Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
@Dissipate - surprisingly, one of your arguments in the first quarter of the last chapter was pretty good:
"There is no guarantee one way or another variety of education would be available in the free market? That is totally false. The free market would be able to provide any kind of education you were willing to pay for. If someone wanted to spend 30 years learning how to skip stones across a pond, the free market could provide such instruction. The public education system on the other hand, will always just provide a handful of subjects chosen by left wing academic elitists. "
I'm with you, more or less up to here, keeping aside the assumption that anyone in control of public education must be a left wing elitist.
Starting here however:
"As for education being entirely allocated by wealth, this is how numerous things are allocated in our everyday lives, from toothepaste to cars. You must either prove that education should be exempt from this method of allocation, or that everything should be allocated by the government. So far your only argument has been that in absence of public education, egalitarianism would drop to a level below that which you desire. Since egalitarianism is a flawed doctrine from the get-go, your argument has failed.
"
You have a serious burden of proof problem; education is a good which could be allocated by wealth; but don't forget that the people receiving it actually have no wealth to speak of at all. When you find a way for children to choose their own education, with the opportunity to borrow to finance it, from the first day of kindergarten (or whatever it is they choose), AND actually make choices that reflect the person they will become (rather than what every 6 year old would choose and regret when they're 20, i.e. not going to school) then you will have made the market for education sufficiently like other goods markets that my argument might fail. Until then, the market as it exists is highly dissimilar to other markets for goods and services, and it is not obvious that anyone's choices are a suitable proxy for the child making choices.
Ok, those are your personal opinions, but I do not see how they could possibly be grounded in axiomatic philisophical principles. Actually, the burden of proof lies with you. You are the one who must prove that the state must exist, with education and in general.
That men ought to accede to claims of supreme authority is not so obvious. Our first question must therefore be, under what conditions and for what reasons does one man have supreme authority over another? The same question can be restated, under what conditions can a state (understood normatively) exist? Kant has given us a convenient title for this sort of investigation. He called it a "deduction," meaning by the term not a proof of one proposition from another, but a demonstration of the legitimacy of a concept. When a concept is empirical, its deduction is accomplished merely by pointing to instances of its objects. For example, the deduction of the concept of a horse consists in exhibiting a horse. Since there are horses it must be legitimate to employ the concept. Similarly, a deduction of the descriptive concept of a state consists simply in pointing to the innumerable examples of human communities in which some men claim supreme authority over the rest and are obeyed. But when the concept in question is nonempirical, its deduction must proceed in a different manner. All normative concepts are nonempirical, for they refer to what ought to be rather than to what is. Hence, we cannot justifiy the use of the concept of (normative) supreme authority by presenting instances. We must demonstrate by an a priori argument that there can be forms of human community in which some men have a moral right to rule. In short, the fundamental task of political philosophy is to provide a deduction of the concept of the state.
From: In Defense of Anarchism
The fact that you believe that the free market would not provide sufficient education for children is subjective, it is not an a priori justification for the normative concept of the state.
As for your teacher qualifications 'argument' it's ridiculous; it simply begs the question by assuming that the purpose of public education is to make union teachers rich. I know you think this is 'obvious' but it really isn't; the purpose of teacher's unions is to make teachers rich - labour in any industry isn't unionized by necessity, it's unionized because it's unionized.
I am very confused by this paragraph. You say that the the purpose of unions is not to make teachers rich, then you say that it is the purpose of unions. Then you say that something is unionized because it is unionized? This is quite nonsensical. I don't really know what to say to that, so I will grant you the opportunity to rephrase your argument.
You should really pick up one or two of Elster's books on rational choice, since what I linked you was an essay specifically about information in particular circumstances; the man has spent a very long time on the problems of rational choice. Not to mention that the one study I described (which is discussed in the book for which I gave the title a few posts ago) prooves beyond a shadow of a doubt that in at least some circumstances, man's preferences do not obey the assumptions needed for equilibrium economics. This is from the rational choice side.
From the economics side, claiming that economics involves no mathematical models is just plain ridiculous. If anyone who actually cares is still reading these and has an interest in the potential and limitations of market economies, Arrow-Debreu is a great place to start.
One of the reasons why mainstream economics is in chaos is for this very reason. Mainstream economics has all of these mathematical models, and every mainstream school of thought in economics (neo-classical, neo-Keynesian, Chicago etc.) has their own models. Instead of pursuing chaos, I tried to find something in economics that made sense through and through. That is when I discovered the Austrian school, and so far it has proven to be a very consistent school of thought.
I have other important books to read other than Elster's right now. Namely, Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed which I just started.
I claimed that capitalists exploit wage earners? Not quite - anyone will exploit anything they can in capitalism; it's called the profit motive.
Exploitation cannot occur on a large scale in the free market, due to the fact that all relationships and contracts in the free market are voluntary. Firms have a vested interest in not exploiting their employees or their customers, hence, the profit motive does not bring exploitation, it brings the exact opposite: quality service.
Oh yeah, you don't believe in monopolies, I forgot. Let's tie that in to your information argument, where you will now claim that it is 'obvious' that no matter what price you set for your non-reproducible information, there is no change in the efficiency of the economy as a result. One of the few places where a couple of lines crossing on a page can actually tell you something, and you weren't looking.
No, I do happen to believe in monopolies, just not the economic concept of monopoly. However, I am a firm believer in the political concept of monopoly, that is monopolies that are created by the government by disallowing free entry into particular industries. In fact, the government itself is basically one big monopoly of force over a given geographical area.
WARP is the weak axiom of revealed preferences - you actually know considerably less economics than I thought, which may explain why you love your Austrians so much. WARP implies that if you prefer A to B, you cannot also prefer B to A. If you don't have this, the concepts of indifference curves, utility maximization and other tools of economics become meaningless, at least for the goods where your preferences are irrational, and possibly for all of your consumption.
If I read Mises' Human Action, and Rothbard's Man, Economy & State in their entirety, I would know a lot more about economics. However, these treatises are both over 1,000 pages long and I do not have the time. However, I have read enough to understand the basic principles, and be able to defend the free market on most issues. In any event, I do not understand how WARP (if it is a legitimate theory) justifies a state. If man is irrational, the government is supposed to pass regulation to stop his irrational behavior? I don't get it.
Have you ever met a career homeless person? Have you ever dealt personally with someone who is a paranoid schizophrenic? These people aren't going to work, and in most cases can't work. The administrative overhead of having them on staff would be enough for many of these people that they would need to pay you for the privilege of working for you. Some of them created their own problems; many did not. Your understanding of the ragged edges of the civilized world is once again questionnable.
Whether or not they would be able to get jobs is speculation until the minimum wage laws are repealed. However, one occupation they might be able to take up is something somewhat unorthodox. There are games called MMORPGs which are basically massive online roleplaying games. In these games you can harvest "virtual resources," which you can sell to other players. Often times to collect these "virtual resources," all you have to do is click in a certain place over and over again. It is extremely simple, but the resources can be sold to other players on eBay. In fact, there was a company that started doing this for Dark Age of Camelot. They set up their operation in Mexico, and had migrant workers gather the virtual resources, which they sold for cash, online to other players. The only problem was that the company Mythic that owns DAOC shut down the operation by prohibiting the sale of online virtual items.
How would a public good like the aqueduct honestly be created by a few thousand - or a few million - agents coordinating actions? Afterall, it couldn't be done centrally, as that would be a government. every contributor would just add on a few bricks a day? Who would draw up the plans?
Public goods are a myth. No good should ever be a public good. All scarce resources should be privately owned.
Government was around for a long time before democracy - nice try, but no one believes that a fascist or communist government represents them (though they may believe that they defend their interests, at least on a foreign affairs level); therefore you have argued from a non-necessary property of governments.
Actually, I was pointing out the absurdities one often believes in a democracy. However, a universal absurdity that one must believe if one believes in any government is that somehow a monopoly of ultimate decision making and force is actually a good thing. As Hans-Hoppe points out, this type of monopoly is not unlike any other monopoly, it creates exorbitant prices and low quality.
Selling prices when a good has a marginal value of zero, but positive value to consumers? Assuming you have market power, it's easy - the price is the monopoly price which turns out to maximize revenues.
I don't know what this is in reference to.
Authoritarian eh? Way to be wrong again. Of course anyone who believes that there should be a government would likely get the same label from you. Libertarianism as an ideal is as perfectly brilliant as anything from the great economists of history; the key is understanding why it doesn't function as a complete means of coordination. Remember that when you analyze things you can hold 'everything else constant' but when you want to unleash a complete revolution on the world, you have to account for everything if you want to know what will happen; and you can't do it.
No, a priori reasoning leads us to believe that anarcho-capitalism would be a much better social system. We don't need to account for everything in order to show this.
As a final note, even your axioms of human action can be called in to question when you start studying the behaviour of different cultures, especially eastern ones which haven't nearly the emphasis on the individual that we have. Market economics as applied to individuals who normally act in the best interests of their 'group' would be really interesting.
Nope. Axioms of human action are true for every culture, and every person who is able to act purposefully. However, this does not mean that there could be a culture that is more or less inclined towards prosperity than others. The problem is that government in every case hinders prosperity, for cultures that are more inclined to be prosperous and others that are less inclined.
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