#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-retard]

By Ryan McMaken

Mises.org

August 17, 2024

The Kamala Harris campaign announced today that it will present a plan to ban “price gouging” by food suppliers. In other words, the Harris campaign plans to mandate price controls.

Get ready for rising prices and shortages in meat and other groceries, because that’s where laws against “price gouging”—which are price controls—lead.

According to UPI: 

Vice President Kamala Harris will propose a federal ban on corporate food and groceries price gouging when she lays out her policies in a North Carolina campaign speech Friday.

According to the campaign, the proposal against price gouging is part of the larger Harris economic policy platform she plans to roll out publicly at a Friday campaign rally in Raleigh.

“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”

Directly addressing soaring meat prices, Harris will focus on corporate consolidation in that market as one reason meat prices are so high.

[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

[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

:

:

:

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

[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

[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

[liberty1776]

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

[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…

[chrisabraham]

"Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy." —John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching, 1944 Free Epub and PDF download from https://mises.org/library/we-go-marching

[darkmaga-retard]

By Ryan McMaken

Mises.org

August 14, 2024

This article is adapted from a lecture presented on August 3, 2024 at Mises University 2024 in Auburn, Alabama. 

The full name of this talk is “Self-Determination, Imperialism, and Secession: 3 Sides of the Same Coin.” So, I abuse the metaphor a bit, be we might also say that self-determination and secession—and self-determination’s opposite, imperialism—are three ways of looking at the same object.

The defense of self-determination is well-established within the so-called “classical” liberal tradition, and so let’s start with Ludwig von Mises, who understood liberalism well.

In his 1927 book Liberalism, Mises took a strict and expansive view in favor of self-determination. Specifically, he noted that respect for the right of self-determination required states to allow the separation of new polities via secession. He writes:

The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time … their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

Put another way, secession is the means or tool by which self-determination is expressed and preserved in real world politics. The two concepts go hand in hand.

Where does Mises get this idea of self-determination? He was drawing upon currents of thought alive and well in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[cloudhedges]

One Year Later In Ukraine: Washington And NATO Got It Very Wrong

by Zero Hedge It’s been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In spite of claims from the regime and its media allies that Russia was the next Third Reich and would soon roll through half of Europe, it turns out that was never even remotely true. In fact, things have unfolded more or less just like we predicted here at mises.org: the Russians aren’t even close to occupying any place…

[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.