Friday, February 13, 2004
Cres-cat will baude points to a seemingly reasonable dialog betwen epstein, friedman, barnette. Throw in Posner and you'd have the whole chicago gang.
Epstein (who is in my top 10 for the supreme court, if i got to choose)
is making a poor argument for taxation and emminent domain.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
It reminds me of volokh's attacks on Paul Craig Roberts -strange outcroppings of statism by usually anti-statists.
More as I read further.
barnette, and especially friedman, tear apart his argument.
friedman has a new book, future imperfect, but i couldn't find it on his web page.
Epstein's attempt at rebuttal is lame. He is scoffingly dismissive of the possibilty of ungoverned regions to resist statist agression. Go watch Black Hawk Down, in which an ungoverned society defeats the usa.
Or read Friedman's the machinery of freedom. Or, the moon is a harsh mistress. Or a history of the revolution. I was i think 18 when I read Friedman, and was happy to see a book-length exposition of thing things i know to be true. Met him once briefly at, I think, a FedSoc event. He was going on and on about his kewl new pocket organizer, in a charmingly extropian geek way.
In the end, Epstein comes out of the closet as not a libertarian but a moderate. For a moderate, he's pretty cool. But we thought he was one of us. He's one of those who are riding the freedom train, but plan to get off at the next stop.
One of the topics of the discussion is whether social systems should be justified by their consequences.
My philosophy jargon is rusty enough that i will avoid terms like "deontological."
Our knowledge of consequences is imperfect, and can be gamed.
If social policy choices are made solely on our best guesses about consequences, this creates a motive for people to lie to us in order to promote their policy preferences.
In my now-lost paper on "rights and the market in blood", 1980, I showed that we had been gamed. A socialist activist, R.M. Titmuss, posing as a health-care researcher, faked a study showing that the blood supply rises by banning the sale of blood. His policy choices were enacted into law, with the consequence of creating a blood shortage that kills over 1000 per year.
There was no sound theory in support of the policy, just some gamed data.
I use this example (somewhat oversimplified here) to show the danger of a solely consequentialist approach.
What I advocate instead, is that policy choices should be derived from good theory, but tested by evalution of consequences.
Correct theory should work in the real world. If it doesn't, doublecheck both the theory and the data. Libertarianism offers a consistent theory that seems to produce optimum results.
Hinduism, mormonism, zoroastrianism, are examples of silly theories that produce good results. One of the big challenges in ethics is to develop workableeticalsystems not grounded in silly myths.
Allfor now.
Epstein (who is in my top 10 for the supreme court, if i got to choose)
is making a poor argument for taxation and emminent domain.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
It reminds me of volokh's attacks on Paul Craig Roberts -strange outcroppings of statism by usually anti-statists.
More as I read further.
barnette, and especially friedman, tear apart his argument.
friedman has a new book, future imperfect, but i couldn't find it on his web page.
Epstein's attempt at rebuttal is lame. He is scoffingly dismissive of the possibilty of ungoverned regions to resist statist agression. Go watch Black Hawk Down, in which an ungoverned society defeats the usa.
Or read Friedman's the machinery of freedom. Or, the moon is a harsh mistress. Or a history of the revolution. I was i think 18 when I read Friedman, and was happy to see a book-length exposition of thing things i know to be true. Met him once briefly at, I think, a FedSoc event. He was going on and on about his kewl new pocket organizer, in a charmingly extropian geek way.
In the end, Epstein comes out of the closet as not a libertarian but a moderate. For a moderate, he's pretty cool. But we thought he was one of us. He's one of those who are riding the freedom train, but plan to get off at the next stop.
One of the topics of the discussion is whether social systems should be justified by their consequences.
My philosophy jargon is rusty enough that i will avoid terms like "deontological."
Our knowledge of consequences is imperfect, and can be gamed.
If social policy choices are made solely on our best guesses about consequences, this creates a motive for people to lie to us in order to promote their policy preferences.
In my now-lost paper on "rights and the market in blood", 1980, I showed that we had been gamed. A socialist activist, R.M. Titmuss, posing as a health-care researcher, faked a study showing that the blood supply rises by banning the sale of blood. His policy choices were enacted into law, with the consequence of creating a blood shortage that kills over 1000 per year.
There was no sound theory in support of the policy, just some gamed data.
I use this example (somewhat oversimplified here) to show the danger of a solely consequentialist approach.
What I advocate instead, is that policy choices should be derived from good theory, but tested by evalution of consequences.
Correct theory should work in the real world. If it doesn't, doublecheck both the theory and the data. Libertarianism offers a consistent theory that seems to produce optimum results.
Hinduism, mormonism, zoroastrianism, are examples of silly theories that produce good results. One of the big challenges in ethics is to develop workableeticalsystems not grounded in silly myths.
Allfor now.
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