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anonymous

The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income - 0 views

www.libertarianism.org/...libertarian-case-basic-income

shared by anonymous on 20 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Still skeptical? Well, here are three libertarian arguments in support of a Basic Income Guarantee. I begin with a relatively weak proposal that even most hard-core libertarians should be even to accept. I then move to stronger proposals that involve some deviation from the plumb-line view. But only justifiable deviations, of course.
  • 1) A Basic Income Guarantee would be much better than the current welfare state.
  • Current federal social welfare programs in the United States are an expensive, complicated mess. According to Michael Tanner, the federal government spent more than $668 billion on over one hundred and twenty-six anti-poverty programs in 2012. When you add in the $284 billion spent by state and local governments, that amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Wouldn’t it be better just to write the poor a check?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      There's still an argument to be made that flat out giving poor people money would result in tons of misspent cash because we aren't very good with money if we haven't nurtured good habits.
  • A Basic Income Guarantee would also be considerably less paternalistic then the current welfare state, which is the bastard child of “conservative judgment and progressive condescension” toward the poor, in Andrea Castillo’s choice words.
  • Conservatives want to help the poor, but only if they can demonstrate that they deserve it by jumping through a series of hoops meant to demonstrate their willingness to work, to stay off drugs, and preferably to settle down into a nice, stable, bourgeois family life.
  • 2) A Basic Income Guarantee might be required on libertarian grounds as reparation for past injustice.
  • One of libertarianism’s most distinctive commitments is its belief in the near-inviolability of private property rights. But it does not follow from this commitment that the existing distribution of property rights ought to be regarded as inviolable, because the existing distribution is in many ways the product of past acts of uncompensated theft and violence.
  • However attractive libertarianism might be in theory, “Libertarianism…Starting Now!” has the ring of special pleading, especially when it comes from the mouths of people who have by and large emerged at the top of the bloody and murderous mess that is our collective history.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      THANK you. It's a strong objection from people like me who are all too aware of the twisted LP-logic emerging from enthusiastic converts.
  • But Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice is a historical one, and an important component of that theory is a “principle of rectification” to deal with past injustice. Nozick himself provided almost no details
  • In a world in which all property was acquired by peaceful processes of labor-mixing and voluntary trade, a tax-funded Basic Income Guarantee might plausibly be held to violate libertarian rights. But our world is not that world. And since we do not have the information that would be necessary to engage in a precise rectification of past injustices, and since simply ignoring those injustices seems unfair, perhaps something like a Basic Income Guarantee can be justified as an approximate rectification?
  • 3. A Basic Income Guarantee might be required to meet the basic needs of the poor.
  • Could there be a libertarian case for the basic income not as a compromise but as an ideal?
  • Both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek advocated for something like a Basic Income Guarantee as a proper function of government, though on somewhat different grounds.
  • And so, Friedman concludes, some “governmental action to alleviate poverty” is justified. Specifically, government is justified in setting “a floor under the standard of life of every person in the community,” a floor that takes the form of his famous “Negative Income Tax” proposal.
  • Friedrich Hayek’s argument, appearing 17 years later in volume 3 of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, is even more powerful. Here’s the crucial passage:The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born. (emphasis added)
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      In my 3-5 years being a Libertarian, I *never* read this bit from Hakey. Methinks that may be a sore-spot I was blind to.
  • But as my colleague Kevin Vallier has documented repeatedly, Hayek was not opposed to the welfare state as such (not even in the Road to Serfdom). At the very least, he regarded certain aspects of the welfare state as permissible options that states might pursue.
  • But the passage above suggests that he may have had an even stronger idea in mind - that a basic income is not merely a permissible option but a mandatory requirement of democratic legitimacy - a policy that must be instituted in order to justify the coercive power that even a Hayekian state would exercise over its citizens.
  • A Basic Income Guarantee involves something like an unconditional grant of income to every citizen.
  • So, on most proposals, everybody gets a check each month. “Unconditional” here means mostly that the check is not conditional on one’s wealth or poverty or willingness to work.
  • A Negative Income Tax involves issuing a credit to those who fall below the threshold of tax liability, based on how far below the threshold they fall.
  • So the amount of money one receives (the “negative income tax”) decreases as ones earnings push one up to the threshold of tax liability, until it reaches zero, and then as one earns more money one begins to pay the government money (the “positive income tax”).
  • The Earned Income Tax Credit is the policy we actually have in place currently in the United States.
  • It was inspired by Friedman’s Negative Income Tax proposal, but falls short in that it applies only to persons who are actually working.
  • 1) Disincentives - One of the most common objections to Basic Income Guarantees is that they would create objectionably strong disincentives to employment.
  • After all, with a Basic Income Guarantee, the money you get is yours to keep. You don’t lose it if you take a job and start earning money. And so in that way the disincentives to employment it creates are probably less severe than those created by currently existing welfare programs where employment income is often a bar to eligibility.
  • 2) Effects on Migration - When most people think about helping the poor, they forget about two groups that are largely invisible - poor people in other countries, and poor people who haven’t been born yet
  • With respect to the first of those groups, I think (and have argued before) that there is a real worry that a Basic Income Guarantee in the United States would create pressures to restrict immigration even more than it already is.
  • That worries me, because I think the last thing anybody with a bleeding heart ought to want to do is to block the poorest of the poor from access to what has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever devised - namely, a policy of relatively open immigration into the relatively free economy of the United States.
  • 3) Effects on Economic Growth - Even a modest slowdown of economic growth can have dramatic effects when compounded over a period of decades.
  • And so even if whatever marginal disincentives a Basic Income Guarantee would produce wouldn’t do much to hurt currently existing people, it might do a lot to hurt people who will be born at some point in the future.
  • Tyler Cowen and Jim Manzi put forward what seem to me to be the most damning objections to a Basic Income Guarantee - that however attractive the idea may be in theory, any actually implemented policy will be subject to political tinkering and rent-seeking until it starts to look just as bad as, if not worse than, what we’ve already got.
  • anonymous on 20 Dec 13
     
    "Guaranteeing a minimum income to the poor is better than our current system of welfare, Zwolinski argues. And it can be justified by libertarian principles."
anonymous

Libertarianism and Hegemony - 0 views

www.bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...libert.html

libertarianism

shared by anonymous on 01 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 May 11
     
    The comments are a hoot. "My views on foreign policy tend to diverge from mainstream libertarian doctrine. Take American hegemony. Many people are predicting (usually with glee) the demise of American power (see, for example, Ronald Dworkin). Regardless of the accuracy of these predictions, I think libertarians have reasons to support American global hegemony. Realistic alternatives to hegemony are the international state of nature, balance of power, and governance by an international institution such as the United Nations. The state of nature is undesirable for well-known Hobbesian reasons: defensive efforts would undermine productive cooperation. Balance of power is inherently unstable; sooner or later will morph into hegemonic power. And, at least in today's world, governance by an international institution would be plagued by legitimacy deficits and agency costs that would surely threaten liberal values. So, if we are going to have hegemony as the only arrangement capable of providing global public goods, the United States is the least bad because American institutions and culture embody liberal values. Any likely competitor is certainly to be worse for those who cherish liberal values. I believe history supports this, too: three times during the 20th century the United States saved liberal culture from onslaughts by illiberal forces. Objections to hegemony are often condemnations of means rather than ends, and I certainly agree with those where applicable. Let us concede that the United States sometimes pursues moral ends (say, helping other nations achieve freedom) with immoral means (say, bringing about unjustified collateral harm). Citizens in liberal democracies must oppose the use of immoral means, even for a good cause. However, this kind of criticism cannot be a wholesale condemnation of hegemony, because there are world powers, such as the Soviet Union, who pursue immoral ends. Surely these cannot be saved even when they use moral means (whi
anonymous

The question libertarians just can't answer - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._libertarians_just_cant_answer

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 13 - Cached
  • There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
  • Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.
  • Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
  • If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?
  • Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
  • But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise.
  • Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries.
  • With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire.
  • Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.
  • These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade.
  • Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S.
  • The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?
  • According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010.
  • In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S.
  • Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 13
     
    A most cogent argument. I don't think it's the author's job to balance itself out (as was suggested in G+). Against what, exactly? The piece had nothing to do with the two-party system. I completely agree that our two party system is a joke, but I fail to see how inserting an additional joke adds anything. The LP serves a vote-getting purpose for the GOP. That is all. Once the GOP gets enough votes, they reserve the right to kick the LP ideas/candidates to the curb - and often do. That's been the cycle for decades. Years back, it made me angry. I'm pretty ambivalent now. Circle of political life. The official LP positions on a whole host of issues is beyond unpalatable even for our heavily right-leaning electorate. Abolishing the WoD is a great policy idea, but it needs to be accompanied by more great ideas before Americans do more than pay lip service and pretend to Go Galt. Oh, and they have to rip out their Objectivist-center and hurl it into the sun.
anonymous

Libertarians Are the New Communists - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ns-are-the-new-communists.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.
  • By radical libertarianism, we mean the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values.
  • By communism, we mean the ideology of extreme state domination of private and economic life.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • social libertarians aren’t the problem. It is the nihilist anti-state libertarians of the Koch-Cruz-Norquist-Paul (Ron and Rand alike) school who should worry us.
  • Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature, misunderstanding of how societies work and utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances.
  • We say the conditional “would” because radical libertarianism has a fatal flaw: It can’t be applied across a functioning society.
  • Radical libertarians would be great at destroying. They would have little concept of creating or governing. It is in failed states such as Somalia that libertarianism finds its fullest actual expression.
  • Some libertarians will claim we are arguing against a straw man and that no serious adherent to their philosophy advocates the extreme positions we describe. The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist and the Pauls speaks for itself. Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work -- not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist.
  • The alternative to this extremism is an evolving blend of freedom and cooperation. The relationship between social happiness and economic success can be plotted on a bell curve, and the sweet spot is away from the extremes of either pure liberty or pure communitarianism. That is where true citizenship and healthy capitalism are found.
  • True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes in circumstance. Sometimes government isn’t the answer. Other times it is.
  • Freedom is responsibility.
  • anonymous on 07 Sep 13
     
    "Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. Both attempt to answer the same questions, and fail to do so in similar ways. Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe."
anonymous

The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the "free m... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...the_fantasy_of_the_free_market

shared by anonymous on 18 Sep 14 - Cached
  • To believe that markets operate and exist in a state of nature is, in itself, to believe in the supernatural.
  • According to the American Values Survey, a mere 7 percent of Americans identify as “consistently libertarian.” Compared to the general population, libertarians are significantly more likely to be white (94 percent), young (62 percent under 50) and male (68 percent). You know, almost identical to the demographic makeup of atheists – white (95 percent), young (65 percent under 50) and male (67 percent). So there’s your first clue.
  • Your second clue is that atheist libertarians are skeptical of government authority in the same way they’re skeptical of religion.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In their mind, the state and the pope are interchangeable, which partly explains the libertarian atheist’s guttural gag reflex to what they perceive as government interference with the natural order of things, especially “free markets.”
  • Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.
  • “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,”
  • Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them.
  • “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”
  • Atheists are skeptics, but atheist libertarians evidently check their skepticism at the door when it comes to corporate power and the self-regulatory willingness of corporations to act in the interests of the common good.
  • Corporations pollute, lie, steal, oppress, manipulate and deceive, all in the name of maximizing profit. Corporations have no interest for the common good.
  • In the 1970s, consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader became famous for helping protect car owners from the unsafe practices of the auto industry. Corporate America, in turn, went out of its way in a coordinated effort, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, to destroy Nader.
  • The documentary “Unreasonable Man” demonstrates how corporate CEOs of America’s biggest corporations had Nader followed in an attempt to discredit and blackmail him. General Motors went so far as to send an attractive lady to his local supermarket in an effort to meet him, and seduce him. That’s how much corporate America was fearful of having to implement pesky and costly measures designed to protect the well-being of their customers.
  • Today America is the most income unequal among all developed nations, and we find ourselves here today not because of government regulation or interference, but a lack thereof.
  • The unilateral control that Wall Street and mega-corporations have over economic policy is now extreme, and our corporate overlords have seen to the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history, while corporations contribute their lowest share of total federal tax revenue ever.
  • By every measure, Australians, Scandinavians, Canadians, Germans and the Dutch are happier and more economically secure. The U.N. World Development Fund, the U.N. World Happiness Index and the Social Progress Index contain the empirical evidence atheist libertarians  should seek, and the results are conclusive: People are happier, healthier and more socially mobile where the size of the state is bigger, and taxes and regulations on corporations are greater. You know, the opposite of the libertarian dream that would turn America into a deeper nightmare.
  • anonymous on 18 Sep 14
     
    "Atheist libertarians pose as skeptics -- except when it comes to free markets and the nature of corporate power"
  • Ed Webb on 19 Sep 14
     
    If Ayn Rand hadn't existed, the corporations would have found it necessary to invent her...
anonymous

Libertarian Electoral Fantasies - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...ibertarian-electoral-fantasies

generations

shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction
  • Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. This can be seen in the Pew Survey report (PDF) on Millenials, entitled "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation.
  • if George W. Bush couldn't convince Americans to privatize the program in 2005, after a 25-year bull market when stocks were widely assumed to be lucrative and safe, I don't see how anybody who lived through the current crisis is going to come around.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • this has no bearing on the intellectual value of libertarianism, which obviously is unrelated to its popularity. But it's worth keeping in mind when we discuss the electorate, because such discussions often operate under the mistaken assumption that there's an enormous pool of libertarian or libertarian-leaning voters ignored by the two-party system.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 10
     
    By Jonathan Chait at The New Republic on April 8, 2010. A look at the trend of Millennials being more tolerant of government expansion.
anonymous

Why Free Markets? - 2 views

bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...why-free-markets

shared by anonymous on 30 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The short answer, which I will assert here and defend below, is that whatever the intent behind government regulation of markets, it almost always ends up working in the interest of the rich and powerful and does little to protect the interest of those with modest means and little access to power.  If a commitment to social justice demands that we care first and foremost about the least well off among us, supporting government regulation may well violate that commitment.
  • why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?
  • As Hayek made clear 66 years ago, the problem we face when try to “construct” an economic order is how to best make use of all of this knowledge, which is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Mises and Hayek also argued that because this knowledge is structurally dispersed, contextual and tacit, it cannot be aggregated by government planners and regulators (nor, it’s worth noting, by private actors).
  • So one problem facing regulators is that they lack the knowledge necessary to know what people value and how much, so in deciding what to regulate and how, they are acting on incomplete and often erroneous information.  By trying to override the market, they are substituting a less informationally-rich system for a more rich one.
  • In the face of these repeated failures, it’s very easy to imagine, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, that regulators and the politicians who oversee them will start to act in their own political self-interest.  Without the ability to make reliable decisions on the objective merits, self-interest will slowly dominate.  Regulators will try to serve the needs of those who will keep them in power and supply them with healthy budgets.  So-called “Capture Theory” explains that it then becomes easy for regulators to be “captured” by the industries they regulate and then regulate in ways that favor the industry.
  • about 75% of antitrust cases are initiated not by the government but by private firms unhappy with how their competition has behaved.  Private actors constantly engage in lobbying and rent-seeking for regulations that will benefit them and/or harm their competition.
  • For me, as an economist, the argument against a great deal of regulation is precisely that it harms the least well off it is trying to help and provides unwarranted privileges for those who need them least. 
  •  Economic systems are inherent unstable, dynamically evolving things.   In studying them, we are always studying a moving target.  To my mind, that makes equilibrium models less generally applicable than is often held to be the case.
  • I have great sympathy for this line of argument, but write to make two points.
  • First, I think the danger of governmental regulation goes beyond the mere possibility of "capture" of the regulatory apparatus by the powerful. The threat is not just this, but that once the authority to regulate is well-established, the state can use this and other economic tools to "buy off" various constitutencies until the opposition to state authority becomes too weak to prevent a very dangerous concentration of power.
  • Second, there is also a purely moral, but non-consequentialist, argument against regulation.
  • That suggests that human institutions - complexity of parts notwithstanding - often exhibit various aggregate patterns of behavior that correlate with measurable variables, and that can be understood and predicted with reasonable degrees of confidence, and thus that the outcomes of various kinds of higher-level global interventions can similarly be predicted with some accuracy.
  • There is no fundamental theoretical difference between states and other large human organizations that would for some reason result in the inability of states to successfully regulate significant fields of aggregate economic behavior as a result of micro-level calculation problems.
  • This is not an argument for any particular regulatory action.  It is an argument that whether these treatments work is an empirical question that cannot be deduced a priori from the kinds of simplified toy models that are wheeled out in an Economics 101 classes or from the armchairs of either libertarian or socialist philosophers.
  • Philosophers are good at the logical and conceptual analysis of conundrums that occur in the theoretical levels of a science.   But when they venture too far into the way the actual world works, they easily lose their bearings due to their surfeit of rationalistic mental habits and intolerance of detail.
  • Property rights are not actualized in the real human world by philosophical ruminations on the state of nature.  They are actualized by courts, and lawmakers, and executives backed up by police and security services - people with guns and other means of enforcing the laws.  There has never been a durable form of human social life where the power to regulate was not "granted."
  • anonymous on 30 Jun 11
     
    "My first post this week led to some interesting discussion in the comments, which has in turn led me to this post. One issue that came up there was, and I paraphrase: "Okay, fine, markets really do benefit the poor, but the dispute between modern liberals and libertarians is not over 'markets' but over 'free markets.' Libertarians don't want the regulations that liberals do and saying that 'markets' help the poor doesn't help us resolve this issue." Fair enough. So why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?"
  • Erik Hanson on 02 Jul 11
     
    I don't know that free markets help the poor so much as they allow more opportunity to the poor. And where free markets lack is in actually funding the poor, where there's a presumption that they deserve poverty.
anonymous

Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out - 0 views

www.slate.com/2271265

technology society

shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 10 - Cached
  • To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. His most famous quote—borrowed from Vince Lombardi—is, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute*, Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.
  • What differentiates Thiel's Silicon Valley style of philanthropic libertarianism from Glenn Beck's screaming-raving-weeping variety is a laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of any demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving.
  • anonymous on 21 Oct 10
     
    "Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college." By Jacob Weisberg at Slate on October 16, 2010.
anonymous

Why I Hate Your Freedom - 1 views

raikoth.net/libertarian.html

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 10 Aug 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Aug 12
     
    "You can find more information about me at www.raikoth.net. This is the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom)" One of the best things I've ever read about why *I* too am not a Libertarian. Gripping stuff.
anonymous

Are Libertarians Serious About Liberty? - 0 views

delong.typepad.com/...ans-serious-about-liberty.html

politics ideas philosophy

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • the conservative movement includes many people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to the liberty of foreigners, immigrants, drug users, gays and lesbians, women who want abortions, broadcasters, sex workers, criminal defendants, Muslims, publishers of pornography, atheists, and so forth....
  • What libertarians and conservatives share isn’t a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom... the Founding Fathers... free markets... limited government... Hayek....
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 10
     
    Money: "What libertarians and conservatives share isn't a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom..." By Brad Delong at Grasping Reality with Both Hands on July 21, 2010.
anonymous

Why I Am Not a Libertarian - 0 views

sophistpundit.blogspot.com/...why-i-am-not-libertarian.html

politics partisan philosophy

shared by anonymous on 25 May 10 - Cached
  • The first is what I've heard called "first principles" libertarianism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 May 10
       
      This smacks of worshipping a process.
  • The second is utilitarian, or consequentialist libertarianism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 May 10
       
      Voluntary associations are not the only source of good.
  • Paul argued that he was for the part of the Civil Rights Act that ended the legal impositions of Jim Crow, but was against the positive coercive measures taken to try and force desegregation to happen.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • libertarianism, by nature of being an "ism", is a rationalism.  To the extent that it is a cohesive ideology, it demands a rational criteria as a basis for judging the merit of events in human history and human decisions.
  • anonymous on 25 May 10
     
    By Adam Gurri on May 21, 2010
anonymous

Why Rand Never Lost an Argument - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...-rand-never-lost-argument.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The written evidence, such as it is, demonstrates no very great arguing skill on Rand's part. Quite the contrary, Rand, when she deigns to offer any sort of arguments at all, produces rather poor ones, afflicted with yawning gaps and blistering equivocations.
  • There are several factors which contribue to explaining this anamoly. Rand depended on at least five such factors to provide the varnish of irrefragibility over her otherwise hollow and empirically impoverished arguments.
  • Inability of individuals to evaluate the quality of arguments made on behalf of conclusions they agree with.Intimidation tacticsSelection of debating opponentsReliance on explicit articulation of viewsAvoidance of empirical tests in favor of verbalism
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • (1) Cognitive science and experimental psychology have uncovered reams of evidence that people are not very good at evaluating arguments when they agree with the conclusions.
  • Devotees of Ayn Rand sincerely believe that the Objectivist metaphysics, although based on little more than empty tautologies and other such empirically vacuous truisms, represents the very acme of logical soundness.
  • People tend to believe what they want to believe
  • If only bad arguments are available, they will gravitate toward the best of the bad.
  • Most people become attracted to Objectivism when they are young and without experience either of the world or of philosophical arguments
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This was my experience. Though quite intellectual (seeming) from a very young age, the fact of the matter was that binary, reductionist thinking was a very large part of my intellectual adolescence. I moved from fundamentalist Christianity, to strict Libertarianism, to strict Objectivism, before finally understanding it wasn't the *second* part of those labels that was the real problem - it was the first: fundaminalist... strict... strict...
  • Rand's Objectivist philosophy provides an intriguing set of rationalizations defending an extreme form of secular individualism and egoism coupled with common sense view of reality.
  • (2) For Rand, intimidation became central to maintaining her intellectual dominance over disciples.
  • I learned ... that it didn't pay to be confrontational with [Rand]. If I saw or suspected some inconsistency, I would point it out in calm and even tones, as if it were "no big deal." That way, she would often accept the correction and go on. To expose the inconsistency bluntly and nakedly would only infuriate her
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This has been validated by other writings. Those of poorer stills with verbalization would be absolutely savaged by her.
  • Many of my patients used to tell me that they were terrified to ask questions because of the way Miss Rand might respond to them.
  • I remember many occasions when Rand pounced, assuming that a question was motivated by hostility to her or her ideas, or that the questioner was intellectually dishonest or irrational, or had evil motives, or was her "enemy."
  • A young man asked if her brief characterization of Immanuel Kant's philosophy was accurate, and she exploded that she had not come here to be insulted. I was surprised at the heated tone of her response because he was not antagonistic to her and he had, as I watched him, no glimmer of malice or "gotcha" in his eyes.
  • Rand's anger helped shield her from effective criticism. It encouraged her disciples to be extra cautious when asking questions, which led to many important doctrines in Objectivism remaining unchallenged.
  • Individuals tend to be rather poor at evaluating and criticizing their own beliefs. For this reason, criticism from others is essential for any philosophy that presumes to be rational.
  • Indeed, criticism from others is central to rationality.
  • Rand's refusal to allow herself to be effectively challenged renders her system irrational and dogmatic.
  • (3) Rand not only refused to engage in formal debates with other philosophers and intellectuals, she refused to have anything to do with the two groups which could have challenged her most effectively, namely, conservatives and liberatarians.
  • Her disdain for libertarians is both notorious and perplexing. The reasons for her disdain (which include such trivial reasons as her dislike for the word libertarian) strike one as contrived and superficial, as if they were mere rationalizations.
  • It is not difficult to understand the attraction Ayn Rand has for the uninstructed. She appears, I suppose, to be the spokesman for freedom, for self-esteem, and other equally noble ideals. However, patient examination reveals her pronouncements to be but a shroud beneath which lies the corpse of illogic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      And this is from a member of a movement that's been broadly sympathetic to the spirit, if not the letter, of Objectivism.
  • Rand's hostility (and the subsequent Objectivism policy to avoid libertarians because, as Peikoff once put it, Libertarians are worse than communists) gave her a pretext for avoiding the very group which could offer the most well-informed criticism of her Objectivist philosophy
  • Rand kept her distance from them, as she kept her distance from conservative intellectuals. By doing so, Rand was able to protect herself from just the sort of intellectuals who could have conquered her in debate.
  • Rand never lost an argument, not because she was a great debator, but because she never took on any challenging opponents.
  • (4) Many people do not know how to verbalize their basic beliefs.
  • Regardless of how poor Rand's actual arguments might be, the very fact that she could articulate her beliefs would give her a decisive advantage.
  • (5) In the absence of effective, empirical criticism, debates are determined by factors that have little, if anything to do with the truth.
  • Debates conducted without reference to effective empirical criticism become exercises in verbal facility, where the most aggressive, articulate, personable, and/or witty debator inevitably wins.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "Sam Anderson, in a review of Anne Heller's biography of Rand, notes: "Eyewitnesses say that [Rand] never lost an argument." Given the poor quality of many of Rand's actual arguments, as one finds them embalmed in her writings, this is a bit of anamoly." You think? :) Another great ARCHN on July 19, 2011
anonymous

Three arguments against the singularity - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...reality-check-1.html

singularity sf criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • economic libertarianism is based on the same reductionist view of human beings as rational economic actors as 19th century classical economics — a drastic over-simplification of human behaviour. Like Communism, Libertarianism is a superficially comprehensive theory of human behaviour that is based on flawed axioms and, if acted upon, would result in either failure or a hellishly unpleasant state of post-industrial feudalism.
  • I am not an extropian
  • I'm definitely not a libertarian:
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it's unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Jun 11
       
      In other words: what we call 'consciousness' is a bundle of physiological responses, not some tightly designed status.
  • it's possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences ... lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.
  • whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.
  • Consciousness seems to be a mechanism for recursively modeling internal states within a body.
  • Uploading ... is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire.
  • Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril
  • Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues involved in creating ancestor simulations are ignored.
  • This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.
  • We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions.
  • our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it.
  • Therefore I conclude that, while not ruling them out, it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    Over at Charlie's Diary, Mr. Stross articulates why he's not super-enamored of the Singularity. He begins: "I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist." The Long version commences...here are excerpts.
anonymous

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - 2 views

www.salon.com/...net_destroyed_the_middle_class

technology

shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
  • This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways.
  • Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
  • But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”
  • One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.
  • And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.
  • So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.
  • Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
  • And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.
  • So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.
  • the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.
  • The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.
  • If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.
  • And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.
  • So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?
  • And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I think that's a worthy question considering the high-speed with which we adopt every possible technology; to hell with foresight.
  • Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.
  • I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
  • But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.
  • And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Ha ha. Ayn Rand people don't have to admit to *anything,* trust me, dude.
  • It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.
  • But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      This makes me curious. Is he arguing that there are fewer *nodes* because the information access closes them?
  • You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      My understanding was that the U.S. heads of business got the nod to go ahead and start manufacturing things *other* than weapons, because our industrial capabilities weren't anhialated (sp?) relative to so many others.
  • There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
  • In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
  • Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
  • I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.
  • And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.
  • The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.
  • And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Quite true. She's obviously not rolling in solid gold cadillacs.
  • But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.
  • The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.
  • I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.
  • The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
  • We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
  • The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
  • I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.
  • It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
  • You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
  • I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
  • The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
  • I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
  • All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
  • Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Group House. HAH!
  • So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.
  • And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.
  • I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      See, now I like this guy. This is like the political equivalent of aiming for the realist view in geopolitics. We separate what is likely from what is unlikely and aim not for "the best" situation, but a situation where the worst aspects have been mitigated. It's backwards thinking that both parties would have a hard time integrating into their (ughhh) brand.
  • Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?
  • Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
  • I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
  • Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Again, a take I rarely encounter.
  • I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I have had this very thing happen to. I didn't get to have my moment of discovery. I think Google Glass is going to fix that. Hah. :)
  • And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
  • I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
  • So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
  • Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth -- even democracy"
anonymous

Objectivism & Politics, Part 58 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ectivism-politics-part-58.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • If she had a clear, rational case against Libertarianism, wouldn’t she have presented such a case and left it at that? But she does no such thing. Instead, her arguments appear drenched in malice and petty resentment.
  • Now if Libertarianism really is as bad as Rand would have us believe, why did Rand have to resort to name calling and illogical guilt-by-association arguments? I have several conjectures on this score, as listed below.
  • Conjecture 1: Logical deduction from Rand’s basic premises.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • From Rand’s views of history and psychology, she concluded that bad arguments do more harm than outright opposition.
  • Conjecture 2: Vanity motive.
  • In short, even those who sympathized with Rand’s political ideals found her arguments unpersuasive. Imagine how galling that must have been to Rand that even people who shared her political convictions found her arguments unconvincing!
  • Conjecture 2: Jealousy.
  • Perhaps Rand simply resented that some defenders of freedom and capitalism had more success or were taken more seriously than she was.
  • she wrote, “[The Road to Serfdom] had no base, no moral base. This is why my book is needed.” [ibid, 104-105] This final boast suggests that Rand regarded Hayek as a rival, and that jealousy may have played a role in her overwrought denunciations of his book.
  • Conjecture 4: Resentment against excommunicated Objectivists.
  • Apologists for Rand might insist that conjectures two through four must be wrong, because Rand was incapable of vanity, jealousy, and resentment. This, however, is a rather implausible assertion difficult to find creditable. Vanity, jealousy, and resentment are emotions deep within the warp and woof of human nature.
  • Rand’s claim that she didn’t have these disagreeable emotions because, after all, she was a woman of self-made soul, is no more creditable than someone denying that his or her organism produces disagreeable body odors.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Why was Ayn Rand such a vociferous opponent of Libertarians - one of the few groups that didn't regard her with contempt? Another great post at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on July 12, 2010.
anonymous

In Gurgaon, India, Dynamism Meets Dysfunction - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...09gurgaon.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
  • how can a new city become an international economic engine without basic public services? How can a huge country flirt with double-digit growth despite widespread corruption, inefficiency and governmental dysfunction?
  • India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      Libertarians like to picture the state in a very fixed, binary position in relation to the economy. Further peeking, though, and you see that governments can be broadly pro-business, or anti-business, or both, or directed specificially in one or another sector. The Libertarian persistence that Government = Bad Things is hardly descriptive or useful.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • GURGAON, India
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      This would appear to be a wet-dream scenario for Libertarian/Anarchists. Let's see how this author portrays the many facets there most certainly are...
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      Only certain types of anarchism allow for large, organized corporations. Recall that the workers' rights movement was largely spurred on by anarchists.
  • In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.
  • “You are on your own.”
  • It is experiencing a Gilded Age of nouveau billionaires while it is cleaved by inequality and plagued in some states by poverty and malnutrition levels rivaling sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      This smells a bit like the rise of Hong Kong. Filling out one piece of paper to start a business. This is Libertarian stuff that still resonates with me. That's very good. And then, the inevitable: BUT...
  • Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”
  • Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.
  • And that is where the problems arose. HUDA and other state agencies could not keep up with the pace of construction. The absence of a local government had helped Gurgaon become a leader of India’s growth boom. But that absence had also created a dysfunctional city. No one was planning at a macro level; every developer pursued his own agenda as more islands sprouted and state agencies struggled to keep pace with growth.
  • From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      As an MR reader notes, in the absence of street laws, drivers are incentivized to speed and behave recklessly. This is one hell of a *feature* of little-to-no government? Cool.
  • The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.
  • “We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”
  • Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.
  • Sheikh Hafizuddin, 38, lives in a slum with a few hundred other migrants less than two miles from Cyber City. No more than half the children in the slum attend school, with the rest spending their days playing on the hard-packed dirt of the settlement, where pigs wallow in an open pit of sewage and garbage. Mr. Hafizuddin pays $30 a month for a tiny room. His landlord runs a power line into the slum for electricity and draws water from a borehole on the property. “Sometimes it works,” Mr. Hafizuddin said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work.”
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      This is one of the issues I take with anarcho-capitalism. It works great, so long as you only look at those on top.
  • Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      And where the private world of Gurgaon and everywherelse intersect, who's problem is it?
  • Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.
  • “The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”
  • “Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 11
       
      Years ago, when I moved to Seattle, I worked with a mess of Indian programmers who complained that, coming from middle to middle-upper class households, their families had a difficult time doing the U.S.-style entrepreneur thing precisely because of (you put it:) byzantine laws and payoffs. I also take the nod that deriving broad trends from this isn't exactly wise. But it was worth noting because I have vague, youthful memories of the classic Capitalist-vs-Marxist quandry: Both can claim that there has never been a *true* example of one or the other. Reality is messy like that; it never provides perfect samples. By the way, thanks so much for joining in with my little bookmark-experiment, Erik. I love the idea of marking up a discussion document in order to probe an issue. I really shoulda gone to college. :)
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      Hey, thanks for chunking out longer articles so that I can get through them (once I have time to open the Diigo emails in my inbox). I'm always a little upset about the juicy stuff I may be missing by skipping Buzz for a week or two.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    The anarcho-libertarian's wet dream: a city without a government. "In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world's most respected corporations. "
  • Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
     
    India's government is especially byzantine and a truly active inhibitor of commerce and growth. I can understand how, especially to outside companies who don't know the system, there's a real appeal in being able to avoid the sort of daily struggles of someone claiming to be an official coming to your reception and demanding a fine for a law you're not sure even exists. But even if this city weren't rotting out from the inside, I don't think it would necessarily be a lesson applicable to all other governments. Not every piece of rope is a Gordian Knot, as not every government is India's.
anonymous

Ayn Rand is for children - 1 views

www.salon.com/...ayn_rand_is_for_children

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 13 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Since I first met Objectivists (read: libertarians) in college, my Unified Theory of Rand Groupies posited that they all probably fit into at least one of three groups: those who 1) never grew out of the usual “the world is persecuting me and doesn’t see my true genius” phase that momentarily afflicts the typical high schooler 2) think saying “Ayn Rand” in any context makes them sound intelligent, even though they’ve never actually read her work or 3) have read Rand’s work, don’t genuinely believe in her ideology as evidenced by their lifestyle/politics, but still say they love her because it serves to make them feel good about their own avarice.
  • Typically, they are more than happy to (among other things) drive on taxpayer funded roads; to have their assets defended by government agents (aka police and firefighters); to have their property rights protected by a law enforcement collective known as the judiciary; and to pocket their share of handouts. Some alleged Randian individualists are even willing to decry the social safety net for others but not for themselves, and still others are happy to to vote in Congress for the epitome of what Randianism stands against.
  • Nonetheless, after my three-week voyage to the poorest province in China in 2009 (which you can read about here), I can say with confidence that if you have been to the non-Tom-Friedman developing world – aka the actual developing world – you don’t need Saunders’ MacArthur Genius-worthy intellect to arrive at his very same conclusion.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Simply put, once you actually see laissez faire capitalism and greed-is-good extremism at work, it doesn’t look as nice as it sounds in Rand’s works. On the contrary, as Saunders implies, it makes “Fountainhead Shrugged” look less like serious treatise than bad young adult fiction, with all the corresponding misguided parables and oversimplified conclusions.
  • To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 13
     
    "With this week's news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and "Going Galt," I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is "Fountainhead Shrugged" (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand's profit, so for brevity, let's just use one name)."
anonymous

Objectivism & Politics, Part 56 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ectivism-politics-part-56.html

politics philosophy objectivism idiocy

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • When asked, “Why don’t you approve of the Libertarians, thousands of whom are loyal readers of your works?” Rand responded:Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program.
  • ad hominem slur with no logical or objective value whatsoever
  • If Rand had to choose between (1) achieving widespread influence for her ideas but not being given credit for them, or (2) never suffering plagiarism but never achieving widespread influence, which would she choose?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Her bitter complaints about plagiarism suggest that she would prefer the latter
  • Rand seemed to have gotten many of her ideas, both political and otherwise, from Isabel Paterson
  • This is merely guilt by association
  • the notion that Libertarians are collectivists is simply absurd
  • More ad hominem chatter
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on June 28, 2010. Amazingly, Rand had this great ability to alienate people who *loved* her.
anonymous

Sophistpundit - 0 views

sophistpundit.blogspot.com

shared by anonymous on 25 May 10 - Cached
  • The first is what I've heard called "first principles" libertarianism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 May 10
       
      This is process oriented stuff. When I realized I wasn't a libertarian was when I failed to see the primacy of process in every thing.
  • The second is utilitarian, or consequentialist libertarianism.
anonymous

Who Makes The Randroids? Inside an ARI Weekend Workshop. - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...droids-inside-ari-weekend.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 31 May 11 - Cached
  • A typical Objectivist assurance that rational debate is welcome and encouraged. So how did it measure up? Well, let's find out.
  • One, while arguing that abortion is permissible in the third trimester, added this classic Objectivist line to his argument: A is A. A is A entails that abortion is moral? Call the press! The pro-lifers have been officially refuted. And absolutely hilarious was the debate between a Randroid and an ideological anarchist (Editor: did the anarchist call the Randroid a "statist"?? They really hate that!). If only we had a dogmatic libertarian, we could have had the cultist right trifecta!
  • And another remarkable statement: Mr. Biddle told several students that morally we would be justified in overthrowing our government because it is more powerful than the one the Founders overthrew (he does not advocate it because it would be unpractical - but then what happened to Rand's claim that the moral is the practical?)
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • To be fair, I don't think that most students were as enamored of the book as he was, but still there was an air of fawning about the sessions. The professors helped guide the discussions but otherwise generally stayed out of the way. Interesting to note that the handful of times I criticized Objectivism or Atlas, they were sure to 'correct' me. Not brusquely or rudely, but nonetheless the message was that we were supposed to believe what Rand said (in the group think model, they would be the "mind guards").
  • Unfortunately, his topics were pretty standard fare for those well versed in libertarianism: communism is evil, the welfare state is pretty darn bad too, we need to go back to a commodity standard, and the Fed was the prime mover behind America's Great Recession.
  • So what is the net sum of this potpourri of ideas, quackery, and economics? Some good, I'm sure, but a dangerous potential for evil. I had been a libertarian and Objectivist fanatic for long enough to be familiar with most of the ideas presented in Clemson, but my roommate, who is new to the movement, said he learned a lot, so there's a good chance that many students picked up on a lot of radical right ideas. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
  • The trouble is that there were almost no caveats. Dr. Thomson's encouragement to free thinking aside, Rand's ideas were presented as the truth, without any warnings that they were controversial.
  • All too often, as Robert A. Heinlein once said, man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. And what's been 'proved' with 'reason' usually turns out to be some arbitrary claim by Rand. As Dr. Eric Daniels said: "To understand political economy, you need to understand man". Sadly, man is perhaps what Objectivism understands the least.
  • anonymous on 31 May 11
     
    "Our ARCHNblog mole "Mr A" goes undercover at an Ayn Rand Institute weekend student workshop. Once a year, the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism hosts a free conference for college students on "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" and the greatest book ever written in defense of it...oops, I forgot, Atlas Shrugged isn't primarily about capitalism, but hey, it STILL made the best defense of capitalism in the history of the world!"
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