of his ass, I’m not criticizing them for being a priori, but for lack of application to the real world — in a word, crap.
Ludwig von Mises:
Von Mises is correct. The real world is far too complex for a priori assumptions, which are always made ceteris paribus, to be tested by experiment. This is the problem with all social science, including catallactics and games theory. But if von Mises’ theories had no predictive and testable qualities at all, they would be no more relevant to human science than a drawing by Dr. Seuss would be to architecture.
J. Neil:
So if they aren’t predictive in either a free or an unfree market, of what use are they?
Asked and answered above.
No, I just pulled terms like praxeology and catallactics out of my ass.
The hell I have.
Name a big corporation whose directors have studied Kevin Carson and dismantled itself into smaller units to avoid “calculation” problems.
No. But I am beginning to think that the libertarian movement died with Rothbard and Konkin. The dogmatism that passes for the libertarian movement today reminds me of the fucking Inquisition.
December 25, 2009 - 6:40 am
Neil:
What difference does it make?? Why… because the libertarian–who believes in “individual freedom”, expressed usually in terms of individual rights against aggression–opposes all forms of aggression as being unjust… he opposes both private aggression (crime) and public aggression, and he recognizes that states of necessity commit aggression–or, as you might say, infringe on “individual freedom.”
As we are conceptual, language-using beings, it helps to use words for various concepts.
I had formed the impression, given Alongside Night and other writings of yours, that you would have agreed with all this, so I can’t understand your disagreement here.
Over on Carson’s thread, BTW, you wrote, inter alia, “I have no use for a libertarian movement that thinks the United States government is more evil than those of Venezuela or Iran.”
I am not sure how you measure these things, and it could be that individuals in charge in those little states may be “more evil” than our own politicians, but all 3 of these states are criminal organizations, and there is no doubt that in meaningful terms the US gov’t is a bigger threat to, say, me, than the others–I have an obscene sum stolen from me every year by the US. I’m willing to entertain arguments for why … Venezuela is an even bigger threat to me than the bully in my back yard who robs me every f*cking day. What *I* have no use for is a libertarian movement that tolerates the legitimacy of this criminal gang, that whitewashes its nature and history and motivations.
BTW, I actually agree with many of your criticisms of the substance of mutualism, environmentalism, though I don’t share your disdain for or hostility against Carson. He seems honest and sincere to me and certainly a fellow traveler, in his opposition to the state. (And he has a respectable argument, though I disagree with it, that mutualism is at the end of a spectrum of libertarian property views.) The state–and yes, the US state–is our biggest enemy nowadays, and opposition to it has to be the central focus for the libertarian.
Of course Hussein was a bad guy and we should no more mourn for him than for a mafia boss killed by agents of a competing mafia. BUt to say the US military “should” have done X, Y, or Z is to ignore the nature of the state–it’s not gonna do what you think it “should” do. As Mises wrote, “No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.” The same applies to any state at all, IMO.
Moreover, even if the army had done only what you suggest, it would still be unjust and unlibertarian: it would still have resulted in many civilian deaths–what we libertarians call “murder”; and it would be done at the expense of me, the American taxpayer. We libertarians condemn this as theft.
This is not a surprise, though. And praising Bush for violating international law, for murdering civilians, for robbing the US taxpayer–it is mind boggling how this could be praiseworthy. This “if Bush had just…” seems to be of the idea that if we just get the right people in power, the state can be run right, in a libertarian way. This is a pipe dream.
Neil, I understand your argument. I disagree completely with it. I think it completely fallacious. There is a reason so many libertarians have woken up to the fraud that is IP (and yes, logorights is just another type of IP). I have no doubt you are sincere but your argument for IP is wrong.
December 25, 2009 - 7:03 am
Incidentally, for further discussion of fallacies of Schulman’s “logorights” IP idea, see my post On J. Neil Schulman’s Logorights.
December 25, 2009 - 7:10 am
Incidentally, Neil, just curious, but if you are so hostile to left-libertarian ideas why in the world were you moderator of a left-libertarian list? I joined the C4SS Advisory Panel because they are anti-state, not because I see much of value in any “leftist” paradigm to libertarianism. I believe the left-libertarians and mutualists are certain correct that libertarianism is not right; but it is certainly not left, either (see Walter Block’s forthcoming JLS article Libertarianism is unique; it belongs neither to the right nor the left: a critique of the views of Long, Holcombe, and Baden on the left, Hoppe, Feser and Paul on the right). A pox on both their houses. They are both collectivist, statist, warmongering, murderous. I’m tired of people saying we have something to learn from the left (or the right): screw that, they have something to learn from us.
December 25, 2009 - 9:41 am
Take a look at part 3 of MPE, where Carson lays out the historical evidence for his views on value. And Org Theory is chock full of evidentiary bases for his points.
If you’re not convinced, fine – but you’re making sweeping, uninformed statements that discredit you in the eyes of anybody who has done the tiniest bit of fact finding. It’s all so unnecessary and mean, too.
December 25, 2009 - 10:01 am
Sorry, that’s actually part 2. Merry Christmas!
December 25, 2009 - 5:18 pm
Stephan,
Once again your reply to my Logorights argument is merely to assert that it’s false without actually refuting any of the proofs I make. All you do is say “Well Locke said this” and “Tibor Machan said that.” I don’t care. I say outright that I’m offering a new theory of property rights — and not once — not ever — have you ever dealt with it other than to say, “Well, that’s not what [insert name here] wrote!”
You fail to answer my challenge that material identity IS property, and that without material identity the concept of property is meaningless.
Answer this challenge from my article:
Does the difference in composition of words make an otherwise identical physical object a different thing — yes or no?
Did the buyer who expected to get a copy of Atlas Shrugged and who got a copy of A Tale of Two Cities get what they paid for — yes or no?
If the answer is yes to either of these questions, then you have conceded that the composition of words — the logos — is the sole differentia between two physical objects — and therefore the logos is what makes it a different THING.
If the logos makes these two otherwise identical objects different things then that which makes them different things is what gives them their value — and the property rights case for the logos is made.
Answer that. Answer that!!!!!!!!!
December 25, 2009 - 6:38 pm
To read Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy is to enter a world not known to the scientist but to the academic or theologian.
Ideas are tagged with a pedigree of who said it and how important they are in academic or church history, and untested assumptions are passed along as dogma never to be tested. It’s all very self-congratulating with appropriate sneers of dismissal for the “vulgar” barbarians and gentiles whose thoughts just don’t rise to “our” lofty and blessed ascendance.
Fifteen minutes of reading this exegesis and I need a Pepto Bismol.
Economics has been called the dismal science, but that is using the word “science” only in the most generous way, where the epistemological rigors of the scientific method are nowhere to be found.
Economics is a soft science because it attempts to make generally true statements about the behaviors of billions of individual volitional actors, and neither experiment nor real-world testing of a premise is possible because all predictions require a ceteris paribus never possible in the real world.
But then again — in the day when astronomers have to take a vote in a latter-day Nicean Conclave as to whether Pluto is a planet — even traditionally “hard” sciences have gotten quite fuzzy.
Kevin Carson states his purposes and biases right up front. He is unhappy with the modern Rothbardian Austrian-school anarcho-capitalist movement which epistemologically recognizes that ALL economic transactions are unique and irreproducible ones between individual actors.
Because Carson prefers an earlier time before there was a clear break between propertarian anarchists and communist anarchists, he wants to substitute this “all transactions are unique” view with earlier economic theories that are collectivist and abstract attempts to “socialize” human beings into classes and categories of actors — treating “markets” as collective entities and “prices” as Platonic Realities.
It’s not science. It’s religion.
I have gotten heat from prominent libertarians for expressing my hostility and contempt for Kevin Carson. Some of this heat is justified. I have lost my temper and gone into what Carson has correctly identified as “Gorgon” mode: “Death to you all!”
But I have my emotional buttons after four decades hanging around intellectuals, and the historical/academic/churchy approach that Kevin Carson takes just makes my blood boil.
His approach is not to look at an idea and ask: how can we tell if this idea is true or even useful? His approach is to say, “Well, Smith said this and Ricardo said that, and Bohm-Bawerk conceded this.
It’s the attempt to take ideas out of the world of common usefulness and make them into the litany of the new technocratic priest craft whose main method of communication is to sneer at anyone not initiated into their club with its secret words.
Fuck that noise!
When one reads through the major works of the Austrian School of Economics — as I have done — one does indeed have to crawl on one’s belly over a stinking corpse-filled battlefield of dead ideas to get to a few fresh ideas that have provided some useful analytic tools to the arsenal of the social sciences. The assumptions of Austrian extreme a priorism — as von Mises well understood — are as arbitrary as the rules of Chess. Like math, some of them can be applied within specific contexts to answer certain real-world questions. They are maps, not the territory.
The usefulness of Austrian Economics is that it denies all attempts to treat human beings and human transactions collectively. It recognizes that economics is a study of unpredictable actors. It understands by its first assumptions that it rests on the assumption of individual free will.
Kevin Carson would take us back, before that, to economics when it was still attempting to treat human beings — and human transactions — in terms of classes of objects.
It’s crap and I’ll keep on calling it crap until we get back to a libertarian movement less tolerant of witch doctors and their voodoo.
December 25, 2009 - 9:11 pm
‘Take, for example, the central theme of Christianity: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”’
I’m amazed by how widespread this misunderstanding is. That is not the central theme, it is the number two priority after something else (go and look it up – or just think what’s missing from that formulation). Anyone who takes that as its number one priority is neither a Christian nor understands Christianity (though the converse does not follow). There’s a case of two different things that, on closer inspection, work together rather than amounting to trying to serve two masters…
Jeremy wrote “That’s the aspect of your argument that bothers me the most: this idea that, if you can’t say it simply, it just ain’t so”.
As Einstein is reputed to have remarked, “make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” (or was it Nils Bohr?).
. Neil Schulman wrote “They can kiss my ass. Are those five words clear enough?”
No. Are you referring to your donkey or to a portion of your anatomy? Unlike the British, the US dialect of English is ambiguous here. Certainly, context clears up the ambiguity – but you were asserting, erroneously, that the words themselves sufficed. For some reason, this ambiguity makes some people amused by Joshua, chapter 15, verse 18: “And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field: and she lighted off her ass; and Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou?”.
. Neil Schulman then wrote ‘Name a big corporation whose directors have studied Kevin Carson and dismantled itself into smaller units to avoid “calculation” problems’.
Oh, dear. With the structure of faulty incentives in favour of corporations, we don’t have a world with that happening. But there have indeed been analogous historical cases when the cohesive incentives were removed, for instance what happened to the holdings of the Teutonic Order of Knights in areas that went Protestant after the Reformation: they were split off from the rest – though further cohesive incentives arose and operated subsequently.
December 25, 2009 - 10:16 pm
JNS, I have a lot of sympathy for your critique of Carson. He irritates the beejeezus out of me.
But your position on Iraq and the military is complete crap. The military is the vanguard of collectivism.
The American military has mass murdered more civilians and destroyed more property than any other organization in the 21st century.
There is nothing libertarian about the taxes they eat (particularly seen through the lens of agorism), the lives they take, or the destruction of capital and progress they conduct with ruthless efficiency.
Merry Christmas.
December 25, 2009 - 11:58 pm
I’ve called myself an anarchist frequently. What I’ve always meant by that is that I do not see the State, or coercive government, as a good way for human beings to organize their affairs. It is inefficient, encourages and rewards bad behavior, tends to demented analysis and consequently solutions with harsh unintended consequences, legitimizes criminal behavior and outlaws decent and benevolent behavior.
But I have also been awake on Earth for over 56 years in this lifetime, and except for the first dozen or so I’ve had a pretty good chance to get a sense of how things work on this planet.
There are no societies on this planet which have no government. There are territories in constant states of war between contending factions to form a government, but they are violent places with even less respect for rights than places with functioning monopolistic governments.
As a practical man I note that I live in a world which does not offer me the possibility of living in anything close to what I would consider a reasonable or benevolent social order.
Every place on this planet — including the high seas — is within the reach of powers representing governments that I think should not exist.
I also think that there is nothing in the nature of the human species that precludes achieving better forms of organization.
But I also note that achieving any sort of approach to reorganization of human affairs along the lines of recognizing individual human rights and forgoing violence and coercion in dealing with others is — despite several centuries of trying — beyond the reach of those who have tried.
I am therefore left two alternatives. Live a life of pure protest and have nothing to do with the rest of the world, or make accommodations with the rest of my species who to one extent or another approve of and participate in State- and government-related activities.
I choose the latter.
I regard the federal government of the United States of America as a severely degraded version of the Republican principles of the Constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights. But at least those documents give us a lofty standard by which to judge its lack of fidelity to its founding principles.
That, to me, makes American government — as shitty as it is — superior to governments throughout the rest of planet earth with no such history of documentary idealism.
I am proud to be an American because of the ideals of the American Revolution and the love the American people have expressed for those ideals — often with their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
But I find that a lot of anarchists and libertarians are unable to make distinctions and relative judgments between and among one government and another. They are binary rather than textured in their cognition and analysis of politics.
America bad.
Not America good.
It’s downright Animal Farm.
Not playing that game anymore, and I have little use for those who still do.
Merry Christmas!
Neil
December 26, 2009 - 6:26 am
Since I do not own a donkey, my meaning does not need to be disambiguated.
December 26, 2009 - 11:54 am
Yes, because the people who came before us, and the things they thought and did and said, had a LOT to do with the way things are now. One can try to understand how we got to this point and approach the problems of the current order in that light. One can try to understand how the debates of earlier times lead to the consensuses of modern times as well as how arbitrary or accidental the outcomes were. In short, one can pick a side and insult the other, or one can try and study the debate itself and figure out whether there isn’t truth hidden beneath the convenient dichotomies.
There are people who are interested in the above, not as an endeavor separate from discovering what they believe, but rather intimately associated with it. The reason is that, since we are fallible creatures, we benefit from more, rather than less, information.
The great ideas may be simple, but it’s hard to find them if you don’t work at them.
December 26, 2009 - 12:00 pm
The question is not, to my mind, whether or not it’s the “right” or “wrong” way of looking at it, but whether that way of looking at economics yields any insights. Yes, there is value in looking at unique, individual economic transactions. But is that the only perspective that has value?
I guess I’m just unwilling to dismiss entire viewpoints as distasteful. I find value in both the subjectivists and labor theorists. The latter, in my opinion, are particularly good at explaining HOW exploitation over the long run occurs, because they can transcend the day-to-day transactions and discover a net gain and net loss occurring.
December 26, 2009 - 9:16 pm
I find the discussion invigorating. A few further thoughts.
“The man baits me and makes me lose my temper…”. Yes on one, no on two. Yes, he clearly baits you. You rise to the bait, like a big ol’ fish. Your temper is your own. No one can make you lose it. If you lose your temper, the guy to take to task for its loss is the one looking back from the mirror.
Rothbard was very interested in Marx. I don’t dismiss Rothbard because he clearly read what Marx had written. Nor do I dismiss Kevin Carson. (I do dismiss Rachel Carson.)
There is clearly a class struggle going on today. It is not the struggle between Marx’s classes. But it is the struggle between Konkin’s classes: the productive and the political. The producers and the parasites. The fact that the political elite consider themselves to be true ubermenschen who must overwhelm and eradicate the rest of us is the main reason we find ourselves in a class war.
Anthropogenic global warming is hokum. It is an excuse for the elitists to slaughter hundreds of millions of persons and claim carbon tax credits for getting rid of them.
Anyone who looks at the temperature curve expressed in ice cores knows that there was a much warmer Medieval warm period, a series of warmer Roman warm periods, and even one in the time of Homer’s epic poem about 1200 BC – long before there were any coal fired steel mills.
There are union thugs who have caused much damage, attacked property, plant, and equipment, used Luddite reasoning against productivity enhancing technologies, and even some who have killed for their labor socialist ideology. There have also been thugs such as the Pinkertons hired by thugs such as John D. Rockefeller to slaughter the miners in the tent cities in Colorado and by other robber barons to forcibly end labor strikes with violence and murder.
Rockefeller and his ilk used government power to impose their monopolies, called competition wasteful, entertained Karl Marx when he came to visit, and lusted after more power to more completely centralize everything. The consolidation of the railroad industry and the banking industry were just the beginning of their march to mix government authority with private capital to form a great American fascism. It would be a mistake to constantly come down against union thugs without ever considering who they were opposing.
You have no use for me. Venezuela does not have 805 military bases in 130+ countries, nor does Iran. The USA does.
Neither Venezuela nor Iran has nuclear weapons, and neither country has used them against any military target in war time. The USA has nukes and has nuked two cities in war, plus a bunch of civilians in the USA have been deliberately exposed to fall out after nuclear detonations in the Nevada desert. The USA has also deliberately tested chemical and biological weapons on American civilians.
So, yep, the USA government is a greater threat to my freedom, peace, prosperity, and future than the government of Venezuela and the government of Iran, combined. No other government has done as much to thwart individual initiative in space achievement. No other government is as centralized, as collectivist, as elitist as the USA government and what William F. Buckley described as its totalitarian bureaucracy.
You have no use for me because I don’t want American troops to invade Venezuela or Iran. Okay. I don’t mind. I don’t want to be used by you.