#mises.org

[adribosch-fan]

Lo que los nazis tomaron prestado de Marx

  [ De Gobierno omnipotente (1944)] Los nazis no inventaron el polilogismo, sólo desarrollaron su propia marca. Hasta mediados del siglo XIX nadie se atrevía a discutir el hecho de que la estructura lógica de la mente es inmutable y común a todos los seres humanos. Todas las interrelaciones humanas se basan en este supuesto de una estructura lógica uniforme. Podemos hablar entre nosotros sólo…

[arcticdementor]

Sometimes you encounter a proposal that is so daft that you think to yourself, “The author can’t be serious!” In today’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this sort that comes from one of the world’s most eminent moral philosophers, Martha C. Nussbaum. In her article, “A Peopled Wilderness,” appearing in the New York Review of Books, December 8, 2022, Nussbaum suggests that we need to think seriously about curbing predation in nature. It disturbs her that animals eat other animals: this is not how things ought to be. We must be careful in what we try to do to correct this morally bad state of affairs, since through lack of knowledge, we may worsen things; but this is no excuse to let matters slide.

To be clear, she is not just proposing that we should make sure that lions can’t get into the deer cage at the zoo; she is talking about the possibility of getting animals in the wild to cease to kill and eat each other. Her idea illustrates and extends a besetting sin of contemporary moral and political philosophy, its idle utopianism. The ordinary circumstances of the human condition are rejected, and philosophers devise fantastic schemes to remake the social and political world to their own liking. As Thomas Sowell says:

What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.

Nussbaum illustrates Sowell’s insight in a ludicrously extreme fashion.

…

Nussbaum maintains that people have failed to recognize the need for reform of the natural world because of a false idealization of nature in the wild, and she has insightful comments on the prevalence of this idealization in the Romantic Movement. But her picture of the Romantics is one-sided: Tennyson famously wrote in In Memoriam of “Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine” which “shrieked” against the creed that God is love.

I would say, rather, the reason that people have not in general attended to what Nussbaum deems a grave moral issue is that predation is part of the way the natural world exists, and it is not the business of ethics to endeavor to reconstruct nature.

Nussbaum has two arguments against this response, neither of which is adequate. First, she says “nature” can’t be considered apart from human beings: we now dominate the world and are thus responsible for what takes place within it:

…

The principal argument against her isn’t that nature in the wild is a normative ideal but rather that it isn’t a human responsibility to reform it. Ethics, at least if we confine ourselves to the secular realm, is about how human beings can best lead their lives, and to demand that we alter the way animals lead their lives is a foolish and presumptuous error.

Two caveats need to be added. I am not assuming that the secular world is “all there is,” but instead attempting to address Nussbaum on her own ground. Further, I am leaving aside altogether issues of how we should treat animals that come within our purview: I am not claiming it’s all right to set cats on fire for fun. I am, though, not much troubled by the fact that pet cats eat mice, as I gather that Nussbaum is.

[darkmaga-returns]

By James Bovard

Mises.org

November 1, 2024

If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election on Tuesday, Americans will be told that the final vote count is a sacred number that was practically handed down from Mt. Sinai engraved on a stone tablet. Any American who casts doubt on Harris’s victory will be vilified like one of those January 6, 2021 protestors sent to prison for “parading without a permit” in the US Capitol. Actually, anyone who doubted the 2020 election results was being prominently denounced as “traitors” even before the Capitol Clash.

But is there any reason to expect the final vote count in next week’s presidential election to be more honest than any other number that the Biden-Harris administration jiggered in the last four years?

Biden, Harris, and their media allies endlessly assured Americans that the national crime rate had fallen sharply since Biden took office. That statistical scam was produced by the equivalent of disregarding all the votes in California and New York. FBI crime data simply excluded many of the nation’s largest cities until a revision earlier this month revealed that violent crime had risen nationwide.

Deceitful national crime data helped cover-up the disastrous impact of open border policies. The Biden-Harris administration did backflips to avoid disclosing the true size of the surge of illegal immigrants from early 2021 onwards. Kamala Harris did zombie-like face plants in recent interviews when elbowed for honest answers.

In the same way that another surge of unverified mail-in ballots may determine the 2024 election, Biden manipulated the number of illegal aliens by using his presidential parole power to entitle more than a million people from Haiti, Venezuela, Cubans, and other countries to legally enter and stay in America on his own decree. The Biden administration even provided a vast secretive program to fly favored foreign nationals into select airports late at night where their arrival would occur under the radar.

[leviathan-supersystem]

some thoughts on austrian economics, empiricism, and price controls.

so i've been chewing over thiw quote from mises.org regarding the place of empiricism in austrian economics:

So then, statistics aren’t “eschewed”as such; rather, they are relegated to their proper place in the economic edifice. Just because the Austrian does not think that laws of economics are discovered by complex models, does not mean that statistics in general are never to be used. This would be like complaining that the laws of logic have never been “proven” by statistics. It is in the nature of logical laws that they are not determined by empirical investigation, but rather, are presupposed. So then, when we are accused of dismissing empirical evidence, we ought to point out that statistics by their very epistemological nature cannot disprove those things which are discovered by a priori thinking. Statistics are chock full of their own assumptions, correlations, temporal conditions, and more, which render them wholly insufficient to provide unbreakable laws of economic theory. Bring me a study that proves price controls don’t work and I will point you to another that proves minimum wages are the secret to a prosperous economy.

this is, obviously, extremely extremely stupid. if you find that different studies contradict each other, the way to proceed is to do more studies, gather more data, figure out what's going on. maybe one of the studies was simply incorrect, maybe both studies were critically flawed, maybe price controls work in one situation but not others, maybe price controls on labor are fundamentally different than price controls on commodities, etc. etc. etc.

the answer is not to retreat into navel-gazing circle-jerking and thought experiments rooted in a priori thinking.

also the idea that the laws of economics, inherently a social science relating to the actions of people, could ever be quite as iron-clad and unchangeable as the laws of logic, is nonsense. human behavior can and does change over time, and consequently the laws governing human behavior, including economics, can change over time, especially in response to changes in technology or our relation to resources, so the idea that we should be looking primarily to a priori thinking to discern the laws of economics is fundamentally broken on the face of it.

that said, the idea that statistics can't disprove things discovered through a priori thinking is also broken on the face of it. yes they can? a priori thinking is obviously completely capable of being incorrect, and if empirical evidence is repeatedly showing that the things you discovered through a priori thinking don't hold up, then that means your a priori thinking was wrong.

which all brings me back to price controls- for the record, the ancap/libertarian/austrian economics stance on price controls is that they're always catastrophic, always wreck economic havoc, etc. etc. etc. you can find various statements to that effect in the articles on the "price control" tag on mises.org.

anyways. china uses price controls extensively. every year. none of this has prevented china from seeing growing life expectancy, growing gdp, reduction in poverty, etc. etc. etc. china does not see the empty shelves due to shortages that austrian economics says they should.

this is not to say, of course, that price controls never cause shortages, obviously, famously price controls caused extensive gas shortages in the 70's, but if there are repeated, consistent examples of a country using price controls extensively without significant ill effect, then the "unbreakable rule" your a priori thinking "discovered" is simply not unbreakable, and it's worth looking into the evidence to see the how and the why of the exemptions to that rule. but of course austrian economists would rather retreat into the comforting certainty of their models rather than deal with the messiness and unpredictability of real life.

[collapsedsquid]

Maybe should go through some of those fun mises.org posts as I sometimes do in honor of Milei's victory, we all can learn how libertarianism means you can't leave your house without being shot in a pandemic, how the first move of any libertarian government must be to lock everyone up in labor camps as receivers of stolen goods, and how as long as the police can beat a confession out of you in the end they can torture you with impunity.

[rielpolitik]

CROSSROADS: 'Hubris', Hamas, Israel, & The Collapse of The Fiat Global Order - By Theo Bishop

Source – mises.org “….Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah…Israel’s experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a…

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

A while back I did some research and learned that the Tulip Mania event was heavily exaggerated. And people still believe the exaggerated versions to this day. Here are some articles that go into more detail about it.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/

https://mises.org/library/truth-about-tulipmania

[gone-rogue-again]

https://mises.org/mises-daily/milgram-experiment

The agentic state theory, wherein, per Milgram, "the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow".

[nosce]

Liam Cosgrove, PERIODISTA freelance y Crack, Puto: mercenario por la DIGNIDAD.

https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1843721851383755043   . https://mises.org/profile/liam-cosgrove. https://mises.org/profile/liam-cosgrove https://grabien.com/profile?id=162845 https://thegrayzone.com/author/liam-cosgrove/ . . https://twitter.com/cosgrove_iv     . .

[kramlabs]

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4916388

:

Commentary: https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/08/new-study-says-the-fed-is-captured-by-congress-and-white-house-not-the-megabanks-that-own-the-fed-banks-and-get-trillions-in-bailouts/

:

Who owns the Fed: https://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/who-owns-the-federal-reserve-banks

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Note: https://www.clevelandfed.org/about-us/directors

[adribosch-fan]

Leggett: La desunión es mejor que la esclavitud

“ El cable de Mises•William Leggett [ Nota del editor: En este ensayo de 1835 , el gran jacksoniano antiesclavista —y enemigo de los banqueros centrales— William Leggett ofrece un ejemplo temprano de “abolicionismo secesionista” en su llamado a abrazar tanto la secesión como la desunión. Leggett aquí hace dos afirmaciones clave. Primero, Leggett rechaza las afirmaciones de los defensores de la…

[rpallavicini]

Small states

”States want to consolidate power, annex territories, increase their taxable population. What we want is the opposite of that. We want state unbuilding. State demolition.” Ryan McMaken Read more about secession: https://mises.org/wire/secession-and-small-states

[darkmaga-returns]

By Ryan McMaken

Mises.org

October 30, 2024

There’s a new ballot initiative in Colorado that shows what the “progressive” Left wants as the next step in abortion policy. Coloradans are now in the process of voting on Amendment 79 which paves the way for taxpayer-funded abortions and for protecting pro-abortion mandates on private insurance. The amendment would also create a legal right to an abortion in the state constitution.

For many years—especially during the 1980s and 1990s— the abortion lobby in America insisted that it only supported abortion as a last resort for low-income mothers who had no other choice. The slogan was “safe, legal, and rare.” In practice, however, the mere legality of abortion was never enough for these people. Even during the “safe, legal, and rare” days, abortion advocates repeatedly lobbied for taxpayers to foot the bill for abortions.

This is why, in 1984, local opponents of taxpayer-funded abortions put Amendment 3 on the Colorado ballot, which banned the use of taxpayer money for abortions in most cases. The push for “public” funds is why Congress adopted the Hyde Amendment in 1977, banning the use of federal funds for abortion. For more than 45 years, abortion advocates have been hard at work trying to loot the taxpayers.

Now comes Amendment 79 which is specifically designed to overturn previous limits on public funding, and to ensure that taxpayer funds will be used to pay for abortions. Moreover, these funds will be used to fund abortions for out-of-state residents who travel to Colorado specifically for an abortion.

By defining abortion as a right in the state constitution, the abortion lobby attempts to ensure that state Medicaid funds and other state funds can be spent on abortions. This is all meant to be stacked on top of Colorado’s existing anti-market and interventionist abortion laws which include state mandates that require private insurance companies to pay for abortions with no out-of-pocket expense for the person seeking the abortion. Or, put another way, existing state law requires that virtually everyone who pays health insurance premiums subsidize abortions.

[deblala]

Davos Man Is at It Again: The 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum | Mises Wire

https://mises.org/wire/davos-man-it-again-2022-annual-meeting-world-economic-forum

[collapsedsquid]

Need to know if Quinn Slobodian in his recent book mentions mises.org "when the pandemic hits, we need to lock down all travel, you will be forbidden from using your car, isn't it great that privatization allows and even encourages this" thing they had going on during the Zika and Ebola scares.

[liberty1776]

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.